Over the last year, we’ve had the opportunity to train leaders and practitioners in dozens of organizations on AI implementation. I’ve also had the chance to teach at Michigan State and the University of Chicago, covering a variety of AI training topics.
One of the questions I get most frequently when we talk about corporate AI training is, “What are the absolutely critical topics? Where should we start for looking to upskill our workforce to be more successful with AI?”
In my mind, there are three core topics that in virtually every organization, everyone who touches AI should be trained on. Here they are:
1. Intermediate Through Advanced Prompting Skills
Every six months or so, AI prompting is called something different. In the beginning, it was called prompt engineering. Now you’ll often hear it called context engineering, but whatever you call it, fundamentally, this is the art and science of using AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude, and other large language models to get the very best outputs possible.
There are some basic elements of prompt engineering that most people probably know by now. For example:
- Telling the AI what sort of format you would like the response in
- What the audience is that it’s writing for
There’s intermediate-level prompting that involves more complex inputs, providing lots of context and examples, and being comfortable going back and forth with the AI, never expecting a great output the first time.
Finally, there’s an advanced level of prompting which includes the use of markup language (like XML or JSON) to get highly formatted outputs. Often, markup language is also used to increase the quality of the outputs by running it through several quality checks (either AI-driven or human-in-the-loop). I don’t think it’s much of a secret anymore to say that many AI startups are fundamentally a nice frontend built around a 10-page prompt with lots of markup language.
I love starting with prompting training. I’m not sure it’s the most important subject possible; I would probably give that to safety, which we’ll discuss next. But prompting gives everyone in the organization a view into what the state of the art looks like in AI and why they might want to start integrating it into their work cycles. It’s also one of the rare topics where you can make very quick progress and see substantial results in just a few hours.
2. AI Literacy and Safety Training
It’s impossible to talk about training your workforce for AI without talking about AI literacy and safety. What does that mean?
AI literacy simply means being highly familiar with the terminology, the benefits, and the challenges of the use of AI in the workplace. Safety means being familiar with many of the speed bumps, challenges, and regulatory requirements around the use of AI in the workplace and knowing how to navigate those challenges.
If your workforce is using AI, you absolutely have to have some basic training on AI safety. Spoiler alert: your workforce is definitely using AI.
So what does an AI literacy course like this cover? Fundamentally three things:
Understanding How AI Works: A level of familiarity with what AI is and how it works that will enable people to move beyond the “magic” phase and understand how machine learning actually works.
Recognizing AI Risks: It’s important to understand the risks that come along with the use of AI, including hallucinations, AI-generated scams, algorithmic bias, and issues related to data privacy and protection of the organization’s intellectual property.
Navigating AI Challenges: Everyone in the workforce who uses or might use AI has to learn the basic steps to navigate around these challenges. For instance, in a healthcare organization, everyone has to be trained not to upload personally identifiable information (PII) to an AI system that has not been thoroughly vetted and approved.
AI literacy and safety training should also go hand-in-hand with an AI usage policy which gives everyone in the organization specific direction as to what systems are permissible for use and for what use cases. As an added bonus, AI literacy training is going to be required by a number of the frameworks and AI regulations that will govern AI in the next several years.
3. AI Use In the Workplace: Avoiding “Work Slop”
Perhaps you’ve heard my favorite new term in the world of AI: Work Slop.
Work slop is exactly what it sounds like. If you’ve lived through the last three years and are a manager, you’ve definitely seen it as well. Work slop is an AI output which looks perfect – it’s formatted nicely, the punctuation is correct, there are three bullet points under every main heading, and it reads in coherent English. But when you take the time to actually look through it, there’s no thought there, the output itself is totally worthless.
Since this term was coined, many of our clients have brought it to my attention as a real problem in AI adoption. But the issue isn’t simply that the younger generation is lazy. It’s more complicated than that. Remember nearly every company wants to be AI-first now and is encouraging their workforce to use AI more. So how do you actually do that? It’s not as easy as it sounds to get great outputs out of AI, especially when you’re going to get in trouble with a manager if it turns out to be slop.
Good training on effective AI use in the workplace helps your team, especially the younger members, understand how to balance these objectives:
- Integrating AI into their work
- Producing great content
- Importantly, not turning in work that their manager could have just as easily gotten out of ChatGPT in 10 seconds
This workplace AI training includes topics like:
- Reviewing all AI outputs carefully and critically
- Maintaining time in workflows to do that
- Communicating closely to your manager on their preferences for your use of AI
Ready to Transform Your Workforce with AI Training?
The organizations that thrive in 2025 and beyond won’t be the ones that simply adopt AI—they’ll be the ones that train their people to use it effectively, safely, and strategically.
At Proceptual, we’ve developed comprehensive AI training programs that cover all three of these critical disciplines. Whether you need to upskill 10 people or 10,000, we can help you build an AI-ready workforce that creates real value, not just work slop.
Schedule a free consultation today to discuss your organization’s AI training needs, or explore our AI training programs to see how we can help your team master the future of work.
