AI is not something you can treat as experimental or occasional. It is embedded in everyday practice, shaping how information is created, analysed, prioritised and acted upon. In recent weeks, we have also seen the rapid emergence of agent-led systems – AI tools that persist, interact and reinforce one another at speed. That changes the nature of the work, and it changes the questions we need to ask.

This session is designed to help you make sense of these changes.

Delivered live online, Hands-On AI provides a clear, practical introduction to today’s AI tools and techniques, while also addressing what is changing right now and why that matters for professional practice, leadership and judgement.

You will take a guided look across the current AI spectrum, from large language models and workflow helpers through to emerging agentic tools and systems. We will explore not only what these tools can do, but how they behave in practice when they are persistent, connected and operating at pace.

You will learn how to work effectively with large language models, including how to shape prompts that are reliable and repeatable rather than hit-and-miss. You will move beyond one-off tasks to explore simple automations and structured workflows, and look at how digital assistants can be trained for repeated work without drifting or compounding error over time. We will also examine how AI can support analysis for risks, issues, patterns and early warning, and where human judgement remains essential.

This is a hands-on session. You will see tools in action, test approaches and build a clearer sense of what is genuinely useful versus what is currently noise. Along the way, we will unpack a critical distinction that recent developments have made impossible to ignore: the difference between apparent intelligence and recursive reinforcement and why that difference matters in practice.