Hello everyone,

A little while ago, I was working with a client on how they could start using AI more effectively in their work.

We ended up learning a much less obvious lesson about successful AI use, that in fact would help the people in his team as much as help with AI adoption.

They were using Copilot and they used Microsoft Teams for video calls, but not really for anything else. When I asked to see the shared workspace where people collaborated and kept their files, he showed me somewhere that was all over the place. There was no consistent structure and no shared way of naming documents. When he opened his own laptop, his Downloads folder was full of files.

None of this was unusual. Lots of people and teams work like this. You create a document, save it wherever makes sense in the moment, send it to someone on email, and move on to the next thing.

But it creates a problem that becomes much more visible when you start using AI.

These tools absolutely can save you time and become an active thinking partner. They can help you prepare for meetings, pull together information, develop ideas, spot patterns and get to a useful first draft far more quickly.

But they can only work with the context they can find.

If the relevant information is scattered across personal folders, buried in email threads or saved under names that mean very little to anyone else, AI has the same problem as a new person joining your team. It does not know where to look, what matters or which version to trust.

Give it no useful context and you get a bland, generic answer, that misses key information.

That was the unlikely lesson from the client work. The issue was not really the AI tool. It was the workflow and the information sitting behind it.

It is best to start with yourself. Think about the information you use regularly, where it lives and whether you can find it quickly. Give AI the right background about you, your work and what you are trying to achieve, and the quality of the support changes considerably.

But if you lead a team, you also need to look beyond your own system.

How does your team structure its information? Does everyone know where important documents belong? Are files named in a way that another person can understand? Is there one clear version, or five slightly different copies sitting in different places?

Could you, right now, put your hands on the last important document your team worked on together? And if someone new joined on Monday, could they find their way around without asking you?

If those questions make you shudder a little, you are not alone. But it is worth paying attention to, because sorting this out will not only make AI more useful. It will make things easier for your team too.

So before you try another tool or write a more elaborate prompt, look at the context sitting behind it. Start with your own workflow, then look at how your team creates, names, stores and shares information.

That is where much of the value of AI will come from. Not choosing the right tool, but giving it the right information to work with.

I am working on something at the moment that will help managers and leaders do this more effectively, and I am testing it with a small group of clients. I am not quite ready to share it yet, but I think it will be useful to those of you trying to work out how AI fits into the real work of leading a team.

In the meantime, I would love to know what your shared workspace looks like. Is it organised and easy to follow, workable but slightly messy, or somewhere nobody really wants to look? Just hit reply and tell me.

Have a great week,

Helen

P.S. If you only do one thing this week, open your team's shared workspace and ask yourself whether AI, or a new joiner, could actually make sense of it.