⏩ “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” – African proverb
Hello Reader,
An AI Working Group ships projects.
Tools are changing faster than humans can keep up. Most teams and organisations are throwing Copilot or Claude licenses to their crew, with a quick ‘good luck!’ and maybe an inscrutable warning about token counts.
Making mistakes can be costly, when you rely on a paycheck. There isn’t a structure for risk-taking or innovation with AI in corporate teams, just a lot of dire warnings and vague platitudes.
Creating space for this journey enables an organisation to move forward intentionally. The best way to formalise the setting of that space is to establish an AI Working Group.
What is an AI Working Group?
An AI Working Group is a regular meeting between members of your team who have volunteered to ship AI projects together.
A regular (weekly, fortnightly, monthly) cadence creates a shared understanding of the capabilities & limits of AI within the team. It invites a forum for the unspoken questions, and provides the certainty needed to move forward the next step.
Keeping good notes in an AI Working Group will also create ongoing documentation of the AI Rollout, providing board-level oversight on progress. Combined with the tangible outputs in published Case Studies, an AI Working Group can make AI progress visible, both internally and externally.
With 6 roles on the crew, a weekly AI Working Group knows what questions to ask, where the work is being bottlenecked, and which direction to go next. I’ve defined these 6 roles in a 14-page PDF whitepaper.
- The Captain – Sets and changes direction. Owns decisions, agenda, and priorities.
- First Mate – Keeps projects moving to completion. Assigns project owners, monitors milestones, watches drift.
- The Engineer – Maintains tech and tokens. Knows the models, moderates access, usage, budgets.
- The Ledger – Maintains paperwork and audit trail. Policy, compliance, and AI Register.
- The Skull – Builds the Company Brain. Captures and manages institutional knowledge.
- The Publisher – Communicates wins, inside and out. Sends the meeting minutes, shares updates, makes case studies.
If you want to read more details about each role, click here.
If you want my help in setting up an AI Working Group for your team in 6 weeks, click here.
