What does your team think about AI—and how can you start the conversation?
After the AI mandate at Shopify, teams are as nervous about AI as they are excited about it. Top down mandates and number of WAU aren’t going to lead to real change, just gamification. AI like any technology is capable of completely removing ways of working but more often than not it’s going to evolve the work we do. Genuine AI adoption looks like teams sharing how these tools are making their lives better, applying it to specific tasks, and truly believing they are getting value.
If you’re not seeing that, then start the conversation yourself.
160 people, 2 hours, 18 topics.
The theme: “AI and Beyond: How will technology and trends impact our work 3 years from now?”
I hosted another Open Space Workshop for ~160 people in product development at AppFolio, Inc. If you haven’t read my previous articles, Open Space is a participant-driven meeting style where the attendees collectively create the agenda.
Topics from the team included:
Best practices for product development with
How to help customers who are hesitant to adopt AI?
How do we stay aware of the ecological impacts of AI?
What should AI not be use to solve?
How I organized things:
The theme was announced a month before the event.
Due to some time constraints, we created the agenda the week before the event. I used a zoom whiteboard to run a 30 minute brainstorming session with 60 participants. We spent 15 minutes brainstorming, then grouped like ideas, and selected the agenda topics from those groups.
We had two 30-minute sessions with 9 topics each session. Table 10 was left open to strike ad hoc conversations.
Takeaways:
Teams are eager to talk about the nuances of AI, where it works and where it still doesn’t. If you give them the space to lead the conversation, you’ll learn a lot.
My teams, consisting of mostly engineers, really liked having the agenda creation separate from the actual session. It helped those proposing topics to feel more prepared on the day.
Leaving one table open was a great choice! A few different discussions kicked off at this table.
References:
Interested in learning how to create space to have hard conversations? Contact Me.
