Core question
Should AI training be limited to our technical team?
Short answer
No, and the reason is not fairness. It is that your technical team does not know where the operational pain is. The people running the messiest workflows do, because they are the ones losing the hours. Restricting training to IT cuts you off from the only group that can tell you what is worth automating.
Here is a finding that shows up in audit after audit. Ask a leadership team where the company loses time and you get a thoughtful, confident answer. Ask the people doing the work and you get a different one, with specifics attached. The second answer is usually the accurate one, and it is unavailable to you if those people were never trained well enough to recognize what a tool could take off their plate.
Inclusive training does more than build skill. It builds morale and engagement, and it produces a pipeline of ideas that no leadership team could generate on its own. One approach worth copying: require every person who completes training to submit at least one idea for where AI could help in their own work. Review, refine, prioritize, and implement. Then repeat.
There is a second reason to widen the circle. When training lives only in IT, AI itself stays in IT, and you cannot build an AI-capable business that way. It has to reach HR, finance, the shop floor, and the boardroom. People develop judgment about a tool by using it on their own work, and judgment is what separates a company with subscriptions from a company with capability.