Who should attend an AI workshop?

Why breadth of attendance matters for governance workshops

For governance-focused AI workshops, breadth of attendance is not just an administrative preference — it is a governance requirement. Board members who are absent from an AI briefing have not fulfilled their oversight responsibilities. Non-executive directors who think AI is primarily a technology concern, not a board concern, are mistaken: their legal exposure under the EU AI Act is not reduced by ignorance of the topic. CFOs who think AI governance is an IT function, not a financial risk function, are creating blind spots in the organisation’s risk management. The most effective governance workshops achieve consensus across the leadership team — a shared understanding of AI risk and opportunity, and a shared commitment to governance — which is only possible if the full team is present. Partial attendance produces partial commitment.

Preparing participants for an AI workshop

Workshop preparation improves outcomes significantly. For productivity workshops, pre-workshop diagnostics — structured questionnaires about participants’ roles, responsibilities, current pain points, and existing AI use — allow the facilitated session to move directly to analysis and planning, rather than spending time gathering information that could have been collected beforehand. For board workshops, pre-reading about the EU AI Act, the organisation’s current AI use, and the governance questions the session will address allows directors to engage more deeply with the content. Acuity AI Advisory builds pre-work into all workshop formats: participants arrive with a foundation that makes the session more productive and the outputs more specific. Workshops where participants arrive cold — with no pre-work and no prior context — produce shallower outputs and require more time to generate the same quality of outcome.