What it is

Get the room excited about what is possible — and grounded in what is useful.

Groundwork combines practical examples, honest discussion of risk and structured activities that help the room identify where work could genuinely improve. It is deliberately not a product demonstration and it is not a slide deck about the future of work.

Most organisations arrive asking “where can we use AI?” The more useful question, and the one people leave with, is “where could this organisation work better?” Sometimes the answer involves AI. Often it involves a process, a definition or a system nobody is using properly.

We are still finalising the standard format, so we shape each session around who is in the room and what the organisation is trying to improve. We would rather agree that with you than publish a fixed agenda we do not yet stand behind.

Photograph of a Groundwork session being delivered JPG · 1600 × 686 · landscape

Real people in a real room. To be taken once a suitable session has run — not stock workshop imagery.

Why run one

What a session is actually for

01
A shared language

Leaders, managers and teams stop talking past each other about what AI, automation and data actually mean.

02
Permission to not know

People get comfortable admitting what they do not understand, which is usually where the honest conversation starts.

03
A realistic picture

What is genuinely possible now, using real examples rather than imaginary ones or vendor showreels.

04
High-value processes surfaced

The room identifies the work that is slow, repetitive, inconsistent or difficult to scale — and says so out loud.

05
The unglamorous foundations

Why reliable information, agreed definitions, ownership and measurement matter more as the technology gets more capable.

06
A look at how we work

You see our style, our honesty about risk and our judgement before committing to anything larger.

What people leave with

Practical, not theoretical

Participants should walk out able to do these things on Monday morning, in their own organisation, without us in the room.

  • Identify work that is unnecessarily slow, repetitive, inconsistent or hard to scale
  • Tell a process problem apart from a data, automation or AI one
  • Explain why agreed definitions matter more as AI becomes more capable
  • Assess whether technology should inform, assist, recommend, decide or act
  • Recognise where human ownership and judgement have to stay
  • Calculate the value of reclaiming time from a repeated task
  • Name one or two practical next steps for their own organisation

One of the exercises

Where should the machine stop?

For any given piece of work, technology can take on more or less of it. The room decides how far along this scale each process should go, and why.

01
Inform

Surface information for a person to use.

02
Assist

Gather, check, calculate, summarise or prepare.

03
Recommend

Form a view and suggest an action.

04
Decide

Make a defined decision within agreed boundaries.

05
Act

Take an action on someone's behalf.

Capability is not consent. What a system can do and what people will willingly hand over are different questions — and the second one is usually the real constraint.

What is in the room

The pieces we build a session from

We select from these based on who is attending and what the organisation is trying to improve.

Framing the conversation

  • The art of the possible — using real examples, not imaginary ones
  • The foundation model — problem, process, information, ownership, measurement
  • The data maturity ladder — capture, trust, see, predict and automate, then AI

Putting numbers on it

  • The Hour Audit — what a repeated piece of administration actually costs
  • The Hand-Over Map — what technology could do, against what people would willingly hand over
  • Where should the machine stop? — inform, assist, recommend, decide or act

Hands on the tools

  • Prompting basics applied to a real task from your organisation
  • What good and bad output looks like, and how to tell quickly
  • Where a person has to stay in the loop, and how that is designed in

The risks, honestly

  • Skill erosion when automation quietly removes the practice
  • Over-trust in confident output that happens to be wrong
  • Weak governance — sensitive information, unclear ownership, nobody accountable
Everyone leaves with a Monday Morning card: the first two or three things they will actually do, written in their own words.

Who should be there

The people who decide, and the people who know

Groundwork works best with a mix. Leaders bring the decisions and the budget. The people doing the work bring the exceptions, the workarounds and the honest answer about how things really happen. Neither half is enough on its own.

To arrange one

Tell us three things

  • Who would be in the room
  • What the organisation is trying to improve
  • What people are currently anxious or curious about
Talk to us about Groundwork

Tell us what is getting in the way.

You do not need a finished brief or a preferred technology. Tell us what is slow, repeated, difficult to trust or harder than it should be. We will arrange a short conversation and tell you whether we think there is a useful next step.

  • A conversation, not a pitch
  • We will say if we are not the right fit
  • No obligation to buy a build