AI WorkshopTransformation - Keeping Business Momentum Alive
We’ve all been there. A new priority initiative for your business unit. A new opportunity to do things differently. An initial burst of energy. Then momentum stalls. The normal business-as-usual priorities become equally important. The initiative becomes yet another stalled transformation. Another missed opportunity. Another reason for your team to become sceptical of change.
At MadeCurious we’ve spent years helping private and public sector organisations navigate this challenge. We help solve the messy human problems alongside the complex technology challenges. Workshops are a key tool in our toolbelt in bringing alignment and focus for our partner organisations.
Recently we’ve been seeing how AI is massively amplifying our ability to deliver effective workshops and capture and disseminate information that is vital for work programme success.
Why Workshops Matter for Business Alignment (and Why They Often Fail)
Aligning around work is hard. In larger enterprises, where competing priorities and initiatives constantly vie for attention, it becomes exponentially harder. This is why MadeCurious has always been big on incorporating workshops into the early phases of an engagement.
We use workshops as a tool to bring together diverse perspectives, challenge existing ways of thinking, and help rally different parts of the organisation around a shared vision. Our trained facilitators often play the role of the challenger in these sessions - questioning assumptions and encouraging different approaches to thinking about problem and solution opportunities.
There is a kind of magic that happens when you bring people together in a well facilitated workshop. The human connection fostered, combined with a break from the BAU and distractions of the modern workplace, can feel like real progress is being made.
But that sense of progress and momentum can quickly evaporate once people leave the room. That massive list of emails and recurring check-in meetings for other “priorities” quickly pull at the attendees focus.
The Challenges of Running Effective Workshops Without AI
Effective workshops, as the name suggests, take a lot of work. Both in preparation as well as the consolidating and synthesising of themes, decisions, and actions coming out of the workshop. And the longer the gap between the workshop session and the follow up, the more opportunity there is for those other things to erode the focus and slow down the momentum.
This is why MadeCurious has always pushed for quick turnarounds on workshop outputs. Delivering content back to attendees quickly allows us to build on the workshop's energy before all those other distractions pile up again.
But turning around high-quality workshop outputs quickly has traditionally required significant manual effort. Yes, tools like Miro initially helped us to bring virtual groups together and speed the process up. But there was still an enormous amount of human distillation required. MadeCurious generally brings a mix of skillsets to these engagements - including facilitators, designers, and analysts. Not only do these humans need to align on the outputs and next steps, but the key members on the customer side also need to be brought along too. This process could take days, during which that precious momentum continued to fade.
How AI Transforms Workshop Follow-Up and Delivery
The recent explosion in AI tools for business has fundamentally changed how we approach this post-workshop synthesis. These tools have enabled us to be far more responsive in the immediate aftermath of workshops and large meetings, dramatically reducing the time between discussion and documented action.
Our new approach starts with recording the session (and yes, getting the right mic setup for the room is crucial—we learned that the hard way). This recording doesn't just form the backbone of our data collection; it also frees up our facilitators to focus on what really matters: the human dynamics in the room. No more frantically scribbling notes while simultaneously trying to guide discussion.
Immediately following the workshop, we can feed the recording into audio-to-text transcription services, then into content summarisation tools. Photos of whiteboards and sticky notes get uploaded as supporting content, with image-to-text translation providing supplementary data to the audio recording.
MadeCurious AI Workshop Toolkit: Tools We Use to Accelerate Results
Our current toolkit includes:
- Native Voice Memos apps on our MacBooks and phones for recording via the in-built microphones, or our transportable omnidirectional microphones for smaller workshops and meetings.
- Riverside for high-quality audio transcription to text.
- Gemini or Granola for all-in-one transcription and synthesis.
- NotebookLM or Claude for deeper content analysis, and supplementing with additional images or documents.
- Dovetail for one-on-one interviews.
Key Benefits of Using AI in Workshops
Any generated outputs from these AI tools are obviously reviewed by our own expert facilitators and product thinkers, with the outputs supplemented by their own insights and analysis. This allows our people to focus on the real value they add to your business, rather than having to do lots of manual transcription grunt work. This means our customers are also only playing for the highest value interactions.
And MadeCurious is experienced in facilitating large change programmes, with multiple concurrent streams. So the scale and cost-savings these new AI tools present is seriously impressive.
But this also opens up programmes of work with smaller budgets to make use of this facilitated discovery service. In our experience, stakeholders and budget holders can often struggle to prioritise this kind of discovery and alignment workstream. However, it can be so crucial to setting the foundations for programme success. With these AI tools reducing the cost barrier, there is much greater opportunity for organisations of all shapes to adopt this approach.
What previously took a day or two of elapsed time to turn around can now be done almost immediately following the workshop. We're talking about comprehensive summaries and action plans available while the discussions are still fresh in everyone's minds. Again, this helps keep feedback loops tight and gives more opportunity for programme momentum to be maintained.
Capturing the workshop content and outputs in tools like Claude builds out a living knowledge repository of your programme of work. A history of context, decisions, insights, and solution options discussed can all be easily interrogated by users. This presents an engaging and dynamic way to track a programme of work, in a way that static RAID logs just cannot.
Why Human Facilitation Still Matters in AI-Driven Workshops
Workshop turnaround time for follow up synthesis and action is just one example of how modern tooling is enabling us to do more of the true value-add work. But AI is not going to simply magic away the challenges of context switching, cross-team collaboration, and tough prioritisation within large and complex organisations.
These are all very human problems that require very human solutions.
At MadeCurious we see AI not as a replacement for human insight but as an amplifier of it. By handling the heavy lifting of information processing, these tools free us to do what we do best: partner with organisations to navigate complexity, maintain momentum, and ultimately, build the right thing.
But if you’re not adopting these tools to make your own meetings or workshops more effective, then give them a try! Curious about how enhanced facilitation could accelerate your next strategic initiative? Let's discuss your upcoming plans and how we can help you sustain progress from kick-off to implementation.
