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Phase 2: 3-6 Month Launchpad
Launchpad is a set of practical worksheets, including those used in the BootCamp, designed to help you apply new knowledge right from the start. Create a simple 3–6 month roadmap focused on one cultural shift, one governance upgrade, and one collaboration improvement. No major overhaul is needed; only clear, measurable changes that you can pilot immediately.
Question
It all starts with the right questions.
Assess
and continues with the right approach to find answers.
Shift
Clarity allows shift in mindset and habits
Commit
pushing towards goals one step at a time.
The Companion AI Pilot Program
A movement for those building AI with conscious intent.
With the imagination for a bolder, human-aligned future.
Most teams are still building AI as if it were just software.
But AI isn’t just a product. It’s a force that shapes decisions, identities, and futures. It acts. It evolves.
And if AI is becoming a companion to human life, then how we build it must fundamentally change.
The Companion AI is a novel Approach with flexibility and clarity to evolve your own methodologies for building your unique AI Companions. It is rooted in the Companion AI Manifesto and Lens.
The Companion AI Pilot Program isn’t just a workshop or implementation track.
It’s the opening move in a larger movement:
a shift toward AI development grounded in human agency, deep values, and collaborative intelligence.
This pilot is for those who feel the old models are no longer enough, who sense that governance must move beyond rules, that culture must become conscious, and that collaboration must be reawakened as a living force.
Over the course of the program, we’ll help your team:
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Rebuild your foundations, not with templates, but with clarity of purpose and shared direction
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Realign how you govern, decide, and create so that your AI evolves with integrity
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Reconnect with customers as co-developers, not passive endpoints
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Redesign your AI systems to act more like companions than codebases
The Pilot Consists of Two Phases:
The Workshop
A 3-day immersive journey:
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Day 1: Mindset Reset – uncover the deeper truths shaping your AI
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Day 2: Design Tools – reframe systems, symbols, and governance
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Day 3: Real-World Build – apply Companion AI to a product or feature in motion
The Launchpad (3–6 Months)
An implementation phase, tailored to your team’s live context.
You’ll receive custom templates, worksheets, advisory rituals, and co-design support as you evolve a real AI product, policy, or system and make Companion AI part of your organizational DNA.
This is not training. It’s a transformation seed.
You’ll leave not only with a clearer vision of the AI you want to build but with a team ready to build it together with imagination, precision, and trust.
This is a pilot for those willing to go first.
To challenge assumptions.
To design for humans, not just outputs.
To take part in shaping a movement.
If you’re one of them, we’d like to build with you.
Day 1: Understand the Foundations
Before you can build great AI, you need to see what’s shaping it. Day 1 invites you to pause and look under the hood, to uncover the invisible forces driving your product decisions, team dynamics, and governance defaults. You’ll explore the Culture–Governance–Collaboration Triangle not as a theory, but as the living system behind every feature, misstep, and breakthrough. You’ll learn to tell what’s truly foundational in your organization and what’s just a habit waiting to be rewritten. This is the day you start seeing clearly, so you can start building wisely.
Begin with a powerful conceptual anchor: the Triangle. Culture represents the invisible metaphysical layer - your shared beliefs, values, and behaviors. Governance manifests those beliefs into tangible rules, processes, and systems - the physical layer. Collaboration is the creative force that animates the other two, translating idea(l)s into action. This triangle helps teams make sense of organizational complexity and lays the groundwork for building AI systems that are not just technically sound but ethically and culturally coherent.
Not everything in your organizational setup needs disruption, but some things definitely do. In this session, participants will engage with a reflection and mapping tool to distinguish what’s fixed (core values, mission, long-standing cultural traits) from what’s modifiable (processes, team roles, decision-making structures). The aim is to give teams a clear visual sense of where they have leverage to adapt in response to AI, and where they need to anchor.
AI doesn’t just challenge your tech stack; it reshapes how your people think, interact, and make decisions. This moment in history demands more than incremental adaptation; it requires reimagining the fundamentals. We’ll explore why AI is different from previous waves of tech change and how it forces organizations to confront both their blind spots and their potential for renewal.
Tripo
Governance is where your culture meets real-world constraints, but also opportunities. We’ll critically examine key external frameworks: the EU AI Act, ISO and IEEE standards, and emerging U.S. regulations like the AI Bill of Rights and Algorithmic Accountability Act. What’s compliant but not yet value-aligned? Where do regulatory pressures overlap or clash with your company’s mission?
Tripo
Now that you’ve got the Triangle as a lens, it’s time to turn it inward. This session helps you map how your own culture, governance, and collaboration actually play out, beyond org charts and job titles. You’ll examine how these forces interact in your daily work, where they support your goals, and how your customers experience it. You already have the pieces, this helps you lay them out with clarity and purpose.
An interactive, bite-sized worksheet that guides participants to map their organization’s culture, governance and collaboration “DNA,” sort each element into what’s foundational versus what’s open to change, then remix them in a fun exercise culminating in a personal reflection on how to drive authentic, integrity-anchored change.
Because changing your lens changes your product, team and your impact.
Because sometimes the code that needs rewriting is cultural.
Because you feel the tension between what you can build and what you should build.
Because the future doesn’t need perfect teams, it needs people who know where to begin.
Because your best ideas aren’t hiding in your head, they’re sparked in conversation, in collaboration.
Because you want to turn governance into a collaborative compass, not a dusty rulebook.
Because you’re done working in circles, you’re ready to advance in spirals.
Because this pilot turns vision into velocity: one choice, one shift, one product move at a time.
Because each shift means you are starting a (Companion AI) movement towards a bolder future.
Why Companion AI Pilot Program
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You’re building AI that will shape how people live, decide, and connect
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You see AI as a companion to human life, not just a tool for efficiency
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You want your product to reflect your values, not just your metrics
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You want to lead the shift, not wait for someone else to define it
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You feel the cracks in how your team collaborates and want to fix them at the root
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You see customers as co-designers, not data points
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You are here to start the movement, not just fine-tune the motion
Phase 1: Workshop Program
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Day 3: Ship Ideal AI Companion
The best AI products don’t start with features; they start with real human needs. Day 3 is where it all comes together. You’ll learn how to center the customer in your development process and translate their values into practical design choices and governance moves. Then, you’ll map out a clear 3–6 month launchpad to bring it all back to your team: one cultural shift, one governance upgrade, and one collaboration fix you can actually put into motion. No theory, no fluff, just the steps to build AI that’s thoughtful, trustworthy, and ready for the real world.
No one is just a bystander in AI development. Whether you’re in leadership, design, engineering, compliance, or ops, your choices, questions, and blind spots shape the systems you create. In this session, you’ll reflect on your personal influence and how your role contributes to the values embedded in AI products. We’ll also explore the concept of shared accountability, how responsibility for ethical, human-aligned AI doesn’t fall on one department but is distributed across the organization.
You’ll leave with a clearer sense of your agency and how to use it.
AI development often starts from technical feasibility or internal priorities, but what happens when you reverse that? This session challenges you to start from the customer’s lived experience. You’ll work through scenarios to identify how your organizational culture and governance structures could shift if the customer were not the end point, but the starting point.
How would you build differently if you saw governance as a way to protect and empower your customer, not just manage risk?
You’ve seen how easy it is to get lost in metrics—clicks, conversions, engagement. But deep down, you know that building truly meaningful AI takes more than data. It takes listening with intention. In this session, you’ll go beyond surface signals and start tuning into what matters—your customers’ hopes, hesitations, and what they’re agreeing to when they use your system. You’ll learn how to turn those signals into concrete design decisions and governance cues that reflect real human values, not assumptions.
This is where AI stops reacting and starts relating.
Tripo
This is where everything clicks into place. You’ve recognized your impact, explored what drives your team, how you collaborate, and what your customers truly need. Now it’s time to bring it all together. In this session, you’ll step into your power to build the AI companion you actually want to build, one that reflects your values, responds to real-world needs, and feels like something worth putting into the world.
An engaging exercise where participants analyze a product touchpoint to uncover embedded (or missing) customer values and consent expectations, envision the ideal customer experience of agency and safety, and translate insights into clear design signals, resulting in a value-consent map that steers future AI product decisions.
This final session helps you move from reflection to direction. We’ll sketch a sample 3–6 month launchpad, using one cultural shift, one governance move, and one collaboration upgrade as an example of how to bring change into your team or product workflow. You’ll get a practical feel for what’s possible, then take home a full Companion AI Launchpad Guide to continue the work at your own pace.
Because lasting change doesn’t require a full overhaul, it starts with one clear step, taken with intention.
You’ll create a sample Companion AI Design Map, an example that weaves together one cultural value, one governance practice, and one collaboration ritual into a simple, testable product concept. This isn’t your final blueprint, but a hands-on glimpse into how these forces can align in real-world development. You’ll also receive the full Companion AI Launchpad Guide to help you expand, adapt, and apply this method across your own team and roadmap after the BootCamp.
Day 2: Design the Product
Great AI doesn’t come from solo brilliance; it comes from teams that know how to move together. Day 2 is about making collaboration less chaotic and more intentional. You’ll dive into the four collaboration orbits—practical, evolving modes of working that meet your product where it is, whether you're prototyping, shipping, or scaling. You’ll learn how to read the energy in the room, spot what’s stuck, and shift without needing a reorg. With the Orbit Navigator as your guide, you’ll finally get a way to lead collaboration that actually fits your product’s rhythm and gets things moving again.
Collaboration isn’t a checkbox or a handoff; it’s the living, breathing interface where values meet action. In this session, we’ll reframe collaboration as a dynamic, creative act that evolves alongside your team, your goals, and your AI systems. You’ll learn to see collaboration not as a process to manage, but as a space to design, shape, and steward.
Step into the collaboration spiral, a fresh way to see how teams really work together, beyond rigid steps or checklists. You’ll explore four unique orbits, each a different mode of teaming up, from quiet reflection to bold, boundary-crossing creation. These orbits aren’t a ladder to climb but a dynamic cycle to move through, shifting with your team’s energy and your product’s evolving needs. It’s about flowing with what’s needed, not forcing a one-way path.
Truly effective collaboration honors the full human spectrum. This session reveals how our thinking (mind), willing (agency), and feeling (emotion) shape the ways we show up and contribute, both as individuals and as a team. Understanding these three forces helps teams navigate friction, tap into creative energy, and support each other more intentionally.
A hands-on diagnostic that helps participants uncover their dominant mode of Will (action), Feel (emotion), or Think (logic), map their team’s collective profile, spot blind spots or imbalances, and reflect on how these dynamics influence the AI products they build—leading to clear, actionable steps for more balanced and intentional collaboration.
Tripo
AI products don’t just reflect technical decisions; they mirror your collaboration dynamics. This session invites you to trace how your team’s interaction style shows up in real AI outputs: from messy early ideation to decisions baked into code. You’ll start spotting invisible fingerprints, patterns that influence product behavior, impact, and customer trust.
Now it’s time to make it real. You’ll look at where your product is, whether you’re prototyping, iterating, or scaling, and match each stage with the type of collaboration it truly needs. The orbits help you spot what’s missing, shift your team’s energy, and keep momentum flowing when things slow down or stall.
Most organizations assign roles based on function, but few assign responsibility for movement. The Orbit Navigator is a new role - not a manager, not a project lead - but a guide who helps teams sense when to shift or stay within an orbit. You’ll explore how introducing this role can add fluidity, clarity, and responsiveness to your collaboration system without needing a full restructure.
A practical, scenario-based exercise where participants map a real AI use case across the Four Collaboration Orbits to identify blind spots, creative gaps, or rushed decisions. With the help of an Orbit Navigator role-play, teams leave with a visual blueprint of where they are in the creation process and what’s missing to move forward wisely.
Purpose of the Launchpad
The launchpad is not a full transformation plan. It’s a starting point, a low-lift, high-impact tool that helps teams internalize the workshop insights and begin applying them step-by-step in their own context. It encourages movement, not perfection.
What the Launchpad Includes
It’s a guided set of worksheets/tools that helps participants:
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Reflect on one shift they want to initiate in their culture (e.g. a new shared value, belief, or ritual)
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Identify one governance improvement (e.g. clearer decision rights, feedback loops, or documentation patterns)
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Define one collaboration upgrade (e.g. rethinking team rituals, communication modes, or role clarity)
You’ll map each of these across a simple timeline (e.g. 3, 6, or 12 weeks) with room to note:
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Why this shift matters now
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What a minimal test or prototype of the shift could look like
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Who needs to be involved
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How to track if it’s working
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When to revisit and evolve
How It Works Post-Workshop
In Your Day-to-Day Work
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Use it to anchor team stand-ups, sprint reviews, or planning sessions. Each shift (in culture, governance, or collaboration) includes micro-actions that can be tracked and discussed like any other backlog item.
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Bring the launchpad to retrospectives to check in: What changed? What didn’t? What did we learn from this cultural or collaborative experiment?
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Assign light ownership to one person per area (culture/governance/collaboration) to keep momentum and invite reflection without formal overhead.
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Treat it like a compass, not a rulebook; you don’t have to follow it perfectly. You just need to keep moving forward with awareness and an open mind to experiment.
In Your 3–6 Month Roadmap
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Revisit your Companion AI Launchpad every quarter to reflect, expand, or adapt based on what’s working.
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Apply the same format to new teams, features, or product lines, it’s designed to scale with your organization.
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Use it to communicate your evolving AI vision internally: how your team is building not just faster, but smarter and more aligned with real human needs.
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Treat it as a bridge between leadership and product teams, something that brings clarity to otherwise vague ambitions like “responsibility,” “alignment,” or “customer trust.”
Key Expectations to Set
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Participants will only create a sample launchpad during the workshop, like a case study or prototype.
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You’ll receive the full Companion AI Launchpad Guide to scale it internally afterward, together with us.
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The focus is on small, testable shifts, not big change programs.
The process is meant to be adaptable to different team sizes, maturity levels, and product stages.
Resources
to help you make a decision whether this Pilot is for you to activate
Read here
While a framework provides a structured guide for following a specific path, an approach equips you with the mindset to choose the right path according to your unique context. Companion AI is an approach that offers a way of thinking, connecting culture, governance, and collaboration across the entire AI product development journey. Rather than prescribing a fixed set of practices, it provides a lens to navigate complex design choices and organizational dynamics with greater intentionality.
Article 4 of the EU AI Act requires providers and deployers of AI systems to ensure a sufficient level of AI literacy of their staff and other persons dealing with AI systems on their behalf.
This BootCamp provides an essential foundation for your educational efforts to comply with the article 4.
FAQ
It’s a two-part experience designed to help high-potential AI companies build differently. It starts with a 3-day immersive workshop and continues with a 3–6 month implementation phase, where your team applies the Companion AI approach to live product, culture, or governance work. This isn’t just training, it’s your entry point into a movement.
AI-native startups, product-led tech companies, and cross-functional teams that are actively building and deploying AI, especially those ready to lead with intention, rethink their development culture, and design with real human alignment. If you're shaping how people interact with intelligent systems, this is for you.
Tripo
Most programs focus on compliance, productivity, or tech optimization. This one focuses on mindset, systems, and evolution. It’s not about checking boxes; it’s about transforming how your team thinks, collaborates, and builds. Companion AI gives you a lens and structure to design AI with integrity, flexibility, and human depth.
You’ll leave with:
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A deeper shared understanding of your product’s role in people’s lives
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A renewed sense of team alignment around culture, governance, and collaboration
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A prototype roadmap for shifting how your organization builds and evolves AI
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New rituals, symbols, and decision practices that translate values into real action
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A 3-day workshop tailored to your team’s context
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The full Companion AI Launchpad Toolkit
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Ongoing guidance and co-design support for 3–6 months
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Strategic rituals and feedback cycles to help you embed what you learn
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A space to test, reflect, and scale shifts in real time
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Because every company is different, pricing is based on your specific use case, team size, and the desired duration of the implementation phase. Once we understand your goals and scope, we’ll provide a custom proposal that fits your context.
You can request a discovery call here (or click the "Make Your Move" button) to see if your company is a good fit. This pilot is selective, we’re looking for early movers who want to shape the Companion AI movement from the inside out.
Facts & Figures
1k
Executives, ML engineers and product leads trained.
6 Years
of experience in specifically AI Governance that we share in our educational and advisory services.
O'Reilly Media
Education partner: trained 100s of ML engineers and executives.
Future-Proof
The most innovative approach to AI product development is designed to empower decision-makers to make informed decisions at every turn.
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