The method
Education
Phase one gives your people practical AI skills before you automate a process. Each person learns by using AI on real work, with your own leaders taking part.
What happens
- Executive cohorts of ten to twelve, where leaders participate instead of watching
- Company-specific prompt templates built for your actual documents and decisions
- Weekly peer practice that turns a training session into a working habit
- Internal champions identified and deliberately multiplied, so success never depends on the champions alone
Why it works
The first change is cultural, and the technology follows. By the end of phase one, meetings move from “should we use AI?” to “why is the work still manual?” The new question creates the case for funding phase two.
Are you ready for it?
Phase one fits if AI comes up in meetings but has no owner, a few people already use chatbots quietly, or leadership is curious and open about not knowing. If most of your team uses AI on real work every week, you have already moved beyond phase one.
Many companies arrive at phase one after a failed tool rollout. The history is useful because the licences already exist, the skepticism has a reason, and the answer is better capability instead of one more purchase.
Week to week
Phase one follows a steady weekly rhythm. A cohort session covers one theme, everyone applies the theme to live tasks during the workweek, and the next session opens with fifteen minutes of shared wins and failures. Homework always comes from someone’s real backlog, never from a set of exercises. By around week eight, the cohort has added more entries to the prompt library than CrossGen has, so the handover is beginning on schedule.
Each phase closes with a written review of what was measured and learned, plus a candid recommendation on whether the next phase is worth starting yet.