In March 2026 we ran a half-day applied-AI workshop for a cohort of 30 early-stage founders at Cyberport. The brief was specific: help us go from curious to confident in a single afternoon, with a take-home playbook each founder can use the next week.
Here’s the short field report.
What we ran
- 9:30 — Opening. A 20-minute frame on the four-ingredient prompt and the difference between AI-as-search and AI-as-collaborator.
- 10:00 — Validation block. Founders worked on a real validation question they’d brought from their own venture. We covered competitor scans, interview-question generation, and synthesis.
- 11:30 — Branding & copy block. Naming, positioning statements, landing-page hero copy. Each founder produced a v1 they could iterate later.
- 13:00 — Lunch break.
- 14:00 — Launch block. From "I have a prototype" to "I have a launchable artefact" — onboarding emails, social posts, founder-update copy.
- 15:30 — Office hours. Founders queued up to work 1:1 on the specific blocker in their venture.
What worked
- Real material in the room. Every founder worked on their venture, not a case study. Activation cost on day-after follow-through dropped to near zero.
- Constrained outputs. We forced each block to end with a single concrete artefact (a doc, a positioning statement, an email). That created a sense of momentum.
What we’d change
- The validation block was too compressed — 90 minutes was tight for founders who hadn’t done their interviews yet. Next time we’d split it into a pre-work email and a shorter in-room session.
- We underspent on team / co-founder dynamics. Several founders wanted help running AI workflows with their team — that became the #1 follow-up request.
Outcome
- 4 of the 30 founders booked a follow-up 1:1 coaching engagement.
- A second cohort is scheduled for Q3 2026.