Humans & Algorithms

EO Session Recap

A little note from us

It was a real pleasure to spend time with so many founders, entrepreneurs, and challengers talking about something we are deeply passionate about: AI. This is an extraordinary moment for inventive businesses to move faster, think bigger, and compete with organisations many times their size.

This is only the beginning of the journey, so we have pulled everything together here as a resource we hope you will genuinely get value from as you carry on. We wanted to capture the boards, patterns, highlights, and practical starting points from the session in one giant working artefact you can keep coming back to. If there is one thing we have learned from training more than 40K people and building two platforms, it is that people are everything, and real momentum comes from experimentation, trying new things, and learning in the work.

Leadership matters. Culture matters. Trusted platforms matter. Get in the mix, bring your people with you, and hold on to your hat.

Kenny + Louis
Leadership from the front Culture drives adoption Trusted platforms matter
Louis and Kenny
From Kenny + Louis, with love

The conversation continues here with the boards, ideas, and practical starting points from the session.

What We Covered

Session Highlights, Personal Tips, And The Big Messages

A calmer recap of the ideas, signals, and practical takeaways from the session, without making people wade through the whole board at once.
What We Covered

The Practical Agenda

  • A grounded view of AI now: where the value is real, where the risk sits, and where human judgement still matters.
  • Examples of practical use across operations, sales, marketing, customer experience, research, reporting, and internal workflows.
  • A live opportunity-mapping exercise using breakout boards so people could surface real drag inside their own businesses.
  • A practical follow-on frame: where to start, how to test, and how to move from curiosity to useful momentum.
Personal AI Tips

Starts With You

  • Everyone is an explorer. Nobody has fully cracked this yet.
  • Start messy. The first pass is for thinking, not perfection.
  • Talk to it when you can. Voice often creates better context than typing.
  • Use AI to get better at AI. Ask it to improve your prompts, structure, and questions.
  • Do not outsource judgement. Use it to think better, not think less.
Leading AI Well

What Matters Now

  • Top down: get the leadership team aligned on where AI matters, what good looks like, and what the guardrails are.
  • Bottom up: create a cultural moment where people can test, share wins, and learn without feeling judged.
  • Give teams the right tools with freedom, safety, and security so experimentation turns into real work.
  • Pick visible pilots. Momentum grows when people can see what changed.
World Watch

What Is Happening In The World

The centre of gravity is shifting away from "who has access?" and toward "who has redesigned work, trained people, and built confidence?" The gap is opening up between teams that merely try tools and teams that create routines, trust, and reusable operating patterns around them.

Trend One
Workflow redesign is beating random prompting.
Trend Two
Leaders are asking tougher questions about trust, ownership, and architecture.
Trend Three
The strongest adopters are mixing tools, training, and governance together.
Trend Four
The opportunity is no longer just faster work. It is new capability and new operating models.
Deck Highlights

The Big Messages From The Session

These are the strongest threads pulled through from the workshop deck so the board reflects what we actually talked about, not just what landed in the Miro frames.

AI Today

We have enough intelligence now

The real constraint is no longer access. It is how well we structure work, build trust, and turn capability into something useful inside real businesses.

The New Paradigm

AI-augmented work beats human-only or machine-only thinking

The deck framed a shift from craft-only work, to automation-only work, into a more powerful model where humans and AI think, create, and solve together.

Why Agents

We are moving beyond chatbots

The journey is from simple tools toward more adaptive helpers that can plan, think, and act with better context, data, and orchestration around them.

Start With The Goal

Pick the business outcome before the tool

The deck anchored opportunity-finding around four routes: increase revenue, decrease costs, improve organisational efficiency, and create competitive advantage.

Opportunity Mapping

Map problems first, then spot what AI is good at

The workshop structure was deliberate: find repetitive work, manual work, time sinks, inconsistency, and avoidable error, then look at research, analysis, ideas, decisions, and content as candidate support zones.

Prioritise And Move

Use quick wins to build confidence, then plan now, next, and future

The session closed on prioritisation and a 90-day action orientation. For SMEs, the prize is practical: do more with fewer people, move faster than competitors, and build capabilities you could not previously afford.

Aggregated Room Summary

What The Room Surfaced

The repeated pattern was extremely practical: less admin drag, better research and reporting, tighter sales follow-through, cleaner data, and stronger content and decision support.

Problems

Pain points, bottlenecks, and repetitive work that kept appearing across the breakout frames.

Frequent / Repetitive

Sales follow-ups, lead chasing, and prospect nudges were recurring almost everywhere.
Customer support and response handling kept showing up as repeat admin.
KPI tracking, CRM updates, and repeat reporting cycles were common operational drag.

Manual

Invoicing, vendor clearing, costing-sheet updates, and accounting admin took more human effort than they should.
Sales presentations, proposals, copy edits, and report formatting were still heavily hand-built.
Manual data analysis and document prep were eating time across teams.

Time Consuming

Client, market, competitor, and event research kept appearing as slow prep work.
Scheduling, resource planning, approvals, and follow-ups dragged simple work out for too long.
Onboarding, warehousing prep, and manufacturing assignments showed real coordination overhead.

Inconsistent

Work spread across too many tools and formats created rework and weak handoffs.
Pricing logic, tone, reporting standards, and execution quality were not always consistent.
Ownership was often unclear when work crossed sales, delivery, and operations.

Prone To Human Error

Accounting data entry, product costing, and client reporting were visible error hotspots.
Teams worried about poor data entry, weak formatting, and missed details.
Quality checks on campaigns, sites, numbers, and spec documents were still fragile.

Opportunities

Where the room saw the best openings for AI to create useful movement.

Analysing Content & Data

Automated reporting, performance analysis, and financial insight came through strongly.
Sorting data to find better leads and clearer signals felt immediately useful.
Several groups hinted at AI agents connected to ERP or system data.

Research & Insights

Competitor analysis, market trends, and client research were obvious candidates for acceleration.
People wanted better synthesis, not just more raw information.
There was clear demand for reusable insight packs and faster decision support.

Strategy & Decisions

Scenario planning, industry shifts, supplier choice, and clearer thinking all surfaced.
The room wanted AI that helped people decide better, not just produce more content.
Longer-term planning and visible prioritisation felt valuable across sectors.

Generating Ideas

AI coaching, brainstorming, and better content ideas appeared across multiple groups.
Teams wanted help turning vague opportunities into a stronger first draft.
Several boards pointed toward AI as a thought partner rather than just an automator.

Content Creation

Sales decks, stakeholder presentations, blogs, captions, and training material all showed up.
The room wanted better output speed without losing tone or judgement.
Marketing automation mattered, but it was not the whole story.

What The Live Chat Added

The chat added a second layer of leadership questions that went well beyond sticky-note use cases.

Build Vs BuyFounders wanted help deciding when to build in-house, when to use partners, and when to buy capability off the shelf.
Trust & GovernanceConfidentiality, GDPR, CDA, IP, and local-versus-cloud choices were repeatedly on people's minds.
Tool ChoicePeople were actively comparing tools, not just asking for a giant app list. Fit mattered more than novelty.
ReliabilityThe room knew one-prompt magic is not the game. Repeatability, QA, and iteration still matter.
Staying RelevantThe strongest strategic question was not just "what tool?" It was "how does my business stay valuable as AI reshapes the market?"
Miro Boards

Every Visible Breakout Frame

The screenshots below recreate each breakout frame so you can quickly revisit the shape of the session and compare how different groups saw the opportunity landscape.
EO workshop breakout frame
Breakout 1

A finance-and-operations-heavy board with clear signals around invoicing, lead-finding, vendor clearing, resource planning, and content creation support.

Each frame follows the same structure: people, problems, and opportunities. It makes the format easy to reuse with your own teams.

Sample Transformation Blueprints

Sector Flavours And Starter Journey Maps

These are sample archetypes built from the breakout themes, the live EO chat, the earlier tools research, and the transformation blueprint and 90-day planning logic.
Value Streams

Where Work Enters, Gets Stuck, And Starts To Move

Each line below shows the likely workflow, the drag that tends to appear, and the sort of quick AI support that often creates the first visible momentum.

Candidate Tools

Likely Stack Shapes And Workflow Builds

These are not rigid shopping lists. They are the kinds of tool patterns and build shapes that often make sense for this archetype.

90-Day Pilots

How A Practical First Quarter Could Look

Start with a visible, bounded pilot, then build capability, confidence, and clearer operating rhythm from there.

Run Your Own Internal Sessions

Use The Miro To Find Real Opportunities With Your Team

Here is a great starter kit for you and your teams. This is where leadership and bottom up meet: analyse the challenges, think about workflows, and get started with a practical first plan.
Who To Bring

Mix Perspectives

Bring a small mix of leaders and operators from commercial, operations, customer, finance, and people. You want people who know where the work slows down, not just people who like AI.

How To Run It

Work Through Drag Before Tools

Use the board to move through problem and opportunity exploration, workflow mapping, and a first 90-day plan. Ask people where work is repetitive, manual, time consuming, inconsistent, or prone to human error, then shape the best starting moves together.

What To Leave With

End With A Small Commitment

Leave with one visible pilot, one learning or enablement track, and one leadership decision about tooling, governance, or operating rhythm. That is usually enough to create momentum without overwhelming the team.

Open Internal Session Starter Kit
If you reuse the board, ask people to write in the language of real work, not abstract innovation ideas. The strongest sessions stay close to actual customers, actual handoffs, actual evidence, and one sensible next move the team can genuinely commit to.
Links And Boards

Everything In One Place

The links below take you to the original workshop board and the starter kit you can use to run your own internal sessions.
1. Original Miro Board
Open The Live Workshop Board

Revisit the original breakout structure, prompts, and workshop flow.

Open Workshop Miro
2. Internal Starter Kit
Run Your Own Internal Session

Use the post-session starter kit to explore challenges, map workflows, and shape a simple 90-day plan with your team.

Open Starter Kit Board