There's one key thing companies must do when they bring AI into the workplace, BCG's AI ethics officer says

• BCGGlobal Chief AI Ethics Officer Steven Mills said employees crave AI training.
• The consulting giant's research shows most employees want roughly five hours of training.
• Once workers learn the basics, Mills said, that's when the real value begins.

Companies that want to successfully deploy AI can't just throw workers into the deep end.

"What we found is that employees want about five hours of hands-on training, and coaching, and mentoring," Boston Consulting Group GlobalChief AI Ethics OfficerSteven Mills told Business Insider. "Only about a third are actually getting that."

Mills, who spoke to Business Insider on the sidelines of Semafor's World Economic Summit, said the real value starts once employees see what AI can do.

"What we see is once they get the taste of value, let's say they start using it to help them edit bullet points for an email or something, and they're like, oh, that actually works really well," he said. "And so they instantly start thinking about how else they could use it, and so it creates this virtuous cycle. It's like the more value they get, the more they use it, and it amplifies."

Last month, BCG released a report that found that only 5% of companies arederiving value from AI. Mills, who also leads BCG's Center for Digital Government, said the onus is really on companies "to reimagine the art of the possible," instead of just treating AI like another tool.

"A big thing that organizations are not doing is stepping back and saying, 'How do we really reimagine our business processes, our service offerings, now that we have AI?'" Mills said. "This is a really transformational tool. It can do new things that we could never ever do before, so we shouldn't just shove it into a legacy human-centric process."

At BCG, Mills works with governments worldwide. He said that the growing adoption of AI in the private sector is helping push public officials to do the same.

"I think governments have been sort of a beat behind, but they're actually playing catch-up really, really fast in a way that I don't know that we've seen before," Mills said.

Leading AI companies, including OpenAI, which partners with BCG, Anthropic, Meta, Google, and Microsoft, have offered their AI agents atalmost no cost to federal agencies. Mills said that this affordable access will soon yield significant dividends.

"I think you'll see a big hockey stick in terms of rate of adoption here soon. I just think there's a need," Mills said. "If people want to use this technology, they use it in their private lives now. They want access to it at work."