As generative AI (GenAI) becomes increasingly integrated into our workplaces, the need for comprehensive employee education on its capabilities, risks, and ethical use has never been more critical. This blog post addresses why educating your workforce about GenAI is essential for cultivating an innovative, secure, and compliant organizational environment.
Understanding Generative AI
GenAI is a set of technologies that generate new data or content by “learning” from existing datasets. These tools are revolutionizing industries across the marketplace. From content creation to predictive analytics, GenAI offers a plethora of opportunities for businesses to innovate, streamline, and enhance organizational processes. However, to harness these technologies responsibly, employees across the organization must understand what GenAI is, how it works, and its potential impacts.
The Imperative of GenAI Education
Educating employees about GenAI isn’t just about mitigating risks; it’s about empowering your workforce to leverage these technologies creatively and responsibly. A well-informed employee is more likely to identify opportunities for GenAI applications while recognizing and avoiding potential pitfalls. For instance, understanding that all content—including any confidential, proprietary, or personal information—sent in a prompt to a GenAI model is 1) retained by the model provider in its knowledge base and 2) will more than likely be used to train the next iteration of the model. This means that the content can no longer be considered private or secure, and will be available to any future model user who comes across it.
Similarly, developers and coders who might be tempted to have a GenAI model review or correct existing code or create new code might not be aware that they could be introducing malicious code at worst and poorly written code at best into the code library and, eventually, into a product. Aside from these foundational security principles–don’t share company content and don’t import unvetted content–the list of potential threats employees must be made aware of and the types of activities administrators need visibility into continues to grow, and must be a central pillar of any employee education program.
Structuring GenAI Education Programs
While effective GenAI education programs must include fundamental information, as noted above, it must also be tailored to the specific needs and learning styles of your organization and workforce. This involves:
- Identifying Key Learning Objectives: What should your employees learn about GenAI? Focus on the technical aspects, such as what the model can do to enhance operational activity, the security aspect, such as policy-based access controls (PBAC), content scanners and filters, human verification requirements, visibility, and auditability, and ethical considerations, such as what constitutes toxic content, bias, etc.
- Adopting a Blended Learning Approach: To ensure the information is clearly understood and implemented by everyone across the organization, it’s best to incorporate a mix of workshops, online courses, and hands-on projects to cater to different learning preferences.
- Emphasizing Continuous Learning: GenAI technologies evolve rapidly; make ongoing education a part of your company culture. When new tools are brought into an organization, productivity goes up, but the attack surface expands. This means the education plan must be updated to explain the new threats and the safeguards.
Measuring Success
The impact of any GenAI education program should be measurable to understand where it is successful and where it falls short. Assess improvements in employee confidence in using GenAI, the quality of projects developed using GenAI, and feedback on the training program itself, and then adjust your approach based on these metrics to ensure your education program remains relevant and effective. Most importantly, however, the results must be audited to determine whether or how often employees are attempting to send or receive prohibited content or take other actions that violate the organization’s acceptable use policy and other policies governing the use of GenAI.
Having the right tools in place to optimize GenAI for an organization means more than just having the latest or easiest to use model; it also means having the right security solutions in place to ensure the GenAI models are used safely, responsibly, and ethically while also enhancing productivity and efficacy. The CalypsoAI SaaS-driven GenAI security and enablement platform is such a solution. This “lightweight” trust layer provides the broadest set of customizable scanners available to review, redact, or block admin-identified content from leaving the organization and prevent malicious or otherwise suspicious content from entering it. User and model behavior are monitored and tracked, enabling full visibility across the models. Customizable PBACs allow admins to limit the access of individuals or groups to specific models to ensure information remains available only to those who need it. And the platform is accessible in minutes via our API.
Conclusion
As GenAI technologies continue to reshape the workplace, the value of a fully informed and security-focused workforce cannot be overstated. Establishing a comprehensive GenAI education, enablement, and security program for your employees is not just a risk management strategy; it’s a growth strategy that empowers your team to innovate safely and ethically with the next generation of AI tools.
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