By Kevin Shepherdson, Founder & CEO of Straits Interactive and Author of The AI Factory – AI Capability Guide for SMEs
Across industries, generative AI is reshaping how work gets done. Yet, while 20% of professionals building AI applications today are from technical backgrounds - coders, software engineers, data scientists, and IT specialists - the remaining 80% are non-technical professionals: business leaders, marketers, educators, analysts, compliance officers, and others who are now learning how to apply generative AI tools to their daily work.
This shift presents both opportunity and challenge. To harness generative AI effectively, we must bridge the gap between technical systems and human expertise. That’s the goal of our recently launched publication, The AI Factory – AI Capability Guide for SMEs. Co-authored between myself, Celine Chew, Head of Learning & Development of Straits Interactive, and Professor Jay Gonzalez, Vice Provost for Global Affairs and Founding Dean of Golden Gate University (GGU) Worldwide, this book aims to equip professionals with the mindset, frameworks, and tools to become AI bilingualists: individuals fluent both in their domain and in how to collaborate productively with generative AI.
Supporting Singapore’s Vision for “AI Bilingualists”
Singapore’s national vision is to develop a workforce of AI bilingualists - workers who can “speak both languages”: their professional domain and AI. This goes beyond digital literacy. It’s about empowering people to design, adapt, and manage AI tools that enhance decision-making, productivity, and creativity in their fields.
In The AI Factory, we build on this vision by showing how AI capability can be developed in any organisation. Just as a physical factory transforms raw materials into products, the AI Factory transforms data, knowledge, and ideas into intelligent outcomes. It offers a structure for developing AI capability at scale, across functions and job roles.
From AI Fluency to AI Capability
Many organisations today focus on “AI fluency” - helping employees understand what AI is, what it can do, and how to use tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, or Claude. Fluency is a necessary first step, but it’s not enough.
AI fluency enables people to use AI.
AI capability empowers them to create with AI.
The AI Capability Framework introduced in The AI Factory describes how organisations can evolve from simple awareness to sustainable capability. It identifies three layers of maturity:
1. AI Fluency – Using AI effectively and understanding key concepts, value, risks and constraints.
2. AI Literacy in Practice – Applying AI tools effectively in real work settings by creating and deploying various types of generative AI apps to address business pain points.
3. AI Capability – Designing, implementing, and managing AI-powered workflows, with a focus on reliability, governance, and performance.
By building these layers systematically, organisations create a culture of innovation grounded in accountability and trust.
Inside the Generative AI Capability Framework
Developing true AI capability requires more than familiarity with tools. It depends on mastering five interdependent dimensions that form the Generative AI Capability Framework:
1. Knowledge
Professionals need a sound understanding of how generative AI works—its strengths, limitations, and potential biases. This includes comprehension of prompt engineering, data handling, model behaviour, and ethical boundaries. Knowledge provides the foundation for confident, responsible use.
2. Skills
Skills translate knowledge into action. They include crafting effective prompts, fine-tuning outputs, evaluating results, and integrating AI-generated content into professional workflows. Building these skills turns AI from a passive assistant into an active collaborator.
3. Tools & Technology
Capability depends on familiarity with the right platforms—whether that’s generative models, productivity plugins, or AI integration tools. Understanding how to select, test, and use these technologies enables professionals to work efficiently while maintaining governance and data protection.
4. Processes
Sustainable AI adoption requires structured processes. This means defining how AI fits into daily operations, creating feedback loops for quality control, and establishing clear governance around data use, compliance, and model monitoring. Processes ensure that AI contributes consistent value rather than ad-hoc novelty.
5. Transformation Mindset
Finally, capability is underpinned by mindset. An adaptive, experimental, and ethical approach helps individuals and teams navigate change. The transformation mindset fosters continuous learning, human-AI collaboration, and readiness to redesign work processes around intelligent systems.
Together, these five dimensions form a roadmap for capability development—moving professionals from casual users to empowered creators who can manage AI in context, with accountability and confidence.
What is the AI Factory?
The AI Factory is a metaphor for how generative AI systems, and the teams that use them, operate. It helps demystify AI development and adoption, showing that every successful AI solution follows a structured process similar to a production line:
1. Raw Materials: Data, knowledge, and prompts
2. Machines: AI models and platforms
3. Workers: Human experts guiding and refining the process
4. Products: AI outputs—content, insights, or automated actions
5. Quality Control: Evaluation, governance, and continuous improvement
Understanding this model allows teams to think systematically about how AI is used within their organisation. Instead of treating AI tools as isolated gadgets, the AI Factory approach encourages a workflow mindset, integrating AI into business operations with purpose and control.
Managing Your “AI Workshop”
For most enterprises, the next step isn’t to build a massive AI lab, it’s to manage an AI workshop.
An AI workshop is the business-level application of the AI Factory. It’s where teams prototype, test, and deploy generative AI tools in real workflows—whether in marketing, compliance, customer service, or data analysis.
1. Running an AI workshop effectively means:
2. Defining clear use cases aligned with business goals
3. Selecting the right “AI machines” (models and platforms) for the task
4. Setting up human-in-the-loop review and feedback processes
5. Measuring results and iterating continuously
This approach turns AI from a one-off experiment into a repeatable capability. It also democratises innovation, enabling non-technical professionals to contribute meaningfully to AI solutions within their domain of expertise.
Why AI Literacy, Governance, and Risk Management Matter
With the encroachment of AI into everyday business, governance and risk management have become essential pillars of sustainable capability-building.
AI literacy must extend beyond functionality to include ethical and operational awareness. Teams need to understand not only what AI can do, but what it should do - respecting data privacy, intellectual property, and organisational policies.
In The AI Factory, throughout the AI production life-cycle, we emphasise three enablers of trustworthy AI adoption:
1. AI Literacy and Awareness: Helping all employees understand the nature and limits of AI-generated outputs.
2. AI Governance: Establishing structures for oversight, accountability, and quality assurance.
3. AI Risk Management: Anticipating risks such as bias, misinformation, data leakage, or overreliance on AI tools—and designing mitigations.
These dimensions ensure that AI capability is built on a foundation of trust, safety, and compliance, rather than enthusiasm alone.
Building the Future of Work Together
The AI Factory is more than a book. It’s a roadmap for building real-world AI capability within your organisation. Designed for leaders, educators, and professionals who want to move beyond experimentation, it provides structured guidance for developing responsible, sustainable AI practices.
This publication also comes with a complementary AI Toolkit that brings the framework to life. The toolkit includes curated resources and Capabara’s Tool Builder Wizard, which helps readers design, prototype, and refine their own generative AI solutions aligned with their domain and governance requirements.
Priced at S$32 (after GST), The AI Factory will be available in bookshops across Singapore and Malaysia, as well as online from 2026. You can also grab an early-bird copy of the book, here.
This article was originally published on 19 Nov at the Governance Age.
