Last fall, we added a new teammate to our staff at the Marine Retailers Association of the Americas. She arrived with great promise: a strong foundation for how to use her knowledge, and the assurance that she could learn rapidly and apply new skills immediately.
The fanfare that preceded her first day built in unprecedented fashion, as if we had just capitalized on the first pick in the draft, selecting a superstar who could change the trajectory of the team. Then her first day arrived, and we loaded her schedule with training. Day two offered more training. Day three, much of the same. In fact, for the first two months in her role, all we did was teach her the nuances of our business. At every step along the way, we tested her to ensure she retained what she was learning.
The new recruit never failed to impress, passing every test. We got deeper and deeper into the vast archives of training content that we use to educate dealership teams around the world. Her ability to learn seemed never-ending, so we added context to her curriculum. Seemingly overnight, she transformed her book smarts — maybe her internet smarts? — into a keen ability to provide her teammates with important context.
I’d like to introduce you to her. Her name is Aimie, and she’s an award-winning, generative AI chatbot. AIMIE stands for Artificial Intelligence for Marine Industry Education. It may seem absurd to suggest that Aimie is an MRAA team member. Or, perhaps this story adds credibility to your fear that AI could replace humans in jobs across our society. In my view, neither should be the case. I believe that AI won’t replace people; instead, people who use AI will replace people who don’t.
Aimie has become a true part of our MRAA team. Today, instead of team members fielding phone calls or emails and then calling a senior staff member to ask where a specific resource can be found, that team member can ask Aimie for insights. Now, we’re asking how Aimie can help make us more efficient, more effective, and more oriented toward customer service.
Having gone through this experience, the question that I find myself asking is: Why would we, as an organization, spend more time training a computer than we would training our own team members?
For most of us, a new employee is welcomed with some orientation. Maybe that first week is spent on training. More likely, it’s, Learn by watching me do this. Or even, Here’s the brochure, here’s your lead list, and here’s the phone. Let me know if you need anything.
Then we turn this person loose to represent our businesses and our brands, never considering how a failure to understand our customers’ needs can deteriorate our standing in the marketplace, or how an uneducated frontline staffer can hurt our bottom line.
I’ll be honest. In leading the MRAA, I’m often tempted to cut back on our training budget, or to omit training plans in professional development conversation. I know that many company leaders feel the same way. It seems as if there’s plenty of on-the-job training that can fill in the gaps, right?
But there are also two realities that I contemplate on almost a daily basis. First is that I run an association whose business model depends on training and educating the employees at the businesses we serve. It’s hypocritical to suggest that the continuous-improvement mindset we preach doesn’t apply to our own team.
Second, I can see the direct impact that our investment in training and education has on the success of our organization. Take, for example, the investment we made in two up-and-coming employees when we took them to the association industry’s annual conference. There, one of our team members discovered the platform we now know as Aimie. She — the human employee — educated herself about how to make AI work for our association. She attended numerous AI courses at that conference. We’ve now taken just the first few steps on our path to incorporating AI, and it’s already showing a huge return on that training investment.
Or consider the investment we made in hiring a consultant to train our team on how to lead an authentic, agile organization. Every three weeks or so, we spend a day together talking about the challenges we face in our organization, and we solve those challenges together. We use the conversations to shape decision-making throughout our team, to help each and every one of our 24 team members sharpen their ability to contribute great ideas. It’s an incredibly rewarding environment.
Aimie has been on our team for six months now. She’s brilliant, in part because of the speed with which she can access and recite information. She also fits perfectly into our culture because of her unrelenting focus on training, growth and improvement. That culture keeps our team focused on providing the marine industry with the absolute best educational content — through membership, Dealer Week, online education, individual credentials like our new Service Management Certification, and our Dealership Certification program.
Training a team is not easy. The MRAA exists to help. Having trouble understanding where to start? MRAA members can ask Aimie at MRAA.com/aimie.
This article was originally published in the April 2024 issue.
