Breakfast meeting on AI: What do we take with us?

We started the day with croissants, coffee, lemon-flavoured Pepsi Max and an ambition to talk about AI without drowning in buzzwords, predictions about the future or PowerPoint slides with rockets on them.

Thankfully, it went rather well.

Together with our good roomies from DAY21, we hosted a breakfast meeting on a topic that takes up more and more space in most organisations: How do we turn AI into concrete value for people, business and digital solutions? Not in five years, but now.

Act one: From digital archives to useful knowledge

The starting point of the day was a concrete case.

Many companies have huge amounts of knowledge tucked away in document libraries, intranets, PDFs, guides and course materials. Material that is valuable, but often hard to find, navigate and turn into action.

So we showed how, for a client, we have turned a large library of course materials and guides into a learning platform where AI helps users to:

• find relevant knowledge faster
• navigate complex bodies of information
• get personal recommendations
• turn theory into concrete learning paths

We also talked about the part of the AI discussion that we ourselves think matters most: the people. The question is rarely what AI can do for the company, but what AI can do for the users.

We talked about how AI affects customer experiences, member experiences and digital self-service solutions. And how the technology only becomes valuable when it feels natural, helpful and relevant.

The participants shared many good reflections on trust, transparency and the balance between automation and human contact.

And thankfully, people asked exactly the critical questions that make mornings like this interesting.

Act two: From vision to reality

Afterwards, we went down into the engine room.

Because even the best AI ideas tend to struggle a bit when they meet reality.

Here we talked about, among other things:

• integration with existing system landscapes
• data security and governance
• choice of platforms and technologies
• operations, maintenance and scaling
• how to avoid expensive experiments without real business value

There was great interest in the concrete experience from projects where AI has already become part of daily operations rather than just an exciting prototype.

The most important part was perhaps the dialogue

The best thing about mornings like this is rarely the presentations alone, but the conversations, the good questions, the honest experiences and the meeting between people who are all trying to navigate a technological landscape that moves faster than most of us can update our LinkedIn profiles.

We left with new perspectives, more good questions than answers (which is often a healthy sign) and a strong sense that many organisations are ready to take the next step with AI, as long as it happens with both care and a firm grip on reality.

Thank you for a lovely morning

A big thank you to all participants for your engagement, curiosity, critical questions and willingness to share your own experiences along the way. Exactly the kind of dialogue that leaves us a little wiser than when we arrived.

And a small thank you to the croissants, the coffee and the surprisingly strong effort from lemon-flavoured Pepsi Max, which did its part to keep the energy up all morning.

We are already looking forward to the next breakfast meeting. AI is hardly going to become less interesting, but hopefully it will become more concrete.