4 common gen AI pitfalls to avoid in 2025

As we enter 2025, Organizations everywhere are racing to take advantage of generative AI (gen AI) — but like any new tech, gen AI requires a thoughtful rollout, a culture of champions to accelerate its adoption, and leadership support to reach its full potential. Trying to embrace gen AI without the right support across your org can lead to frustration and even dips in productivity.  

To help keep your AI plans on track for the new year, here are four common pitfalls to avoid.

1. Underestimating the importance of a strong AI culture   

Introducing AI is only the first step. Without the right approach to AI adoption, you won’t see the benefits you’re looking for.  

It’s important to cultivate an AI culture where everyone feels involved in working toward successful integration. Consider involving your team in decisions about where and how AI could be most useful, and seek out their feedback on what’s working — and what might need tweaking.

And hands-on involvement doesn’t stop there. Experimentation and communal learning are vital to build the gen AI experience that gets effective results. Empower skilled users to share their valuable knowledge. It may take time for your team to become comfortable using AI, but a supportive culture can help them develop the fundamental skills that can add up to AI mastery. 

2. Removing human experts from your AI workflows

Your new intern may be super smart, but you wouldn’t put them in charge of your business strategy. You’d check their work, even as you assigned them increasingly important tasks. The same is true with gen AI. To bring the best out of the technology, real human experts must validate its output. 

Gen AI can do a lot, but it can’t do everything. Complex decisions — like what path a business should take — require deep knowledge, reasoning, and experience that AI doesn’t yet have, even if you give it all the right data.  

And as the technology develops, errors can occur, leading to potentially misrepresented information in AI answers. For now, double-checking gen AI outputs for facts and quality is the best way to take advantage of the tech’s productivity-boosting potential without compromising your business’s standards. 

3. Ignoring security risks

Giving a gen AI product access to organizational information can help increase the relevance of its responses. But sharing sensitive information with a non-secure product risks important data falling into the wrong hands.  

Without established gen AI data protocols, it’s difficult to know what information should be kept private, increasing an organization’s vulnerability to data leaks. Regulations on data storage and sharing may also impact how certain businesses can use gen AI. 

Before integrating a gen AI tool, consider what data should be off limits for AI and how the tool uses information. Bring together tech and security stakeholders to create a clear and comprehensive policy that guides your team with a steady hand while keeping them — and your organization — secure. Learn more about how Gemini for Google Workspace keeps your organization’s data private and secure.

4. Prompting without proper context

Prompt-based misunderstandings can frustrate newer gen AI users, and even push them away from using the technology altogether. Despite the conversational approach many gen AI tools are built around, creating an effective prompt is a learned skill. 

Like people, gen AI models can provide better outputs when they have the right level of information. But it isn't always clear what info would be helpful and how to best include it. The most successful prompts include: persona, task, context, and format. Not every prompt needs all four, but including as much context as possible can increase the relevance of the AI’s response. 

It can also be helpful to share particularly successful prompts with other teams to help them save time on prompting. And creating sharable Gems — distinct Gemini "personalities” that remember instructions — can help your whole team cut down on repetitive prompting, while reaping the benefits of a well-informed AI. 

Chart a course for AI success in 2025

Introducing gen AI to your organization can feel daunting, but it has the potential to revolutionize how you work. With a thoughtful rollout, supportive leadership, and collaborative culture, you can minimize friction and help your team flourish into confident gen AI users ready to tackle whatever comes next.