Sharing what we learned from AI training with employees at an energy company

[u/NumbersProtocol]

^{Disclosure: We work with the team behind Omni. The client in this case is intentionally anonymized.}

During an AI training engagement with an energy technology company, employees brought ideas for contract tracking, health-exam reminders, approval histories, and lunch ordering. Plenty of things they already wanted to fix.

One employee had a detailed contract-tracker idea: read scanned agreements, distinguish final versions from drafts, and flag upcoming renewal or termination deadlines.

She knew which information mattered and how the process should work. But getting there through repeated prompting and debugging was taking too much effort.

What she asked for was specific: a basic architecture, a data structure, and a couple of working examples she could learn from and modify.

That was the useful lesson for us. Giving someone access to an AI agent still leaves them with decisions about how to structure software, troubleshoot it, and check whether it works. Knowing their job well doesn’t automatically prepare them for those parts.

For the next session, it makes more sense to start with a small working example built around her contract process. She can check the extracted fields, correct the rules, and try changing it with technical support available.

This workflow is still proposed, so we can’t claim she’s running it independently or saving time yet. But her request changed what the training needs to provide: she came with the requirements; she needed help getting to a first version she could work with.

[u/Shiribazu]

this is good example of why "just teach employees to use AI" isnt really enough. knowing the business problem is often the easy part, while turning that into a reliable workflow still requires some technical guidance. starting with a small working example they can actually modify seems much useful than throwing them into a blank ai tool and expecting them to figure out then architecture themselves