The most common failure mode is skipping that work entirely. The topic gets handed off, to IT, a centre of excellence, an AI task force, or a newly named AI officer. A pilot gets approved, a training budget gets signed off, and the leadership team decides the matter's been dealt with. But the structures never actually change, so the work carries on the way it always did, 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 can't 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 minimum that makes sense. Three 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 don't ask for AI use cases. We ask what's eating their time, what projects are sitting in their head right now, what their goals are for the coming months. In parallel, we sit down individually with key stakeholders to talk through 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). If you're already ahead on this, we do a joint stock-take together. Where there are gaps, we close them before the offsite.
Day 1: AI literacy, and the structural decisions that follow
The first day is about understanding, then 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's actually 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, everyone in the room has landed on the same observation: every AI workflow lives or dies on what a human put into clear words for it. That's the bridge into the afternoon.
The structural decisions. With the whole leadership team in the room, having just used AI themselves and 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, that's not really the point. What matters is that the team leaves with the decisions made, not postponed.
Day 2: The Management Hackathon
The second day starts straight in. Small teams of leaders take on real problems pulled from the discovery work or from the previous day, using the full toolkit from the literacy day plus coding capabilities where useful.
The rhythm is deliberate: a short kick-off, then build sprints of 30 to 45 minutes, broken up by quick 10 to 15 minute status rounds where the teams compare notes. Three or four cycles of that, 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: there's more time for personal practice on day one, more depth in the structural decisions, more cycles in the hackathon, and more space to look at what comes next for the organisation. Group size, ambition level, and how deep the discovery went all shape the exact format, which we work out together in the prep call.
If it would help the company to see 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, based on the structural decisions.
- A follow-up session 4 to 6 weeks after the event, to check what's 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 doesn't 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 usually the first deep step in a wider AI transformation. If you want something lighter, the Executive Workshop covers the literacy step in a single day, without the formal decision afternoon or the hackathon. If you're ready to go further, the Full Transformation Partnership picks up after the offsite and carries the structural decisions into how the wider organisation actually operates. And if a leadership team is already AI-literate and just wants a day of building, the Executive Hackathon is available on its own.