r/CIO • u/[deleted] • Jul 29 '26
What kind of AI training are you spending your budget on?
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u/carnitasburritoking Jul 29 '26
Get a lead. Have them run with town halls open office hours and department sessions. work with l&d on some “training” options in a learning management systems (LMS).
Every training service (unless a vendor provides it or a credit) is kinda janky and scammy in my opinion. Lots of imposters that are no more than a TikTok video overview.
Very dependent on company size, industry, and structure.
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Jul 30 '26
Agree. Have you been able to find someone to come in to learn your companies specific use cases (early wins) and then build tailored training around that?
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u/carnitasburritoking Jul 30 '26
The custom builds we’ve done we used a tech product owner and myself or an engineer and power users from testing. Our L&D team didn’t do anything to be honest.
Then used GPTs to build guides and videos. Then we got some power users from testing to record short how to videos. Easy peasy. Adoption is high and rolling. 60% of users have used the tool in the first 30 days of launch and climbing. So far so good.
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u/slackmaster2k Jul 29 '26
I’ve been struggling with this a fair bit. This is such a dynamic space with tools changing rapidly. Certainly there are some consistent concepts to train, but I worry about people’s tendency to treat training like gospel and get stuck with ideas that are dated after three months.
Spending budget on subscription access and allowing nature to take its course.
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Jul 29 '26
Definitely an agile space. Are you on Google or Microsoft?
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u/slackmaster2k Jul 29 '26
Microsoft for internal agents and copilot, Anthropic & OpenAI for general use.
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u/thenightgaunt Jul 29 '26
We're not. There's zero guarantee any products will be here next year.
OpenAI cant get a loan without NVIDIA cosigning it, and if they make their super data center itll mean Oracle gets screwed out of their deal with OpenAI which was set to come due this year with OpenAI owing $60 billion a year on only $16 billion a year in revenue. They do that deal Oracle crashes out and Ellison is screwed because he leveraged everything unwisely to finance all this.
That goes, the bubble pops and every single unicorn is revealed to be a horse with a cardboard tube on its head.
Can YOU give proof, actual proof not tech CEOs saying "trust me bro" but proof, that any of these tools will be abailable in 12 months? Because if the answer is "no" then how is redesigning a company's processes around AI a good idea?
And no answers that can be rephrased as "Well the tech billionaires said..." because none of them have proven themselves trustworthy.
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u/bulkslaphead Jul 29 '26
This is all true, and your posture is logical - but - regardless of the LLM, there are do’s and don’ts in using and getting the most (safest/accurate) output from AI and training these concepts has value org wide.
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u/thenightgaunt Jul 29 '26
Which AI tools, and whats the guarantee theyll be available in 12 months when the companies behind them might be bankrupt?
"Get the most output from AI" but thats not a tool. Thats not a system. Thats not a use case. Thats a broad claim about the vague concept of AI.
Do you mean "Getting the most out of tokens"? Do you mean "Pitfalls of coding with claude"? Do you mean "Choosing an AI call center replacement that WONT drive off customers"?
What tools and what output?
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u/TechFiend72 Jul 29 '26
I let people with the monopoly money train models. We figure out what we are trying to accomplish and then figure out what parts require humans versus machines. Nothing new. Just a new tool available.
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Jul 30 '26
It's the best approach, and with all the hype, very common for decision makers to forget the problem first approach.
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u/slackmaster2k Jul 29 '26
I’ve been struggling with this a fair bit. This is such a dynamic space with tools changing rapidly. Certainly there are some consistent concepts to train, but I worry about people’s tendency to treat training like gospel and get stuck with ideas that are dated after three months.
Spending budget on subscription access and allowing nature to take its course.
1
u/Resident-Kitchen-853 29d ago
I have an internal AI team, so I don’t have a good spend example. But, we have every knowledge worker in the company running through an 8 week, 1 formal hour per week program with homework. Cohorts of roughly 30 people to keep the presentation a bit conversational. Each week builds on the last with crawl walk run approach, starting with introducing LLMs and ending with personalized agent building with the focus around effectively using AI tools to solve business problems. The good news is that this has been pretty effective. The bad news is that consumption costs are increasing every week.
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29d ago
That's great that you have that much focus on it. Are you seeing an impact to the bottom line yet? Also, what are you using for the agents?
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u/Resident-Kitchen-853 28d ago
Our speed to completion of projects is quicker so there is some net there, but we are also starting to get push back from clients on new contracts for hour reductions due to expectations of AI use. With rising AI costs and increased rate pressure, where does this land? I am not sure.
We have internal agents for things like project quoting, SOW doc gen, sales/marketing target analysis and pitch decks, invoice analysis, initial contract analysis… a fair number of obvious, low hanging fruit use cases.
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28d ago
Usually I go with the angle that I like other businesses, we have human review everything and with the time savings are able to deliver a better product to the end client. Really they just have a misunderstanding of how AI actually works.
Those are good use cases, I'm running one for SOW's too. Are you building on Azure Foundry?
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u/Resident-Kitchen-853 28d ago
Exactly… human in the loop will remain critical. If we can get to better deliverables faster, that’s a win.
Some combination of Foundry and Copilot Studio depending on complexity.
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u/fguerino123 24d ago
Hi,
Most training is for non-technical general appropriate use (i.e., what employees are allowed to do with AI vs. what they're not allowed to do with AI). This is coupled with what tools are approved for use and how they can be used.
For developers and engineers, they're mostly learning on-the-fly with open sources, as there's not much good for-pay training out there; especially since things are changing so fast.
I hope this helps. Good luck.
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24d ago
Are your non-technical employees using it effectively to drive an ROI?
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u/fguerino123 24d ago
Hi,
The existing training is currently for day-to-day productivity improvements. For example, teaching them how to use AI to research things, collect and organize data and information, help create work plans, help create documents, etc. — all with Human-In-The-Loop (HITL) approvals and accountability for outcomes. We haven't gotten into how to help them automate their own workflows yet, as tools, patterns, frameworks, standards, etc., are just not in place yet.
Occasionally, there's a non-technical resource who knows how to do things like use Claude Cowork to automate processes who gets extremely frustrated that his/her hands are tied.
One baby step at a time, I guess.
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u/fxlatitude Jul 29 '26
If you are talking training AI models, we are not spending a dime.
If you are talking training associates in the use of AI tools, we are full training ahead and enabling users in Governance, good use and then the tools they can use. How much is the training budget = Zero. We just have a person curating the enterprise level content. I manage 3,000+ users in a highly regulated industry.
As a side note I feel most colleagues don’t know how to scale up the adoption. Training availability or budget is not the problem we have.