Training for AI: Six Ways HR Leaders Are Getting Their Teams Up to Speed

As corporate America operationalizes AI at an ever-increasing rate, “HR is going to be the one figuring out how to connect the dots,” declares Dan Kaplan, managing partner and co-head of the CHRO practice at ZRG Partners. Company-wide AI rollouts are ultimately an HR matter, he argues, since they affect productivity, headcount, culture, and revenue. A new report from McLean & Company found that while 68% of companies are using AI, just 14% have a formal strategy. To get a handle on the new tech, some HR teams, like the one at New York Life, are taking the lead on adoption. The insurance firm launched its enterprise-wide AI training program in April, but HR had already been part of early pilots in 2023, testing internal systems that later scaled across the company.“Because of our early experiences with AI, HR became an essential voice for the broader rollout,” said Elliot Steelman, head of employee relations and leader of the HR department’s AI initiative. His team built fluency in prompt engineering, skills intelligence for talent mapping, analytics for long-term planning, and GPT creation. That is, generative pre-trained transformers, the large language models underlying today’s tools.Approaches to training up the HR team on the latest in AI tech vary by organization, but many combine classroom sessions, company-wide knowledge-sharing meetings, messaging channels for swapping tips, and virtual sandboxes where employees can play and experiment. Here are six ways HR leaders are training their teams to use–and lead–with artificial intelligence.HackathonsAt New York Life, AI hackathons–intensive, collaborative workshops focused on solving specific problems–have become one of the most effective ways to build HR’s proficiency. “Of the thousands of GPTs created at New York Life, many of the most-used were developed by HR,” said Steelman. “To date, employees in our HR department have collectively built more than 100.”The company’s CEO, Craig DeSanto, has been unequivocal: using AI is not optional. Yet the company has avoided ugly ultimatums by setting employees free to have fun with the tech. Starting with learning and exploration made adoption less intimidating. “Employees felt like they were driving the change, not chasing it,” Steelman said.S&P Global was also an early adopter. After acquiring AI and analytics company Kensho in 2018, the company began training employees almost immediately. During a From Day One webinar, the global head of people solutions, Tiffany Clark, noted that S&P hosts quarterly hackathons to help employees experiment with AI and solve real problems.Internal Tool Development and TestingSome HR teams are co-designing their own AI productivity tools. The people-operations team at Nextdoor, the hyperlocal social network, began experimenting with ChatGPT in 2022. The head of compensation and talent, Tony Castellanos, said that their early willingness to tinker with a tool that was still clunky, and adapt it to their needs, helped build lasting proficiency.“You need curiosity. You also need resilience and perseverance,” he said. His team has developed their own AI tools to automate common workflows and answer employees’ questions about things like open enrollment and immigration.In 2024, S&P Global rolled out an AI assistant to handle common questions for the people-operations team. In partnership with the AI strategy team, Clark’s team helped develop the framework and conduct testing, a move that’s been instrumental not only in how employees leverage the assistant, but in building the HR team’s literacy, she said.Some people-operations experts, like Janine Yancey, founder and CEO of Emtrain, want the department to take the initiative when it comes to AI use. “I’d love to see HR leaders be the first to the table,” she said at From Day One’s Midtown Manhattan conference in October.Secure Sandbox Environments Training needn’t be too structured, or even goal-oriented. Many companies simply invite employees to experiment with sanctioned tools in “sandbox” environments, where applications and code can be tested safely.At biotech firm Genentech, all employees are trained on AI principles, ethics, and responsible use. The company encourages experimentation within sandboxes, coupled with live sessions and peer-learning events where colleagues show off what they’ve built.These safe, low-stakes spaces where employees are free to make mistakes, take risks, and “learn out loud,” are essential to adoption, said Amelia Rosenman, director of programs at the Experience Institute, during a From Day One webinar. “Share both your successes and your failures. That’s what creates that safe environment, that risk-free sandbox,” she said.Messaging Channels for Trading TipsAt fintech company Stripe, the people operations team set up a Slack channel where employees share how they’re using AI for little productivity boosts. “We make a point of being transparent about how we’re thinking about the future,” said Róisín Daly, head of people solutions, during a panel on how innovative companies are using advanced HR tech. The same was done at Aspen Dental, which created a Microsoft Teams group dedicated to sharing ideas for responsible AI use. This went a long way to quelling concerns that using AI was in some way cheating, said VP of learning and development Katie Stangel during a virtual panel. “People are starting to celebrate and call out when they’ve used it, saying, ‘I use ChatGPT to help me with this outline,’ or ‘I used Articulate AI to help me with the design and development of the course.’ We celebrate that.”Peer-Led Demos and WebinarsPeer-to-peer learning has become one of the most widely used ways to get employees comfortable experimenting with AI. New York Life hosts live workshops where staff demo their own AI use cases for colleagues. These sessions are often led by what initiative leader Steelman calls “internal evangelists” and “AI influencers.” These champions normalize experimentation, model best practices, and accelerate adoption by showing what’s possible.Every department requires different AI training, said Marvie Wright, VP of HR at Qualfon, during a From Day One virtual panel discussion on AI in HR. To meet those varied needs, the company created a cross-functional task force to evaluate tools and department-specific use cases, weighing factors like budget and compliance requirements. As adoption has grown, Wright has even added an AI programmer to her HR team. “The possibilities are endless, and my company is excited to invest because we know this is leading to a more enhanced future,” she said.Fellow panelist Ari Levahi of Moody’s Global agreed, noting that while training formats needn’t differ by function, “it’s all about the unique use cases associated with the HR role.”Traditional Training Environments, Both Classroom and Virtual More traditional forms of learning still play an important role in ensuring consistent, baseline AI literacy across HR and the enterprise at large. Nextdoor trains its team in a virtual classroom, where employees spend one hour a week for five weeks learning how AI works and then experimenting with it in their daily tasks. “One of the things that we're excited about is just the broad range of opportunities,” said Castellanos. “We don’t want to be prescriptive about what people do because we want to tap into the creativity and ingenuity of everybody here.”That openness has already paid off. One recruiter trained an AI-powered voice interviewer to help her team practice candidate interviews, something that previously had no real-world, low-stakes equivalent. “She really embodies curiosity, creativity, and the desire to improve,” Castellanos said. “She has continuously experimented with very specific use cases, and when this opportunity came along, she was one of the first to recognize its potential.”Rote reporting and paper pushing “erode energy and deplete people’s reserves,” he added. With a more AI-literate workforce, “you see an elevation of conversation. We’re not talking about how to push a task forward–we’re talking about strategic objectives. And that’s a lot more fun.”Stripe’s L&D team created a course that employees can access on demand, while New York Life supplements hands-on hackathons with on-demand modules. These structured offerings give employees shared language and technical grounding, making experimentation, and safe use, easier across teams. They also brought in the experts to teach AI skills, inviting leaders from Microsoft and OpenAI as well as Conor Grennan, chief AI architect at New York University’s Stern School of Business.While only a small fraction of companies have formal AI strategies, those that do are already reaping the rewards. At New York Life, an internal survey conducted in June found that 90% of HR employees’ say that they are confident in using AI in their day-to-day work, with 92% of employees reporting they actively look for new ways to integrate the technology into their daily work. “That speaks volumes about our shared enthusiasm, growing confidence, and the trust we’ve built together,” Steelman said.For HR leaders, that may be the lesson: AI adoption isn’t just about deploying new tools, it’s about building a workforce that feels empowered, curious, and capable of shaping the future of work itself–and that can begin with HR itself.Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism. She is the host of How to Be Anything, the podcast about people with unusual jobs.(Featured photo by FG Trade/iStock by Getty Images)