How to run an AI workshop for a marketing team

Most AI training for marketing teams has the same problem. Everyone watches a demo, gets excited, and changes nothing the following Monday. The gap is between watching and doing.

We run hands-on AI workshops for marketing teams, and the format below is the one we keep coming back to. It works for a team that mixes creative, social, advertising, sponsorship, martech and strategy people, which is most marketing teams.

Start with the landscape, and keep it short

Open with a grounded snapshot of what AI can do right now for image, video and building simple apps, and where it still falls short. Keep it short. The goal is a shared picture of what is possible, not a tour of every product. Naming the weaknesses early also lowers the pressure: people stop expecting magic and start looking for what is useful.

Build in front of the room

Next comes a live demo, but not a polished one. Build a few short assets in front of the team and narrate every decision, retry and fix. Seeing a prompt fail and then seeing it repaired teaches more than a flawless result. It also shows that the skill is judgement and communication, not secret syntax.

Let the team make their own

This is the part that matters. Split people into small teams and give them a brand brief. They recreate and remix the work from the demo, with facilitators beside them. Mixed skill levels are normal, so pair confident users with nervous ones and let facilitators move between tables.

By the end of the session every participant should have made something real. One of our workshop clients, Elisa, described it this way: in six hours, every participant went from watching demos to creating real assets: images, storyboards, video and prototype apps.

Close with where it fits

Finish with a practical conversation about where these methods fit your team, your tools and your approval process. This is where a workshop turns into change. Decide what to try next week, who owns it, and what has to be checked before anything goes public.

Choose the focus before the day

Workshops do not have to be about content creation. The three focuses we offer are:

• Agents: getting up to speed with Claude, agents and orchestrators, and connecting them to the tools the team already uses.
• Content: making images, storyboards, video and prototype apps with AI in a single session.
• Skills and tools: creating reusable skills and simple tools, and sharing them so the whole team works from the same playbook.

Practical details

A session can run from half a day to a full day. Prepare the accounts, licences and materials before people arrive, because nothing kills momentum like a login problem. Bring extra facilitators, since hands-on sessions only work if someone can reach each table quickly.

If you would like a session for your team, see our hands-on AI workshops or get in touch.