Not every inbound request for an AI workshop is a workshop we should run yet. Saying yes to a vague brief and showing up with a generic deck wastes a full day of a team's time and produces exactly the kind of "engaged in the room, forgot it by Friday" outcome we wrote about in what an AI workshop actually covers. So before we agree to a date, we ask a short list of questions, and the answers usually tell us more than the original request did.
What does this team actually do all day?
Not their job title. Their actual daily tasks — the documents they touch, the systems they log into, the decisions they make repeatedly. If a prospective client cannot describe this in specific terms, we cannot build the specific scenarios that make a workshop stick. This is usually the question that turns a vague "can you do an AI training" request into a real, scoped brief.
What is the one thing you want different by the next morning?
If leadership cannot name a single concrete change they are hoping to see — one task done faster, one manual process replaced, one habit formed — we push the conversation, not necessarily the date. A workshop without a target outcome becomes entertainment. We would rather have this conversation up front than deliver a well-reviewed day that changes nothing.
Who in the room has the authority to change the process afterward?
A workshop teaches a team new capability. It does not, by itself, change a process that a manager two levels up still requires to be done the old way. If the people who can actually authorize a new workflow are not in the room or aligned beforehand, the team leaves capable and immediately hits a wall. We ask this specifically because it is the difference between adoption and a fun day that changes nothing.
What data or documents can we actually use?
Generic examples produce generic engagement. Real examples — an actual contract, an actual audit file, an actual customer message — produce the moment where someone in the room realizes exactly how this applies to the thing sitting in their inbox right now. This was the entire difference in the Juhayna engagement: walking an internal audit team through summarizing a vendor contract they actually deal with, not a hypothetical one. Getting access to real (appropriately anonymized where needed) material is a precondition, not a nice-to-have.
What happens in the weeks after?
The workshop itself is the spark. Whether it turns into a habit depends on what exists afterward — recorded sessions people can revisit, a short reference document with the specific prompts covered, and ideally a follow-up check-in a few weeks later to see what stuck and what did not. Clients who skip this step tend to see engagement in the room and then a slow fade exactly like the pattern that got them to call us in the first place.
If the answers are thin, we say so
Sometimes the honest answer to a scoping call is "let's have a shorter working session first to figure out what this team actually needs," rather than booking a full day immediately. We would rather tell a prospective client that than take the booking and deliver something built on guesses.
If you are considering a workshop for your team, this is the exact conversation a discovery call covers. See our workshops or book a 30-minute call and we will ask you these same questions before anything gets scheduled.