How AI and Eleanor Roosevelt Can Boost Your Bottom Line

By Ofir Paldi, CEO of Shamaym

One of America’s most influential first ladies, Eleanor Roosevelt once famously advised: “Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.”

More companies are waking up to the benefits of prioritizing collaboration to help team members learn from each other’s experience, lessons – and mistakes. They recognize the strategy’s ability to help outgrow their competitors, resolve problems faster, make smarter decisions, and improve processes.

Yet too often collaboration plans get ‘stuck in second gear.’ Introducing project management software, such as Jira, Asana or Trello, has made team members more likely to share progress on a group project – an important first step. But the insights they gained in the process – intellectual ‘gold’ relevant to all future projects – gets left behind. Team members could miss opportunities to leverage their peers’ experience and lessons, and use them to improve and learn. The volume of missed opportunities is a silent handicap, draining companies’ sales, productivity, efficiency, retention, and probably  other metrics, too.

There is good news. 23% of companies have already rolled out project management tools company-wide.  Our survey shows that some functions, such as product development teams, have adoption rates as high as 66%. With these tools becoming prevalent, teams have become accustomed to logging updates about group projects and checking on progress from fellow members. The platforms have reinforced accountability, and teams are motivated to use them to receive credit for completed tasks.

Imagine what could happen by adding AI to the mix of systems upon which teams already rely. Members could receive notifications with important questions as they walk into client meetings. Platforms could prompt them to easily capture lessons learned or takeaways after those meetings. Calendar integrations could facilitate this two-way information flow before training, report creation, and other activities.

And here’s where it gets really interesting. With buy-in from the full team, project management tools infused with A.I. could act as a collaboration switchboard, sending team members’ past insights – newly relevant – to colleagues right at their moment of need. Further integration into the team’s toolkit – from Salesforce to Slack to Outlook – would create seamless touchpoints for members to capture insights on-the-fly, effortlessly delivering lessons whenever they are needed.

As the benefits of perfectly timed, shared insights lift teams to new heights, a shift in perspective could empower everyone to think bigger: the entire organization as a ‘project.’ Increased results and success would crush the barrier for team members to input their lessons learned in real-time. Teams would intuitively grasp the value of sharing insights across projects – like a company-wide repository of ‘best practices.’

From here, isn’t the sky the limit? Onboarding and ramp up time could be slashed. Realistically, every outcome could be maximized. Your team’s knowledge, juiced by the perfect storm of A.I., full-team participation and positive self-reinforcement could manifest the first on-demand hive-mind.

The gateway to turning day-to-day actions into learning opportunities is already on your staff’s devices: the project management software they know and count on. Sprinkling a little A.I. on top is all that’s needed to ignite a feedback loop of performance improvement for both teams and individuals. By receiving colleagues’ learned lessons at the perfect moment for them to really sink in, we can finally learn from their mistakes. Mrs. Roosevelt is smiling.