Meet people where they are
If you want people to sit through a four-hour training session, you’ve got to make it fun, human, and real. That’s the bit missing from most AI stuff on LinkedIn right now — it’s all giant workflows and “saved £1m by cutting staff.” Honestly? Makes me puke.
You also cant just train people once and then clear off, you have to think onboarding, think new starters, the people that missed the training, languages when your training globally, updating the training as things change, what about after the session - how do you make it stick.
In our basic training started by going back to basics. Explained LLMs, tokens, hallucinations, ethics and legalities, explained agents in plain English. Talked people through the AI Maturity Matrix (I love a matrix) so people could see they were on a journey, not “behind.” I even created an AI video about a woman called Sarah who had just started to play beautiful AI music.
We kept it Northern and human. We trained APAC teams at 2am, half-asleep, but still ourselves — accent, humour, quirks and all. We didn’t need to be corporate. We were empowered to do it our way, and that freedom to be real cut through everywhere.
We built lots extra stuff around it to make people want to come — silly songs, a full 80s disco album. And when we launched in EMEA, we made a song and video inspired by We Didn’t Start the Fire — 34 countries, 34 lines, each in their own language, with their landmarks and our little robot dropped into the video. It took me three days to make a five-minute song, but the feedback was great. When someone emails from Poland to say we love the song can we have a copy, you know its worth it.
The biggest success has been using an agent to handle the post training for people - how do you get over the inital inertia that everyone is naturally faced with when some hands them a mad alien intrument.
Road to Glory is a training program with a difference. You can’t just train people once in an hour and expect it to stick, so we gave them 30 challenges. We built an agent that mentored people through 30 challenges - overcoming the first barrier people have which is "how do I get started".
People rapped Fresh Prince into the mic, scanned their fridge for recipes, drew AI spirit animals. They collected gold coins, cheesy intro videos, and a certificate with their name on it.
But every single thing was a metaphor for a real-world use case. It would’ve been easy to keep it literal, but we went the extra mile to make it fun, weird, and memorable. That’s what made it work.
And the reflections in Road to Glory surprised me the most. People got to build their own fight song, or think about what they really wanted from life. Some people loved the silly bits, some loved the creativity, and for others it was actually quite profound.
We ran hackathons too, which turned into away days. Analysts making songs, marketers doing data science, people laughing their heads off. Those “I didn’t think I could do that” moments were electric.