60 to 90 minutes | Team discussion | Low effort
Use this activity to help your team explore where AI could support their work. Identify practical uses for AI, agree on priorities, and plan small tests.
This activity supports our guidance on how to start small and build momentum.
Planning together helps teams build a shared understanding before making decisions or choosing tools.
By working through ideas as a group, you can surface:
This approach makes it easier to move from curiosity to action without rushing or locking in the wrong approach.
This activity is designed for teams to explore AI in a simple, practical way without needing technical expertise.
Keep it simple. You will need:
Time: 10 minutes
This step helps surface shared areas of interest before finding solutions.
As a whole group, start by identifying everyday tasks that staff would like to automate, speed up or improve.
Capture brief examples, keeping them focused on real work.
To ground the discussion, focus on tasks that:
For more detail and examples, find out how to identify opportunities.
Time: 20 minutes
This step helps surface current frustrations and inefficiencies that make work harder.
Split the team into small groups of 3 to 5 people. Ask each group to list work challenges or inefficiencies they experience in day-to-day tasks.
This could include:
Capture ideas on sticky notes or a digital board.
If the discussion moves towards tools or solutions, bring it back to the task or problem.
Time: 25 minutes
This step helps translate selected problems into clear AI uses you can compare, prioritise and test.
In the same small groups, take each idea and describe:
Keep responses brief and practical. Focus on clarity rather than detail at this stage.
For more detail and examples, find out how to map your processes.
Time: 15 minutes
This step helps decide which ideas are worth testing first based on value and effort.
In the small groups, review all ideas. Use a simple matrix to categorise ideas based on value and complexity:
Focus on prioritising ideas that are high value and easy or moderately complex.
For more detail and examples, find out how to identify opportunities.
Time: 5 minutes
This step helps identify a practical way to test priority ideas without locking in long‑term decisions.
For the high-priority ideas, consider which AI tool best supports testing the idea.
You could consider:
If no specific tools come to mind, capture the type of capability you need instead, such as:
This can help guide later research or procurement decisions.
For examples of AI tools, check out artificial intelligence explained and choosing a solution.
Time: 15 minutes
This step helps your team agree on small, low‑risk tests to learn from.
Come back together as a whole group.
Invite each group to briefly pitch the high-priority AI uses they explored, including:
Once all ideas have been shared, ask everyone to vote on the top one or 2 ideas to test first.
Work together to define:
The next step is to run a small, low-risk test.
Try the AI tool using:
Keep the first test simple. Focus on learning what works before scaling use.
After the test, discuss as a team what worked well and what could be improved. Consider any issues that came up during the test, and how much time and effort the test saved.
Based on what you learn, decide whether to:
The goal is to learn enough to decide the next safe and useful step, not to perfect it.