Case Study: Meet GenAI Leader Accelerator participant Mike Culverwell
In May, the Digital Greenhouse and Avado Learning held the UK’s first leadership accelerator on AI.
Joined by 20 local industry leaders - the first of which to benefit from this innovative programme - the workshop was successful in bringing together local leadership with content aiming to empower them with the skills to start implementing AI tools in their organisations safely and successfully.
Read more about the GenAI Leader Accelerator here
One such leader that joined us on the accelerator was local Business Director, Mike Culverwell who strived to bring new practices back to his businesses. In this interview, we set out to find out more about his learning journey.
What made you join the accelerator?
I have worked with numerous businesses over the years to set up new services or internal operations. The adoption of new technology to inspire and enable these changes has often been a central theme.
I primarily work for two companies in a leadership capacity, Black Vanilla who is an award-winning public relations consultancy and POS who provide specialist office design, consultancy and fit-out services.
In both businesses, we have already been trialling various AI tools to support content and image generation. The Generative AI Leader Accelerator presented a fantastic opportunity to broaden my knowledge and to consider how else we could be adopting these tools.
What was your experience on the accelerator?
The accelerator provided an excellent and engaging overview of the rapid development of AI tools, covering content generation, strategy planning, automation and design.
We experimented with the practical use of these tools and discussed the wider implications for society and business as a whole.
What were your main takeaways?
The abundance of AI tools provides an exciting opportunity to enhance our capabilities immensely. Whenever performing a task or seeking creative inspiration, deeper understanding or clarity of thought, then there is likely to be an AI tool to support it.
However, it is also important to understand potential limitations, the need to scrutinise the output for any data or societal bias and other considerations such as copyright and authorship. Considerations around how AI development and use is regulated and deployed ethically could prove pivotal to the opportunities, and risks, that AI will bring to businesses and society in the next few years.
How will you apply this learning to your industry?
We have learnt about some new tools that have inspired our thinking about the best use cases to trial. We have also set up an internal forum to continue to discuss and explore new ideas and technology.
At Black Vanilla, the team has been experimenting with different tools for a while and it’s a hot topic for discussion amongst their clients in almost all sectors. Being able to feedback on more ideas and learnings from the course has helped to broaden our thinking about more applications of the technology.
Any advice you could give to other leaders wanting to know more about AI?
These are exciting times. However, it is important to be clear about what you or your business is seeking to achieve and what this might mean for the way you structure your operations and the services you offer with AI in mind. Hence, I would encourage people to take the time to understand these tools, how they work, how best to use them and the opportunities and risks that may lie ahead.
Due to the popularity of both the GenAI Leader Accelerator and the upcoming 6-week Applied Generative AI Business Bootcamp, The Digital Greenhouse has elected to run a second round of cohorts.
