Executive Programme · Adapted per Industry

Give your leadership team a working command of AI.

A two-day, hands-on programme for executive committees, managing directors and functional heads, with the application modules written for your industry. Participants leave with a personal prompt library, a prioritised portfolio of AI use cases, governance starting points and a ninety-day action plan.

2 days 12 modules 50%+ hands-on Use-case portfolio included STOA certified
Daniel Sto
Why this programme exists
"Which work to hand over, under which controls, on what evidence. Three decisions, and every one of them sits with the leadership team."
Daniel Sto · Director of Faculty, STOA Institute
Duration
2 days
Format
Live online or on site
Next open date
Private cohorts
Fee
On request
per delegate
For teams
Private cohort from 8 delegates
Schedule a TNA call
Programme overview

Built for the whole leadership team, adapted to your industry.

This two-day programme gives a senior leadership team a working command of artificial intelligence. It is written for executive committees, managing directors and functional heads who carry commercial and operational accountability and who now have to decide where AI belongs in their part of the business. The content is conceptual and practical, no coding is involved at any point, and Modules 6 and 7, the two application modules, are written for your industry before delivery, whether that is logistics, manufacturing, real estate or financial services.

Day one builds the foundation and the tool fluency: what artificial intelligence is and how it works at a conceptual level, the types of AI and where each belongs in a business, hands-on command of ChatGPT, Claude and Microsoft Copilot, structured prompting, document and data work, and the first applied set on the organisation's core operation. Day two carries AI across the remaining business functions, then moves to the leadership agenda: decision-making, agentic AI and the AI Review Board, a facilitated workshop that produces a prioritised portfolio of AI use cases, governance and data privacy, and the change management work of adoption.

Participants work hands-on with AI tools on their own material throughout. The exercises run on the work the room already owns, so the industry expertise stays with the participants while the programme supplies the AI method: which work to hand over, how to ground it in the organisation's own documents and systems, and how to verify a result before it is used. They leave with a personal prompt library, a prioritised set of AI use cases for their own area of responsibility, governance starting points for responsible use, and a ninety-day action plan. Leadership teams that go on to set the enterprise AI strategy, the opportunity matrix and the twelve-month roadmap continue with AI Strategy and Governance. The programme also looks at where the field is heading, with agentic AI, where systems are given a goal and then plan and execute the work under human supervision.

Who should attend

This programme is designed for the senior leadership team of an organisation, a division or a country business, with the application modules written for its industry:

  • Chief Executives, Managing Directors and General Managers
  • Country Managing Directors, Country Leads and Cluster Leads
  • Chief Operating Officers, Operations Directors and Site Heads
  • Chief Financial Officers and Finance Directors
  • Chief Commercial Officers, Sales, Marketing and Business Development Directors
  • Chief Human Resources Officers and HR Directors
  • Heads of Customer Service and Customer Experience Directors
  • Chief Information Officers, Chief Digital Officers and Heads of Transformation
  • Heads of Strategy, Business Excellence and Programme Management Offices

It is delivered to one leadership team at a time, so the exercises run on the organisation's own work and the application modules on its own industry.

Learning outcomes

By the end of this programme, participants will be able to:

  • Explain in plain language what artificial intelligence is and how it works
  • Distinguish generative AI, machine learning, automation and agentic AI, and place each where it belongs
  • Judge the strengths and limitations of AI output and verify a result before acting on it
  • Work competently with ChatGPT, Claude and Microsoft Copilot on business tasks
  • Apply structured prompting and K-shot techniques to leadership work
  • Identify AI applications across the core operation, sales, finance, customer service and human resources
  • Ground AI work in the organisation's own documents, data and systems of record
  • Use AI to strengthen decision-making while keeping human judgement in control
  • Evaluate and prioritise AI use cases by value, feasibility and risk
  • Take a go or no-go decision on an AI proposal put in front of them
  • Set governance, data privacy and responsible-use guardrails for their area
  • Lead AI adoption with their teams and build a ninety-day action plan
Programme outline

Twelve modules. Two days. One prioritised use-case portfolio.

A progressive structure from AI foundations and tool fluency, through AI applications in the core operation and across the business functions, to leadership decision-making, agentic AI and the AI Review Board, the use-case workshop, governance and the ninety-day plan. Modules 6 and 7, the two application modules, are written for your industry before delivery.

Day 1: AI Foundations, Tools and the Core Operation

01
Day 1 · Module

AI in Plain Language

  • What is artificial intelligence?
  • The vocabulary leaders meet (model, prompt, token, training, inference, fine-tuning)
  • Narrow AI and general AI
  • Large language models and what changed
  • How AI works, conceptually:
    • Data, training and inference
    • Tokens, context windows and memory
    • Next-token prediction and probability
    • Chat models and reasoning models
  • Hallucination and non-determinism
  • Verification of AI output
Live walkthrough the calculator test
02
Day 1 · Module

The Types of AI and Where Each Applies

  • Generative AI
  • Machine learning and predictive analytics
  • Automation and robotic process automation (RPA)
  • Agentic AI
  • Computer vision and document AI
  • Speech, transcription and translation
  • Where each type belongs in a business:
    • Operations
    • Sales and commercial
    • Finance
    • Customer service
    • Human resources
  • Deterministic and probabilistic work
Gamified task matching business problems to the right type of AI
03
Day 1 · Module

The Enterprise AI Tool Landscape

  • The mainstream assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Google Gemini)
  • Free, paid and enterprise tiers
  • Where company data goes (public tools, enterprise agreements, data residency)
  • Copilot inside Microsoft 365 (Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams)
  • Files, projects and workspaces
  • Model choice for a given task
Live demonstration and guided practice one business task run across three tools
04
Day 1 · Module

Prompting for Leaders

  • The anatomy of a prompt (role, context, task, format, constraints)
  • The C.L.E.A.R. prompt engineering framework
  • K-shot prompting (zero-shot, one-shot, few-shot, multi-shot)
  • Chain-of-thought and reasoning prompts
  • Structured outputs (briefs, tables, comparisons, decision summaries)
  • Prompt libraries and reusable prompts
Hands-on exercise building a personal prompt library from participants' own work
05
Day 1 · Module

Working With Documents and Data

  • Long-document work (contracts, tenders, policies, reports)
  • Summarisation, extraction and comparison
  • Tables, spreadsheets and data questions
  • Charts and management reporting
  • Drafting slides and briefing packs
  • Source grounding and citation
  • Confidentiality when uploading documents
Individual and pair work interrogating a long business document and producing a management summary
06
Day 1 · Module

AI in the Core Operation

  • The operational document and correspondence workload
  • Quotation, bid and tender work:
    • Drafting and structuring responses
    • Comparing options in a consistent format
    • Reusing approved content and boilerplate
  • Operational documentation:
    • Extracting and summarising data across a document set
    • Cross-checking related documents for consistency
    • Drafting routine operational correspondence
  • Rules-heavy and reference-heavy work:
    • Grounding AI answers in the organisation's own reference material
    • Retrieval and citation for policy and procedure lookups
    • Questions that belong to a system of record rather than a model
    • Human review points on compliance-sensitive work
  • Exception and incident handling:
    • Turning operational events into customer communication
    • Explaining charges, delays and changes in plain language
    • Drafting incident, claims and complaint documentation
  • Status and milestone updates for customers
  • Confidentiality on customer and commercial data
Hands-on exercise drafting and checking an operational document set

Day 2: Business Applications, Leadership Decisions and Governance

07
Day 2 · Module

AI Across the Business Functions

  • Operations and supply chain:
    • Standard operating procedure drafting
    • Shift, staffing and capacity scenarios
    • Scenario and option analysis on operational plans
    • Supplier and subcontractor correspondence
  • Commercial, sales, marketing and customer service:
    • Bid and tender response drafting
    • Campaign, content and proposal drafting
    • Quarterly business review packs
    • Enquiry triage and response drafting
    • Multilingual customer correspondence
  • Finance and procurement:
    • Management reporting and commentary
    • Billing and receivables correspondence
    • Cross-checking documents against agreed terms
    • Identifying discrepancies and missing information
    • Contract review and supplier comparison
    • Human sign-off on financially binding work
  • Human resources and internal functions:
    • Job descriptions and interview preparation
    • Policy drafting and internal communication
  • Figures that must come from a system rather than a model
  • Data quality and its effect on AI output
Individual and pair work AI support on a live document from each participant's own function
08
Day 2 · Module

AI for Leadership Decision-Making

  • AI in the decision cycle (framing, options, evidence, communication)
  • Interrogating management reports, KPIs and long documents
  • Scenario and option analysis
  • Board and management papers
  • Challenge prompts and source checking
  • Automation bias and overreliance
  • Accountability for AI-assisted decisions
Controlled group discussion the decisions that stay with the leader
09
Day 2 · Module

Agentic AI and the AI Review Board

  • What is an AI agent?
  • The agent loop (goal, observe, reason, act, evaluate, repeat)
  • Agents, assistants and robotic process automation
  • Levels of autonomy and human-in-the-loop
  • Agent opportunities across the business
  • Agent failure modes (wrong tool, wrong data, fabricated result, silent failure)
  • The go or no-go memo (grounding, policy compliance, cost, reliability, conditions)
  • Emerging methods:
    • Context engineering
    • Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
    • Model Context Protocol (MCP)
    • Multi-agent systems and orchestration
    • Computer use and browser agents
Case study analysis judging a deployed agent's work and issuing a go or no-go memo
10
Day 2 · Module

Where AI Applies and the AI Use-Case Workshop

  • High-value work types (documentation, correspondence, reporting, investigation, reconciliation, triage, analysis)
  • The function-level opportunity scan (operations, sales, marketing and commercial, finance, customer service, human resources, IT)
  • The use-case template (problem, users, data, AI type, value, risk, owner)
  • Scoring criteria (value, feasibility, data readiness, risk)
  • Prioritisation and sequencing
  • Pilot definition (scope, success criteria, review points)
  • Build, buy or configure
Hands-on exercise building and prioritising a portfolio of AI use cases for participants' own areas
11
Day 2 · Module

AI Governance, Data Privacy and Risk

  • The AI governance toolkit:
    • The acceptable-use policy
    • Approved tools and access control
    • Human oversight and review points
    • Vendor and tool due diligence
  • Data privacy and confidentiality:
    • Customer and commercial data
    • Personal and employee data
    • Data residency and cross-border transfer
  • Risk areas:
    • Confidentiality breach
    • Fabricated output in customer-facing work
    • Bias in people decisions
    • Overreliance and skill erosion
    • Intellectual property and third-party content
  • Standards and frameworks (ISO/IEC 42001, NIST AI Risk Management Framework, the EU AI Act)
  • The AI use register and audit trail
Controlled group discussion the guardrails this leadership team would set
12
Day 2 · Module

Capstone: Leading AI Adoption and the Ninety-Day Plan

  • The leadership team's role (modelling, expectations, managing concerns)
  • The adoption curve across a distributed organisation
  • Communication to staff:
    • Messaging on roles, expectations and permitted use
    • Job security and role redesign
    • Rollout across sites, countries and business units
  • Capability building:
    • Training pathways by role
    • Champions and internal communities
    • Policy, tooling and support
  • Measuring adoption and value
  • Resistance and how it surfaces
  • The ninety-day plan (priority use case, next steps, timeline, owners, review points)
Personal action planning each leader's ninety-day AI plan for their own area of responsibility
Day 2 · Course closing

Course closing

  • Course debrief and key takeaways
  • Final Q&A
  • Official closing ceremony and award of certificates
  • Group photo
Our training methodology

Three frameworks behind every programme.

Whatever programme you choose, it follows three proven instructional frameworks, from design to delivery to evaluation.

Delivery

TEA™ Delivery Framework

  • T Theory, core concepts & frameworks
  • E Examples, live demos & case studies
  • A Application, hands-on exercises & practice

Our signature approach structures every module into three phases for maximum retention and practical application.

Design

ADDIE Instructional Design

  • A Analyse, assess learner needs
  • D Design, structure the learning path
  • D Develop, build materials & activities
  • I Implement, deliver the programme
  • E Evaluate, measure outcomes & refine

The industry-standard model for course design and learning alignment.

Evaluation

Kirkpatrick Model

  • L1 Reaction, participant satisfaction
  • L2 Learning, knowledge & skills gained
  • L3 Behaviour, on-the-job application
  • L4 Results, business impact & ROI

The globally recognised four-level framework for measuring training effectiveness, from initial reaction to long-lasting post-training effects.

Upcoming sessions

Choose your date.

Private cohorts for executive committees and leadership teams, live online or on site, with the application modules written for your industry. Schedule a TNA call and receive a custom proposal within 48 hours.

Date
Format
Duration
Price
Private cohorts run on request.
Live virtual or On-site
1/2 to 5 days
Custom
What every participant gets

You keep everything.

No vendor lock-in, no paywalled materials. Every delegate leaves with the working files, the templates, and the post-programme support to actually use them.

Personal prompt library

8 – 12 tested prompts built during the session on your actual work scenarios.

Templates & dashboards

Dashboards, workflow templates, and evaluation frameworks ready to use.

Learning materials

Full soft copy of all session materials, handouts, and reference guides.

STOA certificate

Certificate of Completion plus a guided pathway to the Google AI certificate.

30-day support

Post-programme Q&A availability and implementation guidance.

Lifetime updates

Access to updated prompt libraries and resources as AI tools evolve.

Delivery options

Choose how your team learns.

In-Person

Instructor-led on-site

Delivered at your offices or venue. Maximum engagement for teams of 8 – 25 participants. All exercises use your team's actual work scenarios.

Live Online

Virtual instructor-led

Real-time delivery via Zoom, Meet, or Teams. Interactive breakout rooms, same content depth as in-person. Ideal for distributed teams.

Hybrid

Blended approach

Combine in-person and virtual sessions. Flexible scheduling across time zones. Pre-work materials and follow-up resources included.

Training catalogue

104 courses in nine families, overview level, methodology up front.

Download the catalogue
Ready to lead

Put your whole leadership team in one room with AI.

Book a private programme for your executive committee or leadership team, adapted to your industry. Custom proposal within 48 hours. Delivery live online or on site.