Hoping to learn more about a growing technology and how it could affect their industry, workers from Premier Communications met at Terrace View Event Center for an all-day crash course on artificial intelligence on Feb. 16.
Premier Communications CEO Ryan Boone said a prolonged discussion on AI at the company has been in the works for a while.
“Last year myself alongside others on the leadership team really decided that artificial intelligence and these new tools at our disposal are not going away,” Boone said. “We really needed to take some time and invest in learning more about it.”
The discussions culminated into plans for an all-day seminar with guest speakers to learn about AI. Taking more than 100 staff out for an all-employee training day was a first for the company, said Boone.
“It’s really the first time we’ve done it in general, not just AI related. Generally speaking, we’ve not closed the office before to really invest in our team like this,” he said.
As a technology company, Boone said it would be difficult to not take a look at the capabilities of AI to potentially improve efficiency and customer service.
“We’re going to do so, and we’re going to do it safely from a customer data perspective and do it responsibly. We’re not going to stick our head in the sand and act like AI isn’t coming,” he said.
However, the CEO acknowledge that not everyone at Premier has a full understanding of AI or what tools exist.
“Like most organizations, we have a pretty wide range of AI adoption within the organization. Some have never touched it, others are building tools and almost their own large language models,” Boone said. “Our main focus for last Monday was really to try and set a baseline. To give everybody this base understanding of what AI is, how it can be potentially used safely within our organization.”
The CEO noted that the AI field is full of jargon and the company even made a glossary of terms for its employees.
“For example, people might throw around just the term AI or Agentic AI or AGI and what does that really mean? We kind of defined those basic terms so that people know what it means when we say it,” Boone said.
Boone added that the all-day seminar was also a good chance to remind employees of the company’s existing AI polices and that not every tool is free to use.
While Premier has approved CoPilot for use and is testing Claude, models such as Grok are not approved.
“You do have to be cautious and safe with what you put into AI and which models,” Boone said
Besides defining the language of AI, staff members broke into groups to compete in a number of activities to learn how AI tools can be used.
One of the activities involved groups designing a business proposal for a 13-year-old during the summer. Groups were required to use AI tools to design a name, logo, mission and financial statements.
“Kind of an iterative process, one step at a time. We actually submitted them all digitally and had each group vote on their favorite,” Boone said. “Just kind of a fun way to do some hands-on learning.”
The CEO said he received positive feedback from the activities as employees got the chance to play with the tool.
“For some people it opened their eyes to what’s possible with AI, and we were just kind of scratching the surface,” he said. “Our main goal is to give everybody that light bulb moment, that they do something and they use AI to help and go, ‘Wow, I can’t believe it can do that, I wonder if it can also do this?’”
After the strong response, Boone and the leadership team are planning more training events going forward.
“We are going to have some more hands on and virtual training on AI throughout the year, but not another all employee in person training,” he said. “The overall feedback of the event that day was very positive so we will probably do it again in 2027; although, the topic and format may change.”
How to incorporate AI
While Premier did spend the day learning about AI, uses at the company are not set in stone. Boone said the majority of uses at the company are internal and are not built into any systems yet.
“Me as a CEO, I use AI daily in helping me do quite a bit, honestly. It can be everything from helping me put a job description together to a business plan for a new opportunity. Help me analyze some of my writing to make sure it hits the right market or audience,” said Boone. “Honestly for us we’re at this crawl, walk, run, phase and I say we’re at the crawling stage right now. Just getting comfortable with it and using it.” While some have only used AI for daily writing, the CEO said a member of the accounting team was able to program Claude to help her fill out PDF forms.
“She was able to put a couple entries in and it would automatically fill out the rest of the form and it was something she had to do manually before,” said Boone.
Boone said he is looking forward to the potential uses Premier can find as they continue to explore AI tools.
“There’s tools we are looking at right now that might help us even predict network issues before they even happen just by noticing different things going on in the network,” he said. “There’s just a whole host of things that I’m hoping we can do in the next 24 months.”
The CEO said that any choice of model would be through a vendor and while they may adopt AI customer service tools, humans will still be present in person or by phone call.
“One of the important things to us as a local community company is we don’t want to lose that human element or human touch,” Boone said. “Our goal with incorporating AI into our organization is that it’s a tool in our toolbox; it’s not the solution where we are going to transition everything.”
Boone added that the leadership at Premier is aware of concerns over AI taking jobs away from people.
“AI isn’t going to be something that we use to just replace people. Our goal isn’t to downsize our staff by incorporating AI into things. Our goal is to free up existing teams because we already run kind of lean,” he said.