Engagement

AI Hackathons and Workshops

Senior leadership rarely needs another AI presentation. They need first-hand experience of what the technology can and can't do — vocabulary, calibration, and a felt sense of urgency. The common failure mode is AI adoption driven from IT without leadership calibration: budget appears, tools get bought, and there's still no real direction because the people setting strategy have never built anything themselves. The fix is hands-on. Get the executive group, or the team, in a room and have them build working prototypes from their own business processes. Three formats run regularly: agentic AI hackathons for senior cross-functional groups, pain-led workshops for specific teams, and facilitator enablement for internal L&D leads who need to run AI events sustainably.

Book a scoping call

15 minutes. No sales pitch.

Recent work

What an event engagement looks like in practice

Agentic AI hackathon Tier 1 UK bank · 2 days · 25 leaders

Two-day agentic hackathon for senior cross-functional leaders

Facilitated a two-day agentic AI hackathon for 25 senior cross-functional leaders at a Tier 1 UK bank's headquarters. Participants used Claude Code to build working multi-agent prototypes from their own business processes, including human-in-the-loop approval gates and automated analysis pipelines. Table facilitator role — coaching teams through prompt design, agentic architecture, and live troubleshooting during the build sessions.

Format: Two-day hands-on hackathon, headquarters venue
Cohort: 25 senior cross-functional leaders
Build: Working multi-agent prototypes with human-in-the-loop gates and automated analysis

Anonymised at the client's request. Further engagement summaries published as they're approved for release.

Event structure

How these events work

The format varies — a two-hour pain-led workshop, a full-day facilitator enablement session for an internal L&D team, a two-day agentic hackathon for senior leadership — but the underlying structure stays the same. Four phases: design, guided build, team build, then pitch and action. The guided build is what makes mixed-skill rooms work; the team build is where the prototype gets built; the pitch closes with commitments rather than applause. For internal L&D teams who want to run their own programme afterwards, this often dovetails into curriculum design.

Phase 1: Design

Scope the challenge, select the tooling, design the build scenario, and prepare the environment. The scenario has to be relevant to the audience's actual business — recognisable enough that participants engage with it as their own work — without requiring any real internal data or system access on the day. Most of the difference between an event that lands and one that fizzles is decided here, before anyone walks into the room.
Phase 2: Guided Build

A facilitator-led session where every participant builds the same working prototype step by step. Nobody gets left behind. The "aha moment" — watching something useful appear from a plain English instruction — is engineered deliberately into this phase, because that moment is what unlocks the rest of the event. Once a sceptical executive has typed a sentence and watched it produce a working analysis, the conversation changes for the rest of the day.
Phase 3: Team Build

Teams choose their own business process, design an agentic workflow, and build a working prototype. Facilitators coach and unblock without directing — the work has to belong to the team for the lessons to stick. The output is a demonstrable prototype, not a slide deck, and the difficulty scales naturally with the team because each team scopes its own challenge.
Phase 4: Pitch and Action

Teams demo what they built live, articulate the business value, and identify the first concrete action they'll take to move it forward — usually within two weeks. The session closes with commitments, not applause. The point of the event isn't the prototype itself; it's the calibrated, vocabulary-equipped leadership group that walks out of the room with a clear next step.

A view on training and events

"Generic AI training is worse than no training — it creates the illusion of adoption while actually immunising people against change."

People who've sat through generic AI training — the slide deck, the feature tour, the dutiful five-minute play with a chatbot — are often harder to engage afterwards, not easier. They believe they've already "done AI" and concluded it didn't work for them. That's the opposite of where you want a senior leader before a real adoption conversation. Events have to produce something they built themselves, on a problem they recognise, or they reinforce the existing scepticism instead of breaking it. The longer version sits in how we think.

Common questions

What people usually ask before booking

What do senior leaders actually get from a hackathon versus a presentation?

Calibration, vocabulary, and urgency. They leave knowing from first-hand experience what AI is good at and where it falls over. They can have a real conversation with their technical teams because they've built something themselves. And they've felt the moment where a task that takes their team forty hours gets done in minutes — that drives budget and strategy in a way presentations never will.

How do you handle a room where skill levels are completely different?

I design sessions with a guided build first — everyone follows the same steps, nobody gets left behind — then move to team-based challenges where the difficulty scales naturally. The advanced person discovers their "solved" workflow still has manual steps. The beginner leaves with a working solution. The challenge menu is designed so every team can scope to their level.

What happens after the event?

The hackathon produces prototypes and — more importantly — informed leaders who now understand what AI can do for their teams. The natural next step for most organisations is a focused adoption programme that takes the highest-potential ideas from the event and turns them into production workflows. I can support that transition or hand it to your internal team with a clear brief.

What engagements look like

Events range from a focused two-hour session to a two-day programme, depending on audience size, objectives, and whether the format includes hands-on building. Scoped on a call.

Get the room building, not listening

The scoping call is where we work out which format fits your situation — a two-hour pain-led workshop for one team, a full hackathon for the leadership group, or facilitator enablement so your L&D team can run sessions sustainably.

Book a scoping call

15 minutes. No slides. Just a conversation.