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2 2 dŚĞ ƵƚŚŽƌŝƚLJ │ October P utting ai to W ork : t raining and s taFF t ouch P oints By Heath Edelman, PhD, Professor - Water and Environmental Technology, Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology, and Bryon Killian, PE, Executive Vice President, Entech Engineering T here is never a shortage of work. Regulatory requirements, customer concerns, equipment problems, meetings, and daily operations all compete for limited staff time. As a result, some important activities can become the things we get to when time allows. Employee training and communication are often among them, and even when we have the time, coordinating these activities into manageable pieces can feel daunting. We resort to infrequent big dumps of information on our staff, and then the important messages we want to convey get lost. Then we are disheartened when our employees seem disengaged. Training, onboarding, safety communication, employee recognition, and routine staff engagement are not extras. They help build a safe workplace, transfer institutional knowledge, develop employees, and create an organizational culture where people want to stay. Artificial Intelligence (AI) will not do those things for us. It can, however, reduce the time and effort required to do them consistently and eliminate repetitive tasks, freeing time for other priorities. Start With What You Already Have One of the easiest ways to begin using AI for training to start with what already exists rather than creating something new. Most organizations have years of PowerPoint presentations, as well as policies, procedures, manuals, safety materials, and other resources in digital or print format. Much of this information may still be valuable even if the training built around it needs updating and a refresh. Tools such as ChatGPT or Copilot can help digitize and reorganize existing material, simplify technical language, develop learning objectives, generate knowledge checks, and adapt information for different audiences. It can be remarkably good at helping you synthesize multiple documents and sources or, conversely, break them into more manageable pieces. Presentation tools incorporating AI can take this further. Gamma, for example, can import existing presentations and help restructure and redesign the material. For someone staring at a PowerPoint that has not been substantially updated in years, that can provide a useful starting point. In our own training development work, some of the most useful applications of AI have involved improving and repurposing existing materials rather than asking AI to create training from scratch. Importantly, that process is not simply about making older materials look new. It is also an opportunity to reconsider whether the way we are teaching the material still fits today's workforce.