A department leader recently told Jim Cusick about a change they had noticed in one team member. This person had started using ChatGPT and was suddenly delivering completed work rather than relying on others to finish it for him. His colleagues recognized the difference immediately.
The impact moved into client relationships. Faster turnaround. Less back and forth. One person's confidence rippling through the whole team.
That is not a solo-use story. That is what happens when a team creates the conditions for someone to actually use the tool well.
Most people use ChatGPT alone. They write emails, summarize notes, draft posts, brainstorm, and solve problems. It feels like a private notepad that talks back. That works. But if you stop there, you leave most of the value behind.
We have always worked from a simple idea. People, presence, and participation drive results. On LinkedIn that meant your network, your visibility, and your consistent engagement. The same principles apply to AI — just in a different context.
People — teammates, stakeholders, and contributors who bring their prompts, workflows, ideas, and hesitations to build shared intelligence for the business.
Presence — how and where your team works together in these tools. Shared workspaces, project chats, and custom applications toward a common goal.
Participation — consistent collaboration through saving proven prompts, sharing workflows, protecting data, and helping everyone use these tools effectively and ethically.
When you use ChatGPT alone, you get one perspective. And it is a perspective you love to hear — your own. You might share results in a meeting or a chat thread, but the real work happens in isolation.
When you use it together, no one starts from scratch. Good prompts and workflows become the starting point for everyone. Each conversation builds on the last.
May Habib, CEO of Writer, puts it well: "You raise the intelligence of the entire organization." Quality use enables people who were average at writing, research, or analysis to work at a higher level by building on what already works. That raises the ceiling for the whole team.
Shared workspaces and projects let teams work faster, produce more, and spend more time on the work that actually requires judgment.
Prompts improve over time. Good ideas get saved and reused. Uses emerge that no one person would have thought of alone.
Every time Jim runs a foundational AI training session he feels the momentum build immediately. Teams start experimenting right away. They build on each other's ideas in real time. Even a simple shared document of proven prompts can keep teams from starting over every time and fuel that momentum.
Someone has to make sure good ideas spread, sensitive data stays protected, and the team understands what works. That does not need to be a full-time job. But without it, everyone goes back to working alone.
Adoption happens in waves. Early adopters jump in. Others wait to see what works. Skeptics need proof before they try anything.
The teams that make it work create simple feedback loops. They save the prompts that get reused. They share wins. They have clear rules about what data can go into AI tools and what cannot. And someone pushes for the investment — shared workspaces, premium accounts, time to experiment. Without that push, teams stay on free individual accounts and miss everything that compounds.
Everyone takes responsibility for making the collective intelligence stronger.
Most companies are stuck in the figure-it-out-yourself phase. That is where they were with email in the late 1900s, and with LinkedIn in the early 2010s, before collaboration and admin solutions existed across the platform. Almost every technology that works well has a plan, admin controls, and collaboration built in.
It is why we have always said LinkedIn is a team effort. The interest, the training, and the shared approach make a real difference. AI is no different.
What matters most is how you set it up:
You can still build an early advantage. But once AI becomes a commodity, anyone can press without thinking, the teams that built shared systems will be ahead of the ones still figuring it out alone.
Start there. Build the shared system now. The private notepad had its moment. This is the next one.
*This was revised and updated in March 2026, and yes, the window is still open.
Colleen McKenna is the founder of Intero Advisory. For fifteen years, she has helped professionals use LinkedIn as a business development tool, not a social media channel. It's Business, Not Social™ is the methodology.