A single "AI demo day" excites people for a week, then habits revert. Scattered wiki pages do not change behavior. A six-session AI lunch and learn plan spreads policy literacy, department workflows, and troubleshooting practice across a month so skills stick without pulling everyone into a full-day bootcamp.
This syllabus fits organizations rolling out approved tools from categories like AI productivity and AI marketing suites. Adapt session owners and exercises to your data tiers and vendor list.
Session 1: Policy and Data Tiers
Session one sets guardrails before hands-on practice. Attendance should be mandatory for anyone who will use AI tools on work data. Duration: 45 minutes presentation, 15 minutes Q&A over lunch.
- Approved tool list and how to request exceptions
- Data classification tiers: public, internal, confidential, regulated
- What must never be pasted (customer PII, credentials, unreleased financials)
- Human review expectations before external send or publish
- How to report quality or policy issues (link to feedback form)
End with a five-question quiz or attestation in your LMS. No quiz pass, no production tool access. Pair policy content with examples from productivity tools teams already use so rules feel concrete.
Sessions 2–5: Department Workflows
Sessions two through five go deep by function. Run one per week. Each session follows the same rhythm: 10-minute context, 25-minute live workflow demo, 15-minute guided exercise, 10-minute share-back.
Session 2: Marketing and content
Drafting briefs, repurposing webinars, brand voice checklists, and compliance review before publish. Demo an approved AI marketing writing workflow with templates. Exercise: attendees refine a blog intro using only tier-2 internal data.
Session 3: Sales and customer success
Call summaries, CRM note hygiene, proposal first drafts, and what requires manager review. Emphasize no customer PII in consumer chat tools. Exercise: summarize a synthetic call transcript and label fields that need redaction.
Session 4: Operations and finance
Spreadsheet formulas, process documentation, and variance commentary with verification steps. Show how to cite source cells and flag when the model invents numbers. Exercise: document a fictional month-end close step with AI, then peer-review for accuracy.
Session 5: Engineering and product
Code explanation, test generation, ticket triage, and secure use of coding assistants. Cover secrets scanning and sandbox boundaries. Exercise: write a unit test for a small function using only the approved internal assistant.
Invite a champion from each department to co-present. Champions answer "how we actually do it here" better than central IT slides.
Session 6: Troubleshooting and Open Q&A
The final session consolidates lessons and surfaces blockers. Agenda: top five failure modes (hallucination, context limits, login issues, wrong template, policy uncertainty), live troubleshooting demos, office hours signup, and roadmap preview.
Collect unanswered questions in a shared doc during sessions two through five. Session six prioritizes those topics. Announce how employees access ongoing support: Slack channel, office hours, or help desk queue tagged for AI tools.
Materials: Recordings, Exercises, and Office Hours
Every session produces reusable assets. Record screen and audio (with participant consent notices). Store recordings in the LMS with searchable chapters per workflow.
- Slide deck: Version-controlled, max 20 slides, plain language.
- Exercise worksheets: Synthetic data only; downloadable PDF and editable doc.
- Cheat sheets: One-page prompts and checklists per department.
- Office hours: Biweekly 30-minute blocks for four weeks after session six.
- Attendance log: Name, department, session, quiz score for audit trail.
| Session | Audience | Deliverable |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Policy | All staff | LMS attestation |
| 2–5 Workflows | By function | Department cheat sheet |
| 6 Troubleshooting | All staff optional | FAQ doc + office hours |
Attendance Tracking and Completion Criteria
Session one completion: live or recorded attendance plus quiz pass. Sessions two through five: attendance plus submitted exercise worksheet. Session six: optional attendance; completion badge for full series requires sessions one through five.
LMS integration automates reminders for employees who miss their department session. Managers receive weekly roster of direct reports incomplete after two weeks. Completion criteria should align with tool access policy: no production access without session one attestation minimum.
Track completion by department to spot teams that need extra champions. Low completion in one region may mean timezone issues, not disinterest. Adjust scheduling before blaming adoption culture.
Measuring Attendance and Engagement
Track sign-ups, live attendance, recording views within seven days, exercise completion, and post-session survey scores. Departments below 50% attendance get a manager nudge before session three. Engagement matters more than headcount: a focused group of twenty champions beats two hundred passive viewers checking email.
Gamify lightly: certificate of completion for all six sessions, leaderboard for exercise submissions (opt-in), shout-outs in company newsletter. Tie completion to optional tool access tiers if policy allows. Never shame non-attendees publicly; offer makeup recordings with the same quiz requirements.
Customizing for Company Culture
Remote-first companies should default to interactive Zoom with breakout rooms for exercises. Office-heavy cultures can run in-person demos with live polling. Highly regulated industries extend session one to 90 minutes and add legal office hours. Startups may compress to four sessions by merging operations and finance workflows.
Align examples with tools employees will actually use. If you standardized on an AI writing assistant, every department session should demo that SKU, not a competitor from a personal account. Consistency reduces shadow tool temptation.
Executive opening for session one
A three-minute video from the executive sponsor sets tone: AI is encouraged within guardrails, leaders use approved tools themselves, and feedback is welcome. Sponsors who never appear undermine policy credibility. Record once per year unless strategy shifts materially.
Sustaining skills after session six
Graduates join an internal community of practice with monthly show-and-tell. Rotate presenters from marketing, sales, and engineering. Archive exercises in the same folder as productivity playbooks so new hires inherit the curriculum without rerunning the full series live.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do we include remote employees?
Run hybrid sessions with live captions, record every session, and schedule one APAC-friendly repeat of session one and session six. Ship lunch stipends for remote attendees during their local slot.
Should contractors attend?
Yes if they access approved AI tools on your data. Contractors complete session one attestation and only sessions relevant to their role. Their managers verify NDA and tool access alignment.
Is attendance mandatory?
Session one yes, for access gating. Department sessions mandatory for roles using those workflows strongly recommended; offer makeup recordings within one week.
How often should we rerun the series?
Full series annually, policy update micro-session quarterly when tools or rules change. New hires get sessions one plus their department module in onboarding week.
How do we measure success?
Track attendance, quiz pass rate, tool adoption metrics 30 days post-series, support ticket volume, and policy violation rate. Survey confidence before session one and after session six.
A Repeatable Skill-Building Ritual
A planned lunch-and-learn series turns AI rollout from a hype event into a curriculum: policy first, workflows by team, troubleshooting last, with recordings and office hours for reinforcement. Anchor examples in productivity and marketing AI tools your organization already approved so every session connects to real work, not abstract demos.
Series planning is change management on a human schedule. One hour per week for six weeks fits most organizations better than a single mandatory offsite. Champions co-present so central IT is not the only voice. Recordings respect shift workers and global teams. Completion tracking aligns training with access policy so skills and permissions move together.
After the series, feed exercise artifacts and FAQs into the knowledge base and feedback system. Training without durable artifacts decays within weeks. The lunch-and-learn plan is the campaign; the KB and office hours are the sustaining program.
Session six troubleshooting should demo real tickets from the feedback system with redaction. Employees trust training that references actual failures, not only polished success paths. Office hours signup at session six converts momentum into sustained support instead of a cliff after lunch.
Remote employees need stipends, recordings with chapters, and optional duplicate live sessions for unfriendly time zones. Contractors attend policy session and role-relevant workshops when contracts permit AI tool use on company systems. Attendance tracking should feed managers weekly until completion targets hit eighty percent program-wide.
Six sessions beat one demo day because policy, department workflows, and troubleshooting each need room. Materials persist: recordings, cheat sheets, exercises, office hours for four weeks after session six. Measure success with attendance, quiz pass rate, adoption at thirty days, and support ticket themes. Repeat annually with quarterly policy micro-sessions when rules change.
Session one on policy and data tiers gates tool access. Sessions two through five teach department workflows with live exercises on sanitized data. Session six consolidates troubleshooting and office hours signup. Champions co-present; central IT alone cannot carry credibility for every function.
Pilot session two with one friendly department before rolling the full series company-wide. Adjust exercise length and quiz difficulty based on pilot feedback. A six-session plan is a template; your organization may need eight sessions if policy complexity is high or only four if tool scope is narrow. Flex session count, keep the sequence: policy, workflows, troubleshooting, sustained office hours.
Lunch-and-learn series convert AI hype into habits when attendance, exercises, and office hours are tracked and tied to tool access policy.
Remote stipends, recorded chapters, and duplicate live slots respect global teams. Contractors complete policy attestation when contracts permit tool use. Session six demos real redacted tickets from the feedback system so troubleshooting feels grounded. Six structured sessions beat one demo day for durable AI skill building across the entire organization.
Tie session one quiz completion to production tool access so policy training precedes hands-on use.
