Ten seats
Never more than twelve. That is the whole room.
05/fluency · AI-Era FluencyVol. I · Issue 01 · Q3 2026
05 · Fluency
Unlearn. Relearn. Reinvent.
Ten people in a room, and the decisions you actually have to make. Not a lecture, not a certificate, and nothing you could have read.
WHY THIS EXISTS
You are being asked to decide things nobody trained you for.
Most AI training teaches tools. Six months later the tool has changed and the training is worthless. The decisions do not change that fast — what to commit to, what to hold, what stays human, what you answer for when a machine got it wrong. Almost nobody teaches that, because almost everyone teaching is also selling something.
THE ROOM
Ten people. No slides.
Ten is deliberate. Above that people stop saying the true thing. Below it there is not enough disagreement to be useful.
In person
A proper room, in a city we announce. Not a hotel suite.
Online
Where distance makes the room impossible. Not as the default.
Chatham House
No vendors. Nothing sold from the front.
We travel. Fees reflect it.
WHO IS IN IT
Four people who keep turning up.
The one about to sit in the C-suite
First time in the seat, and the first thing on the agenda is a decision about AI nobody prepared you for.
The one redesigning their own function
You have been handed a transformation and a budget, and told to work out the rest.
The leader who wants to actually understand it
Not the demo, not the hype. What it does, what it cannot, and where the judgement still has to be yours.
The director who wants better questions
You are accountable for it. You would like to interrogate what you are told, in your own industry's language.
OPEN ROOMS
Five rooms. Ten seats each.
Sold per seat — you do not need an organisation behind you to sit in one. Rooms open city by city. Tell us which one you want and we will tell you when it runs.
C01 · ONE DAY · START HERE
OPENING FIRST
AI Fluency
You are making decisions about something nobody has explained to you properly.
What the models actually are and how they differ. What an agent is, and how it is not a chatbot. Where the tools sit, what they cost, what they are genuinely good at and what they reliably get wrong. The shape of the whole landscape — so when the next thing arrives you can place it instead of starting again.
The afternoon turns to what is being sold to you. Every demo works. Every business case is optimistic. What separates a real capability from a good deck, and the questions to put to the next vendor who walks in.
You leave with — the ability to look at any AI tool and say what it is, what it would replace, and what could go wrong with it. Plus a written framework for interrogating the next proposal you are shown. Every other room assumes this one.
C02 · ONE DAY
Leader-Led AI
You have delegated AI to people who cannot make the decisions it requires.
You leave with — a scored read on your own organisation, the four decisions you cannot delegate written down, and a ninety-day plan you signed.
Register interest →
C03 · ONE DAY
AI Governance
You are accountable for decisions you cannot yet see or evidence.
You leave with — an accountability map for your own organisation, the questions to put to the people building it, and what a regulator will actually ask for. Calibrated to your industry.
Register interest →
C04 · TWO DAYS
Mindset by Design
What has to change in how you think, decide and design?
You leave with — your assumptions surfaced and tested, a redesign of one real decision loop from your business, and a peer holding you to it.
Register interest →
C05 · TWO DAYS
Operating Model for the AI Era
Can your 2015 operating model carry a 2030 strategy?
You leave with — a map of your operating model against the ambition it carries, the three bottlenecks costing you most, and what to change first.
Register interest →Not sure which room? Tell us the decision in front of you and we will tell you which one fits — or that none of them do. Talk to us →
Per seat. Ten to a room. We travel — fees reflect it.
Request a seat →
CLOSED ROOMS
Or bring your own ten.
Every room above runs closed, for one organisation. Same format, same ten people — except they all work for you, and the material is your decisions instead of worked examples.
This is where most of the work happens. An executive team gets further in a day together than five of them get separately over a year.
Boards
Governance, accountability and the questions to put to management. Calibrated to your industry and your regulator.
Executive teams
One room, one decision loop, everybody who has to live with the answer already in it.
Function leadership
The people running the work, with the workflows they actually run rather than a case study.
OUTLOOKS · A SERIES
Where this goes next.
One theme at a time, with someone who has spent a career inside it. Not a trend report — a view on where this thing is in five years, in ten, and in 2050, and what someone living it should be doing about that now.
Each runs the same way, and each step decides whether the next one is worth taking.
The conversation
Podcast, with the specialist
The Outlook
Written. Five, ten, 2050.
The table
Ten people living it
A room
Only if the table asks
IN THE SERIES
An industry
Insurance first. Then wherever the specialist is better than us.
Founders
Building something now, with tools that did not exist when the playbook was written.
Second acts
People who left the seat and built something of their own. What actually happened.
Who gets to decide
Who holds authority in the AI era, who does not yet, and what changes that.
The series opens shortly. Register interest in a theme →
START FOR NOTHING
Before you buy a seat, read the room.
The roundtable
Ninety minutes, the same ten people, no charge and nothing sold. The diagnostic goes out beforehand and the result is yours either way.
The podcast
Conversations with the people who actually answer for this, not the people selling it.
Coming.
Field Notes
What we learn inside the work, written down. Free, and nobody has to give us an email address to read it.
What it is not.
Not a certificate.
A certificate is something you are given. Proof here is the difference between your score walking in and your score a year later.
Not e-learning.
Nothing is recorded and nothing is watched alone. The value is the other nine people.
Not delegable.
Sending someone in your place defeats the point. The shift has to land in the person making the decision.
Ten seats. Then the room is full.
Tell us which city, or bring your own ten.
UNLEARN · RELEARN · REINVENT
Continue reading → What we learn inside the work, published. · Next · 06 · Atlas