AI workshop for portfolio companies?

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March 03, 2025

by a searcher from Grove City College in State College, PA, USA

I've been doing contract work for a company that does consulting and staff-aug for AI.

They do these workshops sometimes where the "customer" is a holdco and the attendees are all portcos.

For two days portcos are paired with a tech lead (like me) and a PM and we:
- give them a primer on the current AI landscape
- help them back away from shiny hype use cases and focus on real revenue or cost drivers
- brainstorm potential AI solutions that have significant ROI potential
- prioritize one and leave with a technical plan and SoW for a phase one.

I love it - it's fun and one of the biggest problems I see with enterprise AI adoption right now is that people build fun toy PoCs that never have enough real business value to make it to production - it's great to be helping shift the focus to real ROI.

Now the company I do this through makes very little on these workshops - they mostly are hoping to get future contracts out of it (starting with the SoWs we built together).

But the holdcos are willing to pay for it just to get there portcos to "catch up" and start taking advantage of AI in a smart way (without wasting time/money on hype) - and they've seemed very happy with it.

So I can't help but think this could be a business model on it's very own. Where the workshop is the project. Maybe do it virtual instead of onsite to keep costs down.

Thoughts?

(Not trying to sell this btw - just curious if it sounds like a good idea to anyone else. I always think my ideas are amazing so I need a gut check, lol).

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Reply by a professional
from University of Pennsylvania in Austin, TX, USA
Interesting thought, but definitely feels trickier as a standalone business. The current model definitely has some nice incentive alignment that would be hard to replicate as cleanly. Happy to hop on a Zoom and chat through the idea though, feel free to drop me an email at redacted
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