AI strategy workshop for leadership teams in London

We run AI strategy workshops across London and the South East: facilitated sessions where a leadership team decides where AI fits into its plan, its organisation and how it operates, and what that means for each team.

Spend the day deciding where AI changes your 2027 plan: what you'll do differently, what you'll stop doing, and who owns each decision. We work at venues across central London and the Home Counties, or at the one you've already booked.

For leadership teams, senior leaders, executives and boards who need AI decisions rather than another demo.

Book a 30-minute call
A meeting room glass wall covered in sticky notes, sorted under four headings: Ideas, Themes, Choices, Goals.
Ideas, themes, choices, goals

Meet Matt before you book

The person you'd be talking to, and how we think.

Book a 30-minute call
Meet Matt RobertsHow he thinks about the planning process and running workshops.
Unlocking planning magicWhy your planning day is the most expensive meeting of the year.
What makes planning work?What helps planning succeed before and after the day itself.

Who we work with

Senior leadership teams of companies of every size.

Size

Most are 20 to 200 employees, and larger companies are easily supported.

Group

From a single leadership team to large groups working across multiple breakout rooms.

Stage

  • Start-ups
  • Scale-ups
  • Transformations
  • Turnarounds

What the day covers

  • Where AI changes your market, and what your customers will expect from you in 2027.
  • Where it changes how you operate: the work agents and automation can take on, and what that means for each team.
  • What you'll stop doing, and what you'll fund instead. If the plan has no "we will not", it isn't a strategy yet.
  • Goals, owners and a 30-day follow-up, booked before anyone leaves.

We treat AI adoption as a strategy-execution problem rather than a procurement event. The day ends with decisions your board can see, not a list of tools to trial.

Venues for an AI strategy day in London

An AI strategy day lands better somewhere surrounded by people building with the technology. These London innovation spaces put the leadership team in that company, with a more traditional option if the board prefers.

  • The Ned

    City, by Bank · Hotel and boardroom

    The former Midland Bank headquarters, with private meeting rooms and dining under one roof. Good when the board wants somewhere that feels like an occasion.

    Visit The Ned

  • One Great George Street

    Westminster · Hotel and boardroom

    The Institution of Civil Engineers' Edwardian headquarters off Parliament Square. Formal boardrooms for a board away day that needs to feel serious.

    Visit One Great George Street

  • Plexal

    Here East, Stratford · Innovation and tech

    An innovation centre on the Olympic Park with a 20-seat boardroom, a 250-seat theatre and breakout space. Right for an AI strategy day.

    Visit Plexal

Most of these are within 15 minutes of a mainline terminus: King's Cross St Pancras for Kings Place, Liverpool Street for The Brewery and The Ned, Stratford (Elizabeth line) for Plexal. Cliveden is about 40 minutes by train to Taplow, then a short taxi.

All our London venue, restaurant and evening ideas

Venues researched October 2026. We don't take commission, and listing a venue doesn't mean we've run a session there. Check availability direct.

Before you plan: the planning baseline

Agree where you're starting from.

Planning events get swallowed by circular, opinion-based debate. 10 to 15 confidential discovery calls, up to 90 minutes each, give your team a starting point everyone accepts.

Without it

Days of circular debate

Opinions and the loudest voice shape the diagnosis.

With a planning baseline

A starting point everyone accepts

Themes, testable beliefs and the root causes behind them.

See the planning baseline

We'd recommend no serious planning starts without it.

After the plan

The plan is agreed. Now someone has to find the time.

  1. 10 of 15recent discovery interviews

    Leadership teams know what needs fixing.

    • They can name the broken process and the meeting that goes nowhere.
    • What they can't find is the time to fix it.
    • Some aren't sure they have the skills.
    • In 10 of our last 15 interviews, someone said it almost word for word.
    1. Output under pressure
    2. Work harder
    3. No time to improve
    4. Capability erodes
    5. More fires

    MIT's John Sterman and Nelson Repenning call it the capability trap.

    • Under pressure, the sensible short-term move is to work harder.
    • That leaves no time to improve the way work gets done.
    • Capability erodes, the fires multiply, and firefighting starts to feel like diligence.

    Source: Repenning and Sterman, California Management Review, 2001

  3. Can rely on their boss and own team84%
    Can always rely on other functions9%

    It's hard to see from the inside.

    • Managers see their own patch, but most plans fail at the handoffs between teams.
    • In a study of nearly 8,000 managers, 84% could rely on their boss and their own team. Only 9% could always rely on colleagues in other functions.
    • Naming the problem is political, because it usually points at a peer or a past decision.
    • Most managers were promoted for doing the work, not for designing how it flows.

    Source: Sull, Homkes and Sull, Harvard Business Review, 2015

  4. With you
    Coaching
    Reviews

    So we stay, then step back.

    • At first we run the work alongside your people: mapping the process, testing a fix, measuring it and running the retrospective.
    • Then your managers run the next cycle while we coach from the side.
    • Then we step back to the quarterly review.
    • Your people learn by doing the work with us, which sticks in a way a training day never does.
    • We'd rather you stopped needing us by spring.
    • People
    • Operations
    • Sales and marketing
    • AI enablement

    Fractional, until the role is hired or grown

    Sometimes the gap is a missing person, not a missing skill.

    • The plan needs someone to lead the people side, run operations, drive sales and marketing, or get AI working in the business.
    • Hiring for that takes six months you don't have.
    • One of us joins your team part-time, works from inside with your people and systems, and hands the role over when you've hired or grown someone into it.

  6. Weekly check-in

    Goal 2Your owner + ours
    Progress
    Confidence3 of 5

    We're your accountability partners.

    • People find it harder to let a goal slide when someone outside the business turns up every week expecting to see it moved.
    • A quarterly cadence, with a named owner on your side and one on ours for every goal.
    • Weekly check-ins on progress and confidence, so a slipping goal shows up in week three rather than week twelve.
    • What we learn, including what didn't work, is written down and shared across the team.
    • We're measured on one thing, and it's results.
  7. Planning
    30 days
    Carry on

    Every engagement ends with a 30-day review and an option to carry on.

    • However we run your planning, from a single in-person day to several weeks of interviews, async work, online sessions and workshops.
    • The option is priced before we start, so nobody has to negotiate when energy is low.
    • Most teams know by day 30 whether they want it.
Book a call about your planning

Your framework, or our recommendation

We can follow your preferred methodology, or recommend one that fits.

  • Strategy one-pagers
  • Balanced scorecard
  • Strategy maps
  • OKRs
  • Playing to Win
  • V2MOM
  • No named framework

The framework matters less than you'd think. What makes a strategy great is universal: finding your route to being different, with an advantage you can sustain.

Strategy

Where you'll be different

Your route to being unique, and the advantage that makes it last.

Operational excellence

Running better, every day

Getting better at what you do, and solving the problems holding you back now.

The two need to co-exist. A strategy doesn't stop the pursuit of operational excellence, and operational excellence on its own isn't a strategy.

Why bring in a facilitator

Some things are hard to do from the inside.

  • Biases

    InsideConfirmation, sunk cost, optimism: we back what we already believe and what we've already paid for.

    With usWe name the bias and test the evidence.

  • Agendas

    InsideBudgets, teams, pet projects: everyone argues for something they own, so the plan bends towards the loudest interest.

    With usNothing to protect, so we can challenge anyone.

  • Hierarchy

    InsideAnchoring, deference, groupthink: once the most senior person speaks, the room quietly lines up behind them.

    With usEvery voice heard before the boss speaks.

  • Focus

    InsideRunning the agenda, the clock and the debate: whoever chairs from inside loses their own voice in the argument.

    With usWe run the room. You take part.

  • Experience

    InsideOnce a year, by people who do it once a year: nobody has a feel for when to push, pause or change the plan.

    With usWe do this all the time, and adapt on the day.

  • Too close

    InsideHabit, assumptions, the curse of knowledge: familiar problems stop looking like problems, and nobody asks why.

    With usFresh eyes and better questions.

Questions people ask first

Is this AI training for the leadership team?

It's a strategy workshop. People leave understanding what AI can do in your business, but the point of the day is the decisions: where to use it, what to fund and what to stop.

Who runs it?

Matt Roberts, a two-time SaaS founder with a venture-backed exit, who builds with AI agents and automation and treats AI adoption as a strategy-execution problem rather than a procurement event.

Where we work

We run planning days and away days across the UK, Europe and the US, in person or online. These are the cities we're asked about most.

AI strategy workshops elsewhere: Manchester and Birmingham.

Also in London: strategy days, away days and venues, dinner and evening ideas.

Strategy workshop facilitationA neutral chair for your planning day or offsite.Away day facilitationActivities that end in decisions, at your venue.

Last updated

Tell us what has to be decided.

Thirty minutes with Matt Roberts. Tell us who'll be in the room and what you need by the end, and we'll tell you how we'd run it.

Book a 30-minute call