Is AI Like Raw Chicken?
Nobody says “I don’t have time to cook chicken, I’ll just eat it raw.”
But every week, business owners and their teams are saying the equivalent about AI. “I don’t have time to learn it.” “We’ll look at it properly next quarter.” “It’s on the list.”
And in the meantime, the tools sit there. Installed, paid for, and largely untouched.
The excuse sounds reasonable. Everyone is busy. There are clients to deal with, staff to manage, deadlines to hit. Learning something new feels like a luxury when the day is already full.
But here’s the thing. You make time to cook chicken because the alternative is genuinely worse. You don’t skip that step and hope for the best. The same logic applies to Copilot, and to AI tools more broadly. Not using them isn’t neutral. It has a cost. It’s just a cost that doesn’t show up on an invoice.
What “No Time” Actually Costs
The time argument is understandable. It just doesn’t hold up when you look at what’s happening underneath it.
Microsoft’s own research found that employees who use Copilot effectively report saving an average of 14 minutes per day on routine tasks. Government pilots in the UK found average daily time savings of 26 minutes per person. That’s not a small number across a team of ten people over a working year.
The businesses saying they don’t have time to learn Copilot are often the same businesses spending hours every week on tasks that could be done in minutes. Drafting emails from scratch. Summarising meeting notes manually. Searching through documents for information that should take seconds to find.
The time isn’t being saved elsewhere. It’s just being lost differently.
The Tools Are Already There
This is what makes the raw chicken analogy feel so accurate.
You’re not being asked to go out and buy something new. Microsoft Copilot is already embedded inside Word, Excel, Outlook and Teams for anyone on a Microsoft 365 Business Standard or Premium plan. It’s sitting inside software your team opens every single day.
The barrier isn’t access. It isn’t cost. It’s familiarity. And familiarity is something that can be built quickly when someone shows you what good actually looks like in practice.
Most people who say they don’t have time to learn Copilot have never been shown what it can do in their specific role, for the tasks they do repeatedly, in the tools they already use. They’ve seen a generic demo or a LinkedIn post and assumed it isn’t relevant to them.
That assumption is costing them more time than the learning ever would.
Why This Feels Different From Other Tools
There’s a reason AI adoption feels more overwhelming than other software rollouts.
When a business moved to Microsoft 365, or switched to a new accounting package, there were structured rollouts, training sessions, and someone responsible for making it work. AI has largely arrived the other way around. It appeared inside existing tools, was announced broadly, and then everyone was expected to figure it out on their own.
That’s not how people learn. And it’s not how behaviour changes inside a business.
Research from McKinsey consistently shows that a lack of employee training is one of the most significant barriers to AI delivering real business value. It isn’t the technology that’s holding companies back. It’s the absence of practical, role-specific guidance on how to use it.
The businesses getting real value from Copilot right now are not the ones with the biggest budgets or the most technical teams. They’re the ones where someone took the time to show their people exactly how it fits into the work they already do.
What It Actually Takes
This is where the time conversation shifts.
Learning to use Copilot properly does not require a course, a certification, or a week away from the business. It requires someone sitting with your team and working through real tasks in real workflows. Not theory. Not slides. Actual work.
What does a good Copilot prompt look like when you’re drafting a client proposal in Word? How do you use it to summarise a long email thread in Outlook before jumping into a reply? How do you pull key points from a Teams meeting you missed? These are not complicated skills. They just need to be demonstrated once or twice before they stick.
The businesses that invest a few hours in that kind of practical guidance consistently report that it changes how their team works within days, not months.
The Question Worth Asking
If someone handed you a tool that could save your team an hour a day and told you it was already included in what you pay every month, you’d want to know how to use it.
That’s exactly the situation most Irish SMEs are in right now.
The question isn’t whether AI is worth learning. The question is how much longer it makes sense to leave it sitting there unused while the rest of the working week stays exactly as busy as it’s always been.
You wouldn’t skip cooking the chicken because you were short on time. You’d find the twenty minutes because the alternative doesn’t make sense.
The same logic applies here.
Where to Start
If you’re not sure where your team actually stands with Copilot and AI tools, the free AI Confidence Assessment is a straightforward starting point. It takes a few minutes and gives you a clear picture of where the gaps are: techmediaeire.involve.me/ai-confidence-assessment
Or if you’d rather talk it through, you can book a 1:1 discovery call at techmediaeire.com/book-appointment. No pitch, no pressure. Just a conversation about what’s actually going on in your business and what a practical next step looks like.
The tools are already there. They just need to be used.
Sources
∙ Microsoft. 2024 Work Trend Index: AI at Work Is Here. Now Comes the Hard Part. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/2024
∙ McKinsey & Company. The State of AI in 2024. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai
∙ UK Government. Incubator for Artificial Intelligence: Copilot Pilot Results. https://ai.gov.uk
∙ Microsoft. Microsoft 365 Copilot: Measuring Productivity Impact. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com
