AI Opportunities Discovery Workshop

For your executive team

It’s time to make AI work for your business

 

Every company is talking about AI, and has perhaps ran some small experiments. But how many have a well defined AI strategy?

 

Amidst the excitement, there’s a real risk for businesses that fail to embrace AI successfully: falling behind competitors, missing out on AI-driven growth, and losing your competitive edge.

 

It’s time for that to change.

 

It’s time for leaders to get a solid understanding of the real world implications and applications of AI. It’s time to refocus technology-driven experimentation towards solving real business problems. It’s time to turn AI excitement into an actual plan. It’s time to turn talk into focussed action.

AI: growth engine and potential disruptor

AI holds immense potential to transform your business: targeting untapped markets, innovating on customer experience, and helping you create market-beating new products and services. It can help boost loyalty, increase upsell, and acquire new customers.

Yet, without a clear plan, it’s easy to miss these opportunities while competitors forge ahead. This workshop is your chance to gain that clarity and turn AI into a catalyst for growth.

Understand what AI is for

This workshop helps business leaders to identify how AI can be applied to real challenges and opportunities for your business. You’ll learn about the capabilities (and limitations) of AI technologies through concrete examples that are relevant to your context.

What you'll learn

At the end of this process, you will understand:

 

  • the value of applying AI to specific use cases, and be able to estimate the likely costs and timescales of implementation
  • have a solid grasp of the current risks and limitations, so you can avoid pouring money into overhyped AI projects that are too risky, too early or low value
  • how to gain a competitive edge through a data-driven, AI-powered strategy

 

Outcomes

You will leave the workshop with a list of actionable, high-impact AI opportunities for your business. You will have an understanding of the approximate costs and benefits of each, allowing you to make an informed decision about which potential projects merit a more detailed analysis.

Who this workshop is for

This workshop is for business leaders who want to understand the impact AI will have on their product or service, team, company and industry:


  • CEOs will get a clear understanding of how the latest AI technologies are relevant across your organisation
  • CTOs and technical leaders will update their knowledge of the AI solutions on the market, and see how to support responsible adoption in each department
  • Product owners and developers will see how AI projects need to be managed differently to traditional software projects
  • Data scientists and AI engineers will gain a deeper understanding of the context and impact of their work, and how to collaborate with stakeholders effectively

 

No technical knowledge is required, and we won’t get lost in all the technical details about how AI works “under the hood”. This workshop will explain what you need to know about AI to evaluate its relevance to your business, in language we can all understand.

 

To ensure that it is a productive use of time for all participants, the workshop is highly interactive and will focus on real use cases in your business.

 

The time for action is now

 

Don’t let your competitors seize AI-powered growth while you hesitate. Gain the insights you need to outsmart the competition and unlock new growth avenues with AI.

About the facilitator

Seeing the value of AI… before it was cool

Jonathan Melhuish has understood the massive potential of AI since 2003, when he saw a machine learning system that his colleagues were building for the British Army. He described how to repurpose this approach to prioritising emails, an idea later exploited by SaneBox that now earns an estimated $2.3M per year in revenue.

Advancing the AI state of the art

He studied AI at the University of Birmingham and later worked there as an AI researcher on the CASAM project, a €4.2m EU-funded project that pushed forward the state of the art in computer-aided semantic annotation of multimedia content.

For the last 15 years, he has used Design Thinking to identify opportunities for new products and services, increase customer lifetime value, and decrease costs.

Keeping technology development focussed on customer needs

Jonathan played a key role in delivering a complex software solution in the UK Government’s department of education. He mapped the needs of 37 user types, and the interactions between them, before designing improved processes. These were implemented as part of a new CRM system that now offers an improved experience for over 20,000 trainee teachers every year.

He’s also delivered research, consultancy and training for major players and startups in the financial sector, telecoms and food delivery.

An experienced educator and mentor

Jonathan taught Systems Thinking to a diverse group of businesspeople, as part of the European Union’s climate change innovation programme, Climate-KIC. He played an important role in building a strong international community of over 2,000 professionals.

He has also trained, mentored, and facilitated workshops for multiple agencies, community organizations, and professional bodies, on Design Thinking skills and Artificial Intelligence.

Leading innovation, from a customer perspective

A persistent innovator with an entrepreneurial spirit, he has led multiple teams in startups, and social enterprises, including:

  • helping startup Genius Hub to develop and promote their innovative AI-based heating control system, resulting in positive reviews in major publications and industry awards
  • founding Makuma, an AI-based platform to help customers improve their quality of their relationships; he hired, led and guided the team in using Jobs to Be Done to identify a sizeable market opportunity and successfully combine multiple AI technologies
Workshop details

Invoicing: We’ll issue an invoice from our UK or Romanian company, as you prefer. 30 day payment terms, no VAT.

Confidentiality: It’s important than all participants feel comfortable to share details about important challenges you are facing in your organization, so that we can find solutions together. We’re happy to sign an NDA if required.

Follow on services

 

This workshop is only the beginning. Once you have identified the most promising AI opportunities in your organization, we can offer you:

 

  • deep-dive design sessions to scope projects around the opportunities identified, including more accurate estimates of costs and benefits, a more detailed look at the technologies you should consider deploying, identifying risks and benefits for all stakeholders
  • ongoing consultancy to support your management of AI projects, including setting up your AI project workflow and mentoring staff to ensure that business needs are fully addressed and new technologies are fully understood
  • training to help bring your employees on-board with new AI tools, to understand how to use AI effectively to support their work 
  • AI implementation support, including helping you fill any skills gaps in your team and ensure everyone has the expert guidance they need
Duration

1 day (or, ideally, 2 half-days)

Format

Online or in-person, at your office or our training centre

Capacity

Up to 8 leaders from your organisation

Cost

€3000

Slides, reference materials and a workbook of (optional) follow-on exercises are included.

Price includes training venue in Cluj-Napoca, if required, and refreshments. For locations outside Cluj-Napoca, reasonable travel and accommodation expenses will be added.

Course Outline

Part 1: Introduction to AI in Business

Setting the stage for AI’s role in modern businesses by mapping the main types of AI technology that you’ve probably heard of, but might not fully understand.

Topics:

  • An overview of the main types of AI technology
    • what they’re used for
    • current limitations and how they are evolving
    • key terms and concepts
    • common AI myths vs. realities

We’ll cover both Machine Learning, Generative AI, and Agentive AI and explain any technical terms as we go – no prior knowledge is required.

Objectives:

  • Demystify AI technology and its evolution.
  • Illustrate AI’s potential through relevant examples.
  • Discuss AI’s broader implications for industries and society.

Part 2: What’s the business impact of AI?

A focused exploration of AI’s tangible impact on businesses, analyzing how AI technologies drive value, efficiency, and innovation.

Objectives:

  • Understand AI’s potential to transform business models and processes
  • Examine the economic and strategic benefits of AI adoption
  • Discuss the competitive advantage AI can offer in various industries

Topics:

  • How AI can improve operational efficiency and productivity
  • Case studies on AI-driven business transformation
  • Competitive advantages of early AI adoption

Individual assignment:

Inspired by this knowledge of AI capabilities, identify:

  • frequent situations where it would be valuable to be able to predict the future
  • opportunities to add fresh ideas, or express something in a different format, e.g. showing data as graphics, narrative or video 
  • common repetitive tasks in your work, or that of the people you lead

Don’t worry about the feasibility of implementing AI technologies to address these opportunities; that’s what we will discuss in the next section. That discussion will really benefit from being based on real examples that can bring significant value to your organisation.Ideally, the workshop is split over two days, so that participants have time at this point to reflect, observe and collect good examples of challenges that AI might be able to address.

Part 3: Design Thinking for AI: Ideation to Action

Apply Design Thinking techniques to unearth and prioritize AI-driven solutions for business challenges, with an emphasis on actionable insights

Objectives:

  • identify opportunities to innovate with AI in your business
  • conduct interactive sessions to identify AI solutions
  • apply a framework to assess the feasibility and impact of AI projects
  • formulate a prioritized list of AI opportunities for strategic action

Topics:

  • integrating Design Thinking with AI ideation
  • workshop on discovering and evaluating AI opportunities
  • strategies for prioritizing AI initiatives

Part 4: Avoiding common pitfalls in implementing AI

Understand what leaders need to know to implement AI projects effectively, and some of the common ways in which they fail.

Objectives:

  • identify common pitfalls in AI adoption and how to avoid them
  • explore strategies for effective risk management in AI projects
  • discuss the importance of aligning AI initiatives with business goals and capabilities

Topics:

  • how to ensure your AI projects start off in the right direction
  • the importance of data quality, diversity and availability
  • don’t get stuck in “proof of concept hell”: AI integration and scalability
  • getting employees on board with automating their work
  • handling failure gracefully: implementing processes for when AI goes wrong
  • how to track AI performance over time, because it constantly evolves
  • how AI projects differ from other software development projects

Illustrative Example: RayCatcher Energy Systems

The price of solar panels has plummeted by 82% in the past decade, as volumes increased. However, less progress has been made in reducing installation costs, so these now make up a greater proportion of the total cost. In a competitive, price-sensitive market where solar energy is increasingly commoditised, solar installers are always on the lookout for ways to shave costs and accelerate routine tasks.

RayCatcher Energy Systems, a commercial PV installer with €50m annual revenue, was curious to learn more about how they could use AI to reduce costs and grow their business. They have already moved to cloud computing in order to simplify collaboration and data security, and are always monitoring the market for better solar technologies, but they didn’t have a clear understanding of how AI technology works, or how their competitors are implementing it.

Their CEO, CTO, COO and two experienced colleagues (one salesperson, one installation engineer) participated in our AI Discovery Workshop. They learned about the key AI technologies and their capabilities. We discussed the main challenges they have in their business, and identified steps in their process that AI could accelerate or improve.

 

Outcome:

Multiple promising AI opportunities + initial cost-benefit analysis:

 

During the workshop, we explored how AI could be applied to 12 challenges that the participants considered important to the success of their business. By combining the participant’s industry knowledge with the facilitator’s AI expertise, we estimated the approximate cost of each project vs. the estimated benefits. This allowed us to reject 3 of the ideas, and to get a clearer understanding of the remaining 9 opportunities.

Here are the opportunities, and the next steps to take after the workshop:

1

Drafting emails:

Train their sales, support and administrative staff to use the Outlook Copilot to accelerate the creation of the hundreds of emails they collectively send each day. Also, implement a process for collecting data on whether the email achieved the desired impact (e.g. a sale), so that the best-performing emails can later be used to finetune an LLM* to generate superior email content.

Cost: €100/employee (training)  

Benefit: 0.5-2 hours per day per employee

2

Drafting installation paperwork:

Use a combination of traditional code (created using Github Copilot to accelerate the coding process) and an LLM* to allow their staff to enter data only once, then all the regulatory paperwork will be generated. This will have a positive effective on staff satisfaction as well as the time savings! If it works well, explore the possibility of selling this as a software service to smaller PV installers.

Cost: €10-15k software development 

Benefit: 10-20 hours per week saved



3

Lead scoring:

Use historical accounting data, CRM data and emails to train a neural network to predict the likelihood of achieving a sale, and the profit margin of the deal, so that salespeople can focus on their most promising leads. Explore options for recording telephone calls and meetings in order to capture more complete data in future. As lead scoring is a common challenge for companies, they will evaluate an off-the-shelf solution.

Cost: €250/month per salesperson to upgrade to Salesforce Unlimited

Benefit: 5-10% increase in sales? (to be monitored during trial)

4

Employee scheduling:

Employees are currently matched to the requirements of each project manually, which is time consuming and inflexible – which causes headaches when plans change. Switching to software that generates schedules automatically would allow them to better accommodate staff preferences and respond flexibly to changes.

Cost: €10-100/month subscription, depending on features required

Benefit: 5hrs/week saved + increased customer & employee satisfaction

5

Improved cost estimation:

Use past quotations and cost accounting to identify where costs have previously been misestimated. If a similar pattern appears when a new estimate is being created, highlight this to the user, so that quotation process can be improved over time, e.g. by collecting additional details where these may affect the final cost.

Cost: €15-25k software development, including data gathering

Benefit: Reduction in losses from underquoting, increased win rate for new projects by not overquoting (potential to be estimated internally)

6

Autonomous drone inspection:

For larger sites, a drone could be sent to inspect and record video (inc. thermal) of a defective or underperforming panel. Third-party software will diagnose all common issues. In the longer term, appropriate action can be taken automatically, e.g. deploying a cleaning robot or ordering and scheduling installation of a replacement part.

Cost: approx €30-50k for IR drone + charging base, plus €20 per MW per inspection for Scopito software service

Benefit: ~25 hour per MW per inspection plus travel costs; increased generation due to higher accuracy of thermal aerial inspections (to be estimated based on real-world data collected during trial)

7

Automated troubleshooting:

By comparing live data from inverters and sensors on-site with a “digital twin” simulation, errors can be diagnosed automatically and an alert sent to the appropriate person to rectify the issue.

Cost: €15-25k software development

Benefit: problems identified immediately and addressed more quickly, leading to increasing uptime and generation, increased customer satisfaction and reduction in engineer site visits (potential to be estimated internally)

8

Autonomous cleaning robot:

For larger sites, autonomous cleaning robots might offer cost-effective automated cleaning without human labour. These are currently quite expensive, but the team decided to familiarise themselves with the technology and ask manufacturers for a trial unit. This will help them to understand any changes that might help facilitate use of these units in future, when they become more affordable.

Cost: €30-60k per bot depending on size, plus installation and setup

Benefit: 5-50 hours saved per MW per month, depending on site

9

Warehouse robots:

Autonomous robots for moving boxes and pallets around a warehouse are commercially available. The team decided to explore whether they would be feasible for their warehouse.

Cost: $40-80k per bot 

Benefit: 16 hours per weekday saved (2 shifts)

A valuable outcome of the workshop was equipping the team to be able to identify AI projects that may look attractive at first glance, but would actually be poor investments. These are some of the ideas discussed that they decided not to proceed with.

Neural networks could potentially better forecast future demand for solar panels and other key components, based on the company’s historical data. This could allow them to take advantage of lower priced deals, or reduce how much warehouse space they need for stock. However, as most of the components they use have fairly stable prices, most installations use similar components and they already have sufficient warehouse space, this idea was judged to have low savings potential.

CCTV images could be analysed in real time to identify any dangerous situations, and raise an alarm to the supervisor. However, if they were to train their own AI system, it may take a long time to collect sufficient examples of unsafe situations, as they occur rarely and would be time-consuming and potentially dangerous to “stage”. If an affordable commercial solution becomes available, it could be worth adopting, though most accidents happen on large installation sites where there is often little or no CCTV covering the work area, and the cost of installing cameras would be prohibitive.

Generative AI is making it easier and cheaper to create multimedia and even 3D worlds. However, the cost of creating a virtual reality training programme would still be significant, and wouldn’t necessarily offer significant additional value over their existing, hands-on practical training . However if a commercial product for training procedures for emergency situations (e.g. First Aid) becomes available, it might it be worthwhile incorporating into their training programme.

After the workshop, the participants conducted a more detailed calculation of the potential benefits and explored how the technology can be best deployed in their specific context. Jonathan was available to support them in this, and will be available throughout the implementation, to ensure these promising ideas are implemented successfully.

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    To preserve client confidentiality, the story presented here is fictional, based on our experience of working with multiple clients. Examples presented here are for illustrative purposes.

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