The calendar invite usually promises a tour. A vendor, or someone from learning, will open a chat window, run three prompts, and end on a slide about what not to paste. People clap, or they do not. On Monday the inbox looks the same, and the only new artefact is a completion row.
That is a poor return on a day of salaries. Deloitte UK's GenAI Workforce Survey, fielded by Ipsos with 25,000 workers between 7 May and 10 June 2026, found that around half of the employees who use generative AI at work say they have had no formal training on how to use it safely and effectively. The same release says the top uses are searching for information (43 percent), drafting emails (43 percent) and creating summaries (31 percent). Access is not the scarce thing. A change in a real task is.
What the day is for
A one-day session cannot install a strategy, a policy and a new operating model. It can do one job well. Pick a workflow the people in the room already own. Something they will touch again next week. The weekly customer note. The first pass on a policy exception. The research brief before a pitch. Name it in their words, including how long it takes now and what a wrong output costs.
Then make them run it, in the room, on a stand-in for the real material if the live file is sensitive. Each person leaves with an output they could defend, and with the step a human still checks. A prompt cheat sheet is a handout. It is not the result.
What to refuse
Refuse the all-hands demo dressed up as a workshop. A mixed room learns a party trick and forgets it. Refuse a catalogue of fifty tools. The team needs the two that fit the workflow, and a sentence on what must not go into them. Refuse a confidence survey as the only measure. People can feel keen and still paste the first draft into the client email.
If you want the day built around the team's own work, that is what the AI training workshop is for. Vendor neutral, on their tasks, with a short list of uses for the roles in the room rather than a tour of a product.
A test you can apply on Friday
Use four questions before you book, and again before you pay.
- Which workflow will be different within ten working days, and who owns it?
- What will a manager reject, and where will that rejection be visible?
- What data is in bounds for the exercise, and who has already said so?
- What stops if the ten days do not change the work?
If the answers are that people will feel more confident, and that you will review it next quarter, you are buying a tour. Confidence is worth noticing. It is not a workflow.
Source: Deloitte UK, "British workers spend nearly £1bn of their own money on GenAI for work", 16 September 2026. https://www.deloitte.com/uk/en/about/press-room/british-workers-spend-one-billion-pounds-of-their-own-money-on-gen-ai-for-work.html