Gen AI for Non-Tech Teams: HR, Admin, Marketing & Ops

Last month, I ran a training for a government agency. Mixed crowd — HR, admin, comms, operations. Not a single IT person in the room.

So I did what I always do early on.

Before we touched any tool, I said this:

“You don’t need to be technical for this. You don’t need to code. You just need to have work that repeats.”

Because I know what’s going through their heads. In most organisations, the moment people hear “AI,” they assume it belongs to IT.

It doesn’t.

Generative AI isn’t for technical people. It’s for people with work to do.

Let me explain.

When most people hear “AI,” they think of code. Servers. IT departments. The kind of thing you call someone else to handle.

But generative AI works differently. Think of it like an experienced writer — someone who studied language, read thousands of books, wrote professionally for twenty years. If you asked her to draft a memo for your department, she wouldn’t need to “code” anything. She’d just write it, drawing on everything she knows.

That’s what today’s Gen AI tools do. They’ve been trained on massive amounts of text. They’ve seen how humans write reports, emails, proposals, SOPs. When you ask them to help, they’re not running calculations — they’re creating, like that writer would.

You don’t need to be technical. You need to know what you want.

Here’s what I’ve seen in actual trainings:

HR: A lot of HR writing follows a pattern — offer letters, confirmation letters, exit interview summaries. Same structure every time, different details. Once the team builds a prompt that matches their format, the tool produces a usable draft fast. HR still reviews and adjusts — but the heavy lifting is done.

Admin: Meeting minutes are the same story. Attendance, discussion points, action items, next steps. An admin executive can paste rough notes and get a clean draft back in the right structure. Her complaint? “Now I have no excuse to delay sending them.”

Marketing & Comms: Comms teams need volume. Captions, variations, event reminders, corporate greetings. With a simple prompt that includes brand voice rules, they can generate multiple options quickly and pick the best one.

Operations: Ops managers track weekly KPIs, then rewrite the same summary for management every week. With a structured prompt, the summary drafts itself — and the human job becomes checking the facts and adding judgment.

None of these people write code. None of them “work in IT.” They just have repetitive work that follows patterns. And pattern-based work is exactly what generative AI handles well.

Here’s what I’ve noticed after training thousands of people: the best results don’t come from the most technical participants. They come from the ones who know their work deeply.

The admin who’s written hundreds of memos knows what a good memo looks like. Tone, structure, what must be included, what must not. When she prompts the AI, she can spot immediately if something’s off.

A fresh grad might know where all the buttons are. But he doesn’t always know what he’s looking for.

Your experience is the advantage. You know what good output looks like for your role. The AI just helps you get there faster.

This matters, so I say it in every training: generative AI gives you the most likely answer, not the correct answer.

Most of the time, “most likely” and “correct” overlap. But not always. The AI might get a policy wrong. It might invent a procedure that doesn’t exist. It might write something that sounds right but isn’t quite how your organisation does things.

This is why you review everything. The AI drafts, you decide. Your judgment, your context, your responsibility. Those don’t get automated.

Find the task you do repeatedly that follows a pattern. The weekly report. The standard email. The meeting summary. The FAQ responses.

Start there. Build one prompt. See what happens.

You don’t need to be technical to start — but you do need to follow your organisation’s data rules. If you’re unsure, start with non-sensitive drafts and templates first.

That’s how adoption happens: not from “learning AI,” but from clearing one repeated task and realising you just got time back.

If your team is struggling to make sense of generative AI — or feels that it’s “not for them” — this is exactly what we help with.

At Twenty-Four Consulting, we work with ministries and organisations across Malaysia to deliver practical talks and hands-on training for non-tech teams.

If you’d like us to support your team, contact us to discuss a session for your organisation.