The foundation. Where AI actually is. What we think is going to happen. Where you are. And the principle that holds everything we will do over the next twelve weeks.
Where we are.
Today is acknowledging we are in different places with our experience of AI. It is about the question we share. How do I and we as an organisation work with this well that shapes our future.
Today's purpose.
To build the foundation we will spend the next twelve weeks on. Before we open the tools, we are positioning ourselves. Where AI actually is right now. Where we each sit in this cohort. What we are committing to over the next twelve weeks. And the principle that holds it all together. People lead. AI follows.
We are firmly in Stage 3.
OpenAI's progression. Five stages. We have been here three years. Three more in front. Where we are decides what your work with AI is actually about.
One of you in this cohort is already running multiple AI agents on a personal project as we speak. Stage 3 is not somewhere we are heading. Somebody in this cohort is already there. The work in front of you is not learn how to talk to a chatbot. It is learn how to delegate to and supervise a capable AI partner.
Deploy without preparing. Damage without intending.
Without a deliberate narrative, organisations default to the path of least resistance. Buy the licences. Flick the switch. Measure the usage. Wonder why nothing changed. Click each stage to walk through what happens.
Humans and AI think in opposite directions.
We go to two-day strategy sessions, develop objectives, define projects, assign tasks. AI works the opposite way. It starts with tasks and builds up. Getting clear about this shapes what you ask AI to do and how you structure the work around it.
Put 100 people in a room.
Roughly 70 are talking about AI. About 25 are using it as a kind of enhanced Google. About 5 are shaping it for their work. They have it doing things specific to them, structured to their role. Click each segment to explore.
Your room, specifically. About a third of you are daily users. About a third are weekly. About a third are less than weekly. A couple of you are already in Shaper territory, building agents on your own time. The journey from 25 to 5 is shorter for some of you than for others. That is fine.
Talkers → Users → Shapers.
Three stages. The same person can move through them. None is judgement. They describe a relationship with AI.
How AI accelerates fragmentation.
Organisations have always struggled with departmental silos. Remote work scattered teams further. Now AI is creating a third layer. Individual silos. One person can build a set of agents that runs a whole workflow, maybe even a whole division. That sounds productive until you consider what it means for subject matter expertise, quality governance and the connective tissue that holds an organisation together.
Same task. Same AI. Different brief. Different result.
A demo grounded in your actual work. Procurement specification writing. One of the hardest pieces of articulation work in your organisation. Named explicitly in the interviews.
The program has been adapted based on the insights from your survey and interviews.
These are healthy concerns. They are testable.
The next twelve weeks.
Every fortnight, two hours, Wednesday afternoons. The arc moves through the four layers. Narrative. Tool. Practice. System. By the end you have a working AI Role Plan, at least one Process Kit, one Copilot agent and a sustaining practice.
After Session 6, the AI Working Session ritual continues. Short fortnightly cohort drop-ins where people bring real work and the group helps each other shape it. The architecture for sustainment.
Your AI Role Plan.
Your role, mapped to its eight key responsibilities. Each responsibility, mapped to eight typical deliverables. A grid of 64. We look at where AI fits in each, where it does not and what the time-and-quality story looks like.
Each cell is a deliverable you produce. By end of program, this grid is yours.
The benefit is not just that AI helps with these tasks. The deeper benefit is that most of us, after a while in a role, become unconsciously competent. We can do it but we struggle to articulate it.
AI exposes that. It cannot do well what you cannot describe well.
So the act of building your Role Plan is the act of articulating your work clearly, maybe for the first time. That is a gift to you, regardless of what AI does with it.
Actions between sessions. Work on your real work (always).
Four things. None abstract. All on the actual job you actually have. About 30 minutes a day on the dance floor. About 50 minutes total of structured work across the fortnight.
Thank you for the honesty in the chat today. See you in two weeks.