AI & Automation Readiness

Most AI pilots never pay off. Yours will.

A leadership-first programme for measurable AI adoption. Not another tools demo: alignment, governance and reusable workflows that turn licences into return.

95%

of enterprise GenAI pilots fail to deliver measurable ROI

MIT Project NANDA · The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025
We specialise in training teams on Google AI (Gemini) Anthropic Claude Microsoft Copilot
Why AI implementations fail

It is never the tool. It is the operating model.

01

Teams experiment in different directions

02

Licences bought before usage principles are clear

03

Prompt quality varies by person

04

Valuable workflows stay trapped in individual habits

05

Governance and ownership added too late

The result is predictable: more AI activity, but limited visibility, inconsistent quality and uneven ROI. Adoption has to start at the top, because leadership decides the operating model.

What senior leaders told us
"I don't need another walkthrough of the app. Show me what someone who really knows this tool would do with my week."
Operations Director · Logistics
"We use it every day and the workload has not gone down. My team has swapped doing the work for talking to the AI."
CFO · Financial services
"A few of the more technical people have worked out clever ways of using it. Everyone else is stuck on the basic chat with six tabs open."
Managing Partner · Professional services
15
interviews with senior leaders shaped this programme.
3
sectors: financial services, logistics and professional services.
Capability

The five levels of the AI capability ladder.

The same licence supports very different levels of work. The training moves each leader to the level their role needs.

1
AI FluentUnderstand how these models work, where they fail, and how to use them responsibly.
2
AI OperatorNavigate chat, desktop, Projects, artefacts and connectors safely and confidently.
3
Workflow BuilderBuild reusable Projects, Skills, prompt libraries, dashboards and structured outputs.
4
Agentic ManagerScheduled tasks and routine agents handling recurring work, with a person in the loop.
5
AI Systems ArchitectMulti-agent design, connector strategy, Skill repositories and the orchestration boundary.

Not every leader needs level five. What matters is knowing which level each function needs, and who owns the levels above it.

The difference

What an expert does differently.

How most people use AI today
How our participants build it
Every conversation starts by re-explaining the business, the client and the format.
A department Project holds the tone, templates, rules and definitions. Every conversation starts warm.
The best prompts live in one person's head or a private notes file.
The best methods are written as Skills any colleague can access, run and improve.
Each output takes four or five rounds of correction.
Corrections go into the Project and the Skill, so first drafts land close.
One long conversation is asked to do everything at once.
Big jobs are split across agents: one researches, one drafts, one checks.
Results are copied and pasted between the chat window and every other tool.
AI reads and writes automatically, directly into the tech stack: Monday, Slack, Drive and Calendar, on a schedule.
When the most capable person leaves, their methods leave with them.
Assets live in a department library with named owners and a review date.
What you keep

What your team walks out owning.

Every session produces working assets, not notes. Four kinds.

Department Projects

Projects that hold a department's tone, rules, templates and definitions. Set up correctly and shared, they produce the quality everyone expects without refining the same task every time.

Skills

Your best methods written as instructions any colleague can access, run and improve: the weekly report, the client proposal, the meeting follow-up.

Agent teams

Work too large for one pass is split across agents that research, analyse, draft and check in parallel. You brief once.

Recurring routines

The Monday pipeline review, the Friday client summary, the month-end pack. Built once, connected to your tools, running on schedule.

We also audit each department's recurring work to find the Skills nobody thought to ask for. The small tasks that repeat every week are usually where the hours are. Participants leave confident building Skills of their own, the kind that remove hundreds of collective hours a month.

The honest line

Where AI runs the work, and where it should not.

Some work belongs inside the AI assistant. Some belongs in an orchestration layer the AI plugs into. Getting this wrong is how good pilots fail: a high-volume process ends up in a chat window with no retry, no log and no audit trail.

Inside Claude
Judgement work

Research, analysis, drafting, review and decision support. Variable, lower volume, reversible.

Claude plus connectors
Recurring routines

Weekly and monthly rhythms across Monday, Slack, Drive and Calendar, with a person in the loop.

Orchestration layer
Process at volume

Thousands of runs that must survive failure. n8n, Make or Zapier carries the process; AI becomes one intelligent step inside it.

Sometimes the answer is that you do not need AI for this at all. That conversation is cheaper than the licence.

Recommended first step

C-suite AI and Automation Readiness

A tailored leadership session that builds a shared view of adoption before your teams scale further use. We encourage signing NDAs to protect your intellectual property during discovery.

01
A shared leadership baselineWhere AI is useful, where it is misunderstood, and where adoption is uneven today.
02
A clearer view of tool valueWhat the business is paying for, and where each capability can create measurable return.
03
Governance and security principlesData boundaries, approval, ownership, accountability and safe usage.
04
An asset auditWhich Projects and Skills each department should own, ranked by volume and repetition.
05
A department rollout pathDepartment-level Projects and Skills with named owners, prioritised by return.
In the room this month
Claude training for a 12-executive C-suite at a financial firm: security posture, governance and hands-on use cases in a regulated industry.
July 2026 · Executive session · Measured results published after delivery
90%
practical build time, on the client's own examples.
4
working assets built per participant on the day.
How it is delivered

Training that ends in working systems.

90% practical, 10% theory, all on examples from your business.

Stage 00

Programme design

Fifteen minutes with each department head and a sample of what their team produces. The training is then built on your material, not generic examples. Included in every programme.

Stage 01

Security setup

One call with your CTO or security lead: connector permissions, data boundaries and a synthetic data pack for the exercises. We handle none of your data at any point.

Stage 02

Foundation day

One shared day for the leadership team: safe usage, effective prompting, Projects, Skills, dashboards and routines, built live. Everyone leaves with working assets.

Stage 03

1:1 build labs

Three-hour sessions that build departmental Projects, Skills or agentic workflows on real work: tested, iterated and documented.

Stage 04

Office hours

Bookable support after delivery: fixing blockers, extending what was built, deciding what to automate next.

Stage 05

Departmental handover

Everything from the labs goes into one solution with a guide, governance and review dates.

How success is measured

Four checkpoints in the first sixty days.

Every measure is agreed in writing with your sponsor before the foundation day.

End of day Confidence check

Before anyone leaves: can each leader turn a task into a work-ready output, and judge what is safe to use? Plus the first thing they will apply that week.

Day 7 Baseline survey

Usage frequency, confidence across Projects, Skills and dashboards, and minutes per workflow before and after. Everything later is measured against this.

Day 30 Adoption check

Is every leader working through a Project or Skill on real tasks, with approved inputs and human review? Barriers are logged and assigned an owner.

Day 60 Workflow check

Approved workflows in regular use, each with an owner, a reviewer and retained evidence. Time saved is compared against the day 7 baseline.

Questions

Questions leaders ask.

Our team already uses AI every day. Is this too basic for us?

Daily use is the reason to do it. High-usage teams have the widest quality gap, because everyone has developed a private method and none of them are written down. The first session usually surfaces three or four things being done by hand that should have been a Skill six months ago.

How is the training customised to us?

Before anything is scheduled we speak to each department head for fifteen minutes and review a sample of their team's work. The training is then built on your material: your board pack, your tender response, your candidate screen. This is included in every programme.

We are regulated and cannot put client data into these tools. Does this still work?

Yes, and it is a common starting position. We agree data boundaries and approval before anything gets built. Every exercise runs on synthetic data inside your own workspace, and we handle none of your data at any point.

What do we keep afterwards?

The Projects, Skills, agent routines and tool connections, plus a prompt library, the session recording and a written internal guide with named owners. All of it lives in your tenancy and nothing depends on us to keep running.

Can we see anything before we commit?

Yes. Reference calls with previous clients, sample training material, and a contained first option covering the foundation day and a starter set of labs before any wider rollout.

What happens if adoption targets are missed?

Adoption is measured against the agreed baseline at each checkpoint. If targets are missed, we add support at no charge until they are met.

Get started

Be in the 5% that gets measurable value.

A 30-minute call is enough to scope the right readiness programme for your leadership team. No pitch deck, no obligation.