The most common failure mode is to skip that work. The topic gets handed to IT, a centre of excellence, an AI task force, or a freshly named AI officer. A pilot is approved. A training budget is signed off. The leadership team considers the matter addressed. The structures stay untouched, so the work stays the way it was, and a few lighthouse projects create the illusion of progress while the operating model quietly drifts.
The Executive AI Experience exists because that structural work cannot be done in the gaps between board meetings. It needs the leadership team in one room, away from the operational pressure, long enough to learn AI hands-on, decide what it changes for the organisation, and prove to themselves they can build with it. Two days is the sensible minimum. Three days is noticeably better.
Before the offsite: Discovery and Foundation
Two pieces of work happen before everyone walks in, and they decide how strong the offsite turns out to be.
Discovery. Two to three weeks ahead, every leader receives a short, smart questionnaire of 5 to 10 minutes. We deliberately do not ask for AI use cases. We ask what is eating their time, what projects are sitting in their head right now, what their goals are for the coming months. In parallel, we work with you in individual conversations with key stakeholders on the strategic themes that should land in the hackathon. From both sources we curate a set of sharp, solvable challenges.
Foundation. We pin down the technical and regulatory playing field before the leadership team walks in: the right tool (a frontier model, a hub solution, or a Copilot-style setup), licences and access, AI guidelines, data protection and regulation (GDPR, EU AI Act, sector-specific supervision). Where you are already advanced, this is a joint stock-take. Where there are gaps, we close them in advance.
Day 1: AI literacy, and the structural decisions that follow
The first day belongs to understanding and to deciding.
Hands-on AI literacy. Not a talk. Each leader has their own frontier model open in front of them. We work through where the technology stands today, why it behaves differently from any software that came before, and what is technically happening with data and compliance. Two key exercises do the heavy lifting. In the first, each leader uses AI as a real thinking partner on an open decision currently taking up mental space, not as a faster search engine. In the second, each leader builds their own custom assistant on a real pain point pulled from the discovery questionnaire, in roughly ten minutes, on their own laptop, with no IT project.
By the end of the morning one observation has become visible to everyone in the room: every AI workflow lives or dies on what a human has put into clear words for it. That is the bridge into the afternoon.
The structural decisions. With the whole leadership team in the room, having just used AI themselves, sharing one picture often for the first time, the conditions for hard structural decisions are unusually good. The kind of direction-setting that otherwise drifts over weeks falls in an afternoon. We work in priority order.
First, the AI intention letter. A short text the leadership team writes itself, in its own words: how it sees the topic from now on, what it expects of itself in the coming months, what it expects of the organisation. Then access (who gets which models, how open the toolkit is). Then the framework around it (guidelines, communication, rollout, enablement). The format flexes to the group. What matters is not the format. What matters is that the team leaves without postponing the decisions.
Day 2: The Management Hackathon
The second day starts straight in. Small teams of leaders take on real problems from the discovery or from the previous day, with the full toolkit from the literacy day, with coding capabilities added where useful.
The rhythm is deliberate. A short kick-off. Build sprints of 30 to 45 minutes. Quick status rounds of 10 to 15 minutes in which the teams learn from each other. Three to four cycles. Then pitches without slides, and a vote in the room.
Two effects come out of a leadership hackathon that nothing else produces. A learning turbo: working on real cases under mild competitive pressure is the fastest form of learning we know. What the leadership team builds with its own hands sits deeper than anything a talk could install. And leaders as AI solution architects: once a leader has built something themselves, the reflex to push every technical question to IT softens. Each function can do more in-house, and IT is freed for the harder AI questions that genuinely belong there.
Where the extra time goes
The offsite is built to flex. Two days is the floor. Two and a half or three days lets the same work breathe: more time for personal practice on day one, more depth in the structural decisions, more cycles in the hackathon, more space to look at what comes next for the organisation. Group size, ambition level, and the depth of the discovery all move the exact shape, which we set together in the prep call.
Where the company would benefit from seeing what AI does on something the room actually owns, we prepare and run one or two custom demonstrations on real strategic initiatives during the literacy day. NDA where required.
Optional add-ons
- Executive 1:1 coaching alongside or after the offsite, for individual C-level roles that want deeper support.
- A fully worked-out AI intention letter and a draft of the supporting guidelines, delivered as a send-ready document.
- A concrete 90-day rollout plan for the organisation, written out of the structural decisions.
- A follow-up session 4 to 6 weeks after the event, to check what has actually moved.
- Recording and materials packaged as an internal enablement set.
What you walk away with
- A leadership team that has used AI hands-on, on its own real problems, and shares a working understanding of what it does and does not change.
- An AI intention letter, formulated by the leadership team itself, in its own words.
- The structural decisions around access, guidelines, rollout, and enablement either agreed or visibly on the way to agreement.
- For each leader, their own working AI assistant, built during the literacy day.
- Hackathon solutions on real organisational problems, documented in a format that can be carried forward into the wider rollout.
- A short results and recommendations summary after the event.
Who this is for
Executive committees and senior leadership teams of mid to large enterprises that take AI seriously and recognise the work as their own. Leadership teams ready to spend two or three days off the rails of normal operations to do the structural work properly, once, rather than fragment it across months of partial meetings.
How it fits
The Experience is most often the first deep step of a wider AI transformation. Lighter than this, the Executive Workshop covers the literacy step in a single day without the formal decision afternoon or the hackathon. Deeper than this, the Full Transformation Partnership picks up after the offsite to translate the structural decisions into the operating reality, in the wider organisation. The Executive Hackathon as a standalone is available where a leadership team is already AI-literate and wants a day of building.