I am writing this at the end of a week I will remember for a while. Not because anything dramatic happened, but because the numbers quietly told a story I have been watching build for months. Across a run of AI enablement sessions, I spoke to more than 3,000 people this week. One session alone had 1,700 attendees, which is a record for me for the size of the audience.
I am not sharing those figures to impress anyone. I am sharing them because of what they signal. When a single session pulls 1,700 working professionals away from their inboxes for an hour at a very large multi-billion-dollar company, the question of whether organisations are interested in AI has been answered. The interest is there. What people lack is a practical route from interest to capability.
What the week actually involved
The week was a mix. My flagship Art of the Possible session ran alongside several Microsoft-focused sessions covering M365 Copilot, Excel with Copilot Chat, and the broader topic of AI transformation. Different audiences, different levels of confidence, but a consistent thread running through all of them.
Art of the Possible is deliberately not a feature tour. It is the session I run when people need to see, in their own working context, what becomes possible when AI sits inside the tools they already use. The Microsoft sessions then take that and make it concrete. Copilot in the flow of work. Copilot Chat is doing the analysis that people used to dread in Excel. The shift from “this looks clever” to “I could do my Tuesday with this” tends to happen somewhere in the middle of those sessions, and you can usually feel the room change when it does.
Where organisations actually are
If you only read the headlines, you would assume most organisations are either fully transformed or hopelessly behind. The reality I saw this week is more ordinary and more encouraging.
Most people are not resistant. They are uncertain. They have heard the claims, perhaps had a licence assigned to them, and tried a prompt or two with mixed results. They are not sceptical of AI itself. They are sceptical of the gap between the demo and their actual job. That scepticism is healthy, and I would not want to talk anyone out of it.
The second thing I noticed is that the questions have matured. A year ago, the questions were “what is this” and “is it safe”. This week the questions were sharper. How do I get a reliable output rather than a lucky one. How do I write a prompt that works the same way twice? How do I bring this into a process my team already follows? Those are the questions of people who have moved past curiosity and want competence.
The third observation is the one that matters most for anyone planning a rollout. Access is not adoption. Handing someone a Copilot licence and assuming usage will follow is a bit like handing someone a gym membership and assuming fitness will follow. The licence is the start. The capability is built deliberately, with structure, and usually with someone showing the way.
The framework underneath it
A lot of the difference between a lucky output and a reliable one comes down to how people prompt. Throughout the week I leaned on a simple structure, the BAB approach, which gives people a repeatable way to frame a request rather than hoping the model guesses their intent. It is not the only framework I use, but it is the one that travels best across a mixed-ability room. People remember it, they use it the next morning, and that is the test that matters.
The reason structure works is that it turns AI from a novelty into a habit. Habits scale. Novelty does not. An organisation that gives its people a handful of dependable patterns will see more change in a quarter than one that runs a single inspiring launch event and hopes.
What this means if you are planning a rollout
If you are an L&D leader or a decision-maker weighing up how to take Copilot and AI capability across your workforce, the appetite I described above is on your side. Your people want this. The work is in giving them a path that respects their time and their scepticism, and that builds genuine capability rather than awareness.
That is what my AI Enablement Programme is built to do, and Art of the Possible is usually where it starts. The session creates the appetite. The programme converts it into something that holds up after the room empties.
If any of this matches where your organisation is, I would be glad to talk it through. Not a pitch, just a conversation about what a rollout looks like when it is built around how people actually work. You can find me at gethynellis.com, and the quickest way to get started is to tell me where your organisation is now and where you would like it to be by the end of the year.
Useful Links
Stop Typing Rubbish into AI — There’s a Better Way
Why I Built LastPersonStanding.net (And Why I Couldn’t Ignore the Idea)
From Data to Insight: Why Meaning Must Be Made Explicit
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