Case Study: Sedelec
Three days to give an electrical installation company a common foundation in AI, from management to project managers
Situation
Sedelec SA, based in Carouge (Geneva), delivers electrical installations and building services: telephony, telematics, building automation and security, all the way to charging stations for electric vehicles. In early 2024, a year after ChatGPT arrived, management wanted to give all its teams the same starting point on generative AI. Some participants had never used the tool before.
Objective
Give three very different audiences (the management team, the project managers and the administrative assistants) the same foundations: understand what generative AI is, know how to phrase a request, know the limits of the tool, then leave with use cases taken from their own work rather than generic examples.
Training days
3
Audiences: management, project managers, assistants
3
Clarity of the sessions (12 respondents)
3.8/4
Content in line with expectations
12/12
Process
January 2024: the administrative assistants
A day of ChatGPT training, from the generative AI revolution to exercises on their everyday correspondence.
February 2024: the project managers
The same structure, adapted to the job: writing to a hospital client to announce a two-day delay on installing charging stations, explaining a technical point of electrical work in plain words, drafting a job ad for a project manager.
The management team
The management team took the training too, on the same foundation as its staff.
The six-part prompt structure
Task, context, example, role, tone and format, built step by step on the same email until the final result, then the ping-pong method to refine an answer.
Exercises on real emails
Correcting an email, writing one from scratch in one's own style, removing the passive-aggressive tone from a message, translating it.
Use cases specific to Sedelec
Five families: correspondence and communication, administrative and document tasks, research and presentation, translation, technical uses. Then the limits: hallucinations, bias, sensitive company data, environmental impact.
Results
Three days of training and three audiences trained, from the management team to the project managers and the administrative assistants.
12 participants answered the satisfaction survey. All 12 consider the content in line with their expectations (3 or 4 out of 4). Clarity of the sessions is rated 3.8/4 and the facilitation style 3.7/4, for an average of 3.45/4 across all criteria.
The most cited takeaway: knowing how to structure a prompt. "Writing prompts properly", "understanding the prompt", "how to phrase a prompt and where the limits of AI lie".
The same situation seen from both sides: the assistants worked on "how do I tell a project manager I would like faster replies to my emails, without hurting them", the project managers on the reverse question. The training started from their real frictions.
A clear-eyed observation from a participant in the field: "AI will relieve us on the administrative side, but somewhat less on the technical side".
What worked less well: the training objectives were poorly known before the session (2.75/4), and two participants out of twelve found the content hard to apply to their role. Today, we share the programme beforehand and start from an audit of the tasks before training.
What the teams asked for next: data security, the Swiss data protection act (nLPD) and IT security, cited by three participants. It has since become a full part of our training.
Testimonials
- Very good training. MAIjin and Jean-Baptiste Berthoux supported its project managers, its administrative assistants and the whole management team over 3 days. (Eric Schaller, Director, Sedelec Geneva)
- A good overview of what AI can do and how it works. A clear and varied presentation. (a participant)
- A very good course. I am not an IT specialist, so I may need a little help with this great work tool. (a participant)
Contact us
- Want to upskill your teams?
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