Canva gave 5,000 employees a full week to do nothing but learn AI.
Paid time. Cleared calendars. The best tools available.
And most people couldn't figure out how to start.
Not because the tools were hard. Because nobody had a specific problem in front of them.
Canva's Chief Customer Officer, Rob Giglio, said it plainly: most companies don't have a technology gap. They have a behaviour gap.
I've watched the same pattern play out firsthand. In my own work and in conversations with business owners across SEA. Everyone has access to the tools. Almost nobody has a clear answer to the question: what exactly am I trying to solve?
So they experiment. They play around. They generate some text, summarise a document, try a few prompts. They get mildly impressed and then go back to doing things the way they always did.
Nothing changes because nothing real was at stake.
The shift happened for me when I stopped trying to learn AI and just used it on a real problem I couldn't avoid.
I was overseeing a stock count reconciliation. A year of inventory data across multiple source systems, different formats, all needing to match up.
I pointed AI at it instead of the usual manual process.
It surfaced a process inconsistency that months of manual work had missed. A gap in how the data had been structured from the beginning. Sitting there undetected until something looked at it differently.
Was that a guaranteed outcome? No.
It could have produced unreliable data. It could have been the wrong tool for the job entirely. Both are valid conclusions. The point is I had a conclusion. Something I could act on or learn from.
That's what changes when you apply AI to a real problem instead of an imaginary one.
You stop asking "how do I use AI?" and start asking "did this work for my specific situation?" That's a much more useful question.
Here's how to find your starting point:
Ask yourself one question: what is the most repetitive, manual task in my business that produces the most frustration?
Not the most complex problem. Not the one that would impress someone at a conference. The one that feels like it shouldn't require a human but somehow still does.
Point AI at that. See what comes back.
The output will tell you more about whether AI is useful for your business than any workshop, demo, or hour of experimentation without a real problem in front of you.
Start with something real. Start today.