A product workshop that became an ongoing AI program

The situation

HID Global's product managers were being asked what AI meant for their products, without a shared way to answer. The first engagement was scoped as one thing: a product innovation with AI workshop for product managers.

What we did

The workshop opened a sequence that grew into a standing program.

• Product innovation with AI, for product managers: structured innovation method applied to AI-era product questions, with the participants' own products as the material.
• AI strategy: what the organization was trying to change, where AI belonged in that, and the sequence.
• Senior leadership sessions, so the strategy had owners at the level where resourcing decisions are made.
• Building an AI core team: a standing internal group with the mandate and capability to carry the work. This is the part that determines whether an engagement compounds or ends.
• Delivery across functions: customer support, marketing (including answer engine optimization), recurring product innovation workshops, and structured use case discovery.

What changed

The engagement moved from a one-off session to an ongoing engagement with variable monthly involvement, spanning strategy, capability building and delivery. The internal AI core team now carries work that would otherwise have needed us. The pattern is the one we look for: a single well-chosen session gives an organization a shared language, the shared language surfaces the real questions, and the real questions justify a program.

What the strategy commits to

The two-year AI strategy carries concrete measures rather than ambitions. It commits to reducing operational costs by tens of percent, to new revenue and net-new customers from AI features and AI-first products, and to standing up small AI pod teams inside the business. The pod teams exist and are running, and the strategy is inspected against those measures rather than against activity.