The industry determines what a company has to deal with.Die Branche bestimmt, womit ein Unternehmen zu tun hat. But even within the same organisation, every department uses AI in a completely different way. The question that preoccupies the marketing manager never occurs to the accountant – and vice versa. A training course aimed at everyone therefore almost inevitably fails to address the needs of most people.
One company, many AI worlds
Even within a single medium-sized company, people with completely different points of contact with AI sit side by side. What is the central issue for one role simply does not arise in another. A training course that tells everyone the same thing therefore fails to address the issues relevant to most people.
Let’s look at just how different the issues actually are.
Just how different the questions really are
- Personnel and HR. The most sensitive area. This involves job applications, personnel data and job advertisements. As soon as AI influences the pre-selection of applications, this is considered a high-risk scenario – the utmost care is required here.
- Marketing. Runs on AI-generated text and AI-generated images. The dominant issue is labelling: from August 2026, AI-generated content must be identifiable. This department, however, never deals with applicant data.
- Sales. Quotes, customer emails, data from the CRM. The key question is: which customer data can be used in which tool – and which is best avoided?
- Accounting and Finance. Figures, contracts, confidential business data. Here, confidentiality takes precedence over everything else; image labelling is not an issue.
- Customer Service. Chatbots and draft responses. The chatbot must identify itself as AI – transparency in direct customer contact is key here.
- IT. Sits on the other side of the table: handles tools, access rights and security. Their questions are technical in nature, not content-related.
- Management / Executive. Uses AI for research, initial drafts and strategic work – often with the most confidential documents in the entire organisation.
Seven roles, seven priorities.. What is central to one is not even a peripheral issue for another.
Why ‘a bit of everything for everyone’ helps no one
Generic training attempts to cover all topics for everyone. The result: everyone is overloaded with irrelevant information, whilst their own genuine questions get lost. The accountant doesn’t need to learn how to tag AI images; the Marketing colleague doesn’t need to learn how to handle applicant data. If you try to teach both of them both things, you lose both of them.
Department-specific training is therefore the opposite of information overload: everyone learns what actually happens in their own day-to-day work – concise, relevant, practical. This saves time and, at the same time, ensures that what has been learnt actually sticks, because it is linked to real tasks.
The role changes – the person remains
One point is particularly important to me here, especially in small and medium-sized enterprises: there, one person often wears several hats. The administrative assistant does the bookkeeping and Customer Service. The Managing Director takes care of Marketing on the side. The sales representative steps in to help with support.
A department-specific approach must therefore not mean pigeonholing someone. It means: everyone receives exactly the building blocks that match their actual tasks – including several, if someone fulfils multiple roles. It is not the job title that matters, but what the person actually does.
Industry and department together ensure precision
This brings us full circle to the industry. The industry determines what the company fundamentally deals with; the department determines what the individual does on a day-to-day basis. Only when both are right – the ‘what’ of the company and the ‘how’ of the role – does compulsory training become something that sticks in the mind and helps at the right moment.
Generic training is quickly completed. Targeted training is effective – because it meets each person exactly where they actually are.
That is why employees at the EU AI Act Academy choose the modules that match their actual tasks – even several, if someone has multiple roles. Everyone learns what their own day-to-day work requires, rather than what is irrelevant to it