Dan Richards is a serial founder and former public company CEO, and an award-winning member of the marketing faculty at the Rotman School of Management, where he oversees the credit course associated with MBA student internships.
Every January, Canadians make resolutions for the 12 months ahead. This year, instead of diet or exercise, I propose a different route: In just five hours a week, create a new habit that incorporates artificial intelligence into your daily routine.
The reason is clear. Headlines are dominated by news about AI – and the numbers are big. Valuations for AI startups in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Massive investments on data centres. Up to 100 million jobs lost by 2030 in the United States alone, with layoffs already happening as companies such as consultancy Accenture prune employees unable to become AI proficient.
It’s clear that one way or another AI will transform all of our careers. Despite that, a recent Gallup Poll showed fewer than one in four employees use AI at work several times a week and only 10 per cent use it daily.
That gap creates an opportunity. Commit to three 90-minute time blocks a week to build your AI capability and you could join the ranks of those for whom AI boosts your career rather than threatens to put it on hold.
There are three steps to building your AI proficiency – Learn, Use and Build.
Learn: Build your foundation
Learn means developing basic literacy, not technical mastery. If your company doesn’t offer training, consider one of the free courses from Google, IBM or Coursera. That can help you understand what AI systems can and cannot do, how they’re trained, where bias and error creep in and why the recommendations that emerge should be treated as suggestions rather than definitive advice.
But it doesn’t have to be all work – you can also use AI to explore new ideas and experiment with prompts to see the different answers you’ll get based on how you phrase questions.
If, like me, you’re not technically inclined, you could follow the example of a long-time friend who paid his teenaged niece $25 an hour to provide tutoring sessions. In four hours she helped him get up to speed, a great return on $100.
Use: Embed AI into daily work
Conduct an AI audit to identify which repetitive tasks can be automated. Conducting research, drafting and editing emails, analyzing and summarizing data for reports and finetuning presentations are all examples.
Regular use will get you down the learning curve quickly. Consider the advice from Wharton’s Ethan Mollick, one of the acknowledged authorities on how businesspeople can use AI. Prof. Mollick recommends investing $20 a month to upgrade from the free version of one of the AI platforms.
Next, keep that platform in an open tab on your browser and set a goal for how often you’ll open it. Finally, each day monitor your usage against that goal.
I recently met with a former student who works in the healthcare space. Last fall, her team scheduled weekly lunch and learn sessions, where each shared how they were using AI to become more efficient. Those weekly sessions built momentum and led to broader utilization of artificial intelligence by everyone on her team.
Build: Leverage your skills for impact
Finally, build workflows, tools or small experiments that combine AI with areas where you bring expertise, adopting what Prof. Mollick calls a “co-creator mindset.”
This is important for job seekers – a former student now at Google told me that candidates who stand out are those who combine business knowledge with practical examples of how they’ve used AI to build solutions to problems they encountered.
Even if you’re not looking for a job, building is where the payoff from what you’ve learned really happens and where you can set yourself apart.
I recently experienced this firsthand. One course I teach includes a component on effective selling skills, where we talk about asking questions that search for pain points and problems before presenting solutions.
To drive this home, working with GPT5, in 90 minutes I created a customer persona named Patrick. Then I invited students to interact with Patrick. Because I had trained this persona not to say yes unless students first asked good probing questions, most failed to make the sale. We all learned an important lesson from that class – my students about the importance of asking good questions and I about how easy it is to build something effective with AI, even without any technical background.
We’ve been here before
We’re sometimes told that AI is unlike anything we’ve ever seen, but in truth we’ve been here before. When personal computers came on the scene in the early 1980s, they were widely viewed as toys, without any real utility. As a result, many workers were resistant to these gadgets that disrupted their routines. Meanwhile those who embraced the potential quickly separated themselves and often launched thriving careers.
The difference between AI today and computers 45 years ago is the speed at which AI is having an impact. Given that AI will increasingly be at the foundation of how work happens, those who don’t adapt face the risk of being left behind.
The good news: You still have time. Act today to join the 10 per cent of workers who build AI into their daily routines and you too can leverage AI to advance your career.
This column is part of Globe Careers’ Leadership Lab series, where executives and experts share their views and advice about the world of work. Find all Leadership Lab stories at tgam.ca/leadershiplab and guidelines for how to contribute to the column here.