An AI workshop for Skandia
Client: Skandia
Type of project: AI Workshop
Role: Workshop lead
Year: 2026
Background
Skandia first saw me give a talk on AI-readable design systems. A couple of months later, their design system team called and asked me to run a workshop with them. They knew AI should help, but they did not want another demo. Their work had real, specific friction. Requests came in through too many channels. Component needs surfaced too late to plan around. Nobody fully trusted the documentation. Components got built before the requirements were clear.
What I did
I co-led a workshop with a colleague, and the first rule was that we would not start from a tool. We started from their work. We mapped six concrete friction points the team dealt with every day, ran a prioritization exercise to decide where the pain was worth solving first, and only then translated the top problems into AI opportunities. The output was three prototype briefings, each tied to a real friction: one to capture component requirements earlier in the process, one to connect incoming requests to components that already existed before duplicates got built, and one to generate documentation on demand instead of maintaining it by hand.
The result
The team left with a shared map of their own process and three directions specific enough to actually prototype. Not a slideshow of AI possibilities, but briefings grounded in friction they had described themselves. That is the difference between a workshop that produces motion and one that produces a nice afternoon.
What it proves
Most AI projects fail because they skip straight to a demo that solves a problem the team does not really have. The skill that prevents that is diagnosis: walking into a team, understanding how they actually operate, and turning that into interventions specific enough to build. This is the leadership layer of the work, and it comes before any tool. It is also the harder half to fake, because it depends on understanding the discipline being changed, not just the technology changing it.
Contact
Email: pierre@bremell.com
Phone: +46 709353902
LinkedIn: bremell
© Pierre Bremell
Experience Designer