What Nobody Expects to Learn at an AI Workshop

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This is the third and final piece in our series on what 346+ business leaders actually took away from our AI in the Workplace training days.

Week 1 was about how to talk to AI: the RICCE prompting framework that turns a vague request into something that produces real work.

Week 2 was about where you fit in the loop: the 10-80-10 Rule, and why the most important 20% of any AI output still belongs entirely to you.

And the third most common takeaway? It had nothing to do with tools, prompts, or demos.

It was about process.

And once you see it, you can't unsee it.

AI doesn't fix the constraints in your business. It amplifies them.

Good systems get faster. Broken systems get efficiently broken. So before you automate anything, you need to see the system underneath the symptom.

85–96% of your problems, challenges, and opportunities are process issues — not people issues. Most leaders never see that. They're too busy managing the symptoms.

Nearly 1 in 4 leaders named this as their biggest takeaway.

When we read through 346+ feedback forms after our AI in the Workplace training days across Atlantic Canada, 83 participants specifically called out process, workflow, or bottlenecks. The moment they saw their own business differently.

"Need to change the process of addressing daily work tasks and flows... first — how do we do this as a team with AI? Spend more time identifying blocks in workflow." — Cathy Munro, Bramble Hill

"Find the blocker. Research which tool would be best to solve it. Jump in and start working with it." — Eric Michaud, Express Imaging

Aim at the constraint. Not at everything.

Every business has a handful of core processes. Somewhere in those processes, there's one place where things reliably slow down. Where quality drops, time disappears, and good people do work that doesn't match their value.

That's your target. That one constraint. Not every process.

We call this fractional integration. AI saves you minutes per task, hours per deliverable, which sounds modest until those fractions are stacked on the right place. Aimed at your constraint, they compound. Aimed at everything, they scatter.

"Find one key process to focus on. Fractional integration. Establish a set of actions." — Beth Fairbairn, AI Day participant

Here's what this looks like in practice.

Trunk 7 Contracting came into one of our sessions with a familiar problem: proposals were eating their team alive. Slow turnaround, inconsistent quality, deals slipping. It felt like a people problem. It was a process problem.

They stopped trying to fix everything and aimed AI at the one constraint, the proposal workflow. The actual steps it took to get a proposal from ideation to completion to sent. 

The result: 600 hours saved per year and higher conversion on the proposals that went out.

That's fractional integration working exactly as it should. One constraint. One focused intervention. Compounding results.

Three pieces. One system.

Once you know where to aim, the rest snaps into place.

Process is the targeting layer — find the bottleneck that's eating time and holding your team back. That's what this email is about.

10-80-10 is the execution layer — you set the direction, AI does the heavy lifting, you close the loop with judgment and context only you have.

RICCE is the communication layer — the prompting framework (Role, Input, Context, Constraints, Evaluation) that turns a mediocre AI interaction into something that produces usable work.

Knowing all three still isn't the hard part.

The hard part is the week after a workshop.

You leave fired up. You go back to your business. The urgency fades, the to-do list takes over, and six months later you're in the same place, except now you feel vaguely guilty about it.

That gap between knowing and actually changing how your business runs is exactly what we built the AI Leadership Advantage to close.

AI Leadership Advantage 

A 4-week implementation sprint. Four live sessions, 8 hours total. Built for business leaders running $500K–$5M businesses who don't have time to figure this out alone.

We charge $10,000 to deliver the full AI in the Workplace day. This is $997.

Most executives spend 10–15 hours a week on work AI can compress by 50–70%. At $100/hour in recovered time, that's $500–$1,000 back every single week. The program pays for itself before you finish it.

April Cohort Starts April 16

​[Reserve your spot here]​

"Worth its weight in gold. The first applications are going to take tasks away from overworked staff and create better balance." — Ryan Hudecki, AI Day participant

"If you think you're great at using AI in your business, you don't know what you don't know — and Matt will point out areas you hadn't ever thought of." — Brad DiPaolo, AI Day participant