Digital Skills Education

Digital Skills Education travelled across Scotland with the Rural AI Roadshow.

In January, Daniel and I were part of The Rural AI Roadshow – a series of free conferences taking place across Scotland, from Eden Court in Inverness, to Dundee, and down to Gretna Green.

The Roadshow brought together hundreds of leaders, innovators, and practitioners to talk about the transformative potential of AI in rural economies. We met lots of small business owners who were clearly curious about AI, but often hadn’t started using it in any meaningful way.

Our session – Ways to use AI to improve your business communication

From the start, we were clear about what this session wasn’t. It wasn’t about letting AI take the lead. In fact, one of the few hard lines we drew was: don’t let AI do all the writing.

AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini are really just mimicking humans, copying patterns from how humans write. They sound human – but they aren’t. So when you ask one of these apps to write something for you, even something simple like an email, you’re removing the human from the communication.

And small business owners know that business is human-to-human. It’s people serving people. Once you take the human out, all you’re left with is text.

Instead, we focused on what these AI apps are actually good at:

• Noticing patterns in how people write and speak
• Recognising the structure of something, not just the words
• Guessing what comes next in a sentence or idea
• Identifying important parts of text

We looked at how they could use these tools to help them make first drafts, restructure information, and review their everyday business writing.

We know that to get the best results, it’s important to keep a human in the loop, and think critically about what is generated.

Thanks to the partners

Thank you to Highlands and Islands Enterprise, Scottish Enterprise, and South of Scotland Enterprise for making the Roadshow possible, and for taking AI literacy seriously across the whole country.

Thanks also to Nicky Marr for hosting the events, and to Robbie MacIsaac for setting the tone with an opening keynote that kept the focus on how AI can help businesses, not just hyping the tech itself.

Where next?

This kind of work – practical and human – is exactly the kind of AI education I’d want to do more of. We want to help people decide for themselves how (and whether) AI fits into their work.

Craig Steele
Digital Skills Education