A useful AI workshop gives a team a task they can practice and a result they can inspect. For a Minnesota business owner planning training, I would start by asking what staff should be able to do differently when they return to work.
The Minnesota Chamber Foundation's productivity report identifies AI education and workforce training as part of preparing businesses for change. My practical interpretation is to connect that learning to one current workflow, with the people responsible for its inputs and review involved in the session.
Here is how I would design that workshop. The plan is a proposed approach you can adapt to your team.
Decide what the session should produce
Choose a concrete outcome: a reusable brief, a reviewed sample output, and an agreed next test. “Understand AI” is an orientation goal; it needs a more specific destination for a hands-on working session.
An agency team could practice turning approved meeting notes into an account brief. A service firm's office staff could prepare draft replies for inquiries missing job details. The chosen task should be familiar enough that participants can recognize omissions and discuss what the customer needs.
Define the audience by their relationship to the work. Include someone who normally prepares the output, someone who reviews it, and an owner who can resolve a process decision. Bring the person responsible for systems or data access when their input is necessary.
Prepare the example before the workshop
Choose material the business has permission to use in the selected tools. Fictional or carefully redacted examples can support early practice. Label fictional facts clearly and remove information participants should not enter into their accounts.
Prepare an ordinary example and one with a meaningful problem: a missing owner, contradictory dates, an unanswered customer question, or an unavailable source. Keep a reference showing what a responsible reviewer should notice in each case.
Confirm tool access, account settings, required devices, and where participants will save their work. Decide how the group will continue if access fails. Those decisions protect the time reserved for learning.
Walk through one result together
Show the source, the instructions, and the draft. Explain how the output supports the next person's decision. Trace an important claim back to the source so participants can see the review method.
Make the action boundaries concrete. Preparing a message, approving it, and sending it are separate steps. For the sample exercise, state which step participants are practicing and who would own the remaining decisions in the business.
Ask the team what the draft gets right and what it leaves unresolved. Their knowledge of the work is part of the lesson. Record the corrections in language that can improve the operating guide.
Let participants do the checking
Have participants run the exercise and review the result against a short checklist. Required facts, missing information, ownership, dates, and commitments should be visible. Encourage them to explain why they accepted a statement rather than judging whether it sounds professional.
Use the difficult example to practice stopping, asking for an input, or leaving a gap visible. A workshop should give staff a way to handle uncertainty when the facilitator is no longer present.
Invite the reviewer to compare results across participants. Differences can reveal unclear instructions, inconsistent inputs, or a genuine decision the owner needs to make. Fix the shared brief when the problem is shared.
Leave with a small operating guide
Capture the task, required inputs, reusable instructions, output format, acceptance checks, and escalation contact. Assign an owner to maintain the guide. Save a permitted example showing an accepted result and its review notes.
Ask participants to explain when they would use the workflow and when they would ask for help. That tells you more about readiness to try it than attendance or enthusiasm alone.
Agree on a contained follow-up test. Record preparation, review, correction, and whether the output supports the next step. Ask what makes staff skip the workflow and which questions recur. Set a review date and decide who can approve changes.
Brief the organizer before booking
The workshop organizer brief below gives you a place to define the audience, outcome, sample task, preparation, and review. Session format and length should follow those needs and the practice involved.
Bring the completed brief to a free 30-minute AI consultation with me. We can discuss what the team needs to learn, the material available, and whether a workshop is a useful next step.