Past Talk
AI is no longer a passing trend. It is shaping the future of technology and leadership. Whether you are sceptical of the hype or convinced it is essential to your strategy, one thing is clear: avoiding the conversation is not an option.
CTO Craft ran a half-day AI Leadership Lab the day before their main London conference in March, and I was one of several leaders running workshops for a room full of engineering leaders.
Advanced Prompting
I ran my most popular workshop: Advanced Prompting. This is the hands-on, practical session where you stop getting AI to give you the answers and start getting it to give you the questions.
The idea people take away is that your first attempt will almost always disappoint, and that is fine. A bad output is data, not a failure. The skill is teaching the model to interrogate you before it does any work, so it discovers what the task actually is rather than guessing. It is the same discipline I wrote up in Ditch Autocomplete, applied live with leaders and their own laptops. Watching the epiphany land in real time, when someone realises they have been asking for answers instead of questions, is the best part of running it.
The feedback afterwards pointed the same way. What this audience valued was seeing the real tooling in action rather than the concepts, especially the meta-layer of building rules files, getting one model to prompt another, and using AI to get better at using AI itself. That is exactly the material a room full of CTOs cannot pick up from a YouTube tutorial or a vendor webinar, and more than one person wanted even more time on it. As problems go, “give us more of the deep stuff” is a good one to have!
The Wider Programme
The Lab was a chance to roll up sleeves with peers on the topics that keep engineering leaders up at night: cybersecurity in the age of AI, building an AI Guild inside your organisation to drive adoption, partnering with your exec team to set realistic expectations and bridge the gap between AI hype and AI reality, psychological safety in the face of AI and how to lead teams through the uncertainty, and how AI will reshape teams, skills, and the future of engineering.
The best parts were not about tools at all. They were engineering leaders being honest about what actually happens when you try to make AI work inside a real company.