Pathos Services

Practical AI for Leaders and Professionals. A three-quarter day course from Pathos Services.

Your people already use AI. Most of them hide it.

They use it to draft the email, tidy the brief, summarise the paper. Then they say nothing, because they are not sure whether it counts as cheating, and they quietly wonder what they are for if a machine does the first draft. Meanwhile you have been asked to do something about AI across the organisation, the advice is loud and contradictory, and the stories in the press are mostly about what went wrong.

This is not unusual. It tends to be where most organisations are in 2026.

Practical AI is a three-quarter day that changes it. One method for thinking before you prompt, taught properly, practised on real work, with the guardrails for your sector built in. People leave able to say what they do with AI out loud, and doing it better.

Send the brief

Why a storytelling practice teaches this

Everyone now has the smartest team in the world. Almost nobody has told it what they want.

The buttons can be learned in an afternoon. Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are all capable. What tends to go wrong sits upstream of the tool: people do not know what they are asking for, so they get back a fluent answer to the wrong question, conclude that AI is overrated, and go back to doing it the old way.

Briefing an AI is a communication problem. Who it should be, what it needs to know, exactly what to do, what the output should look like. The same discipline that makes a board paper land makes a prompt land. That is why a storytelling and behavioural science practice teaches this course, and why it is technology agnostic: the method works in whichever tool your organisation has approved, and in the one you adopt next.

Three phases, one day. Faster: the first draft in a minute. Better: the draft you could not have written alone. New: the things you never had time to attempt. Most people arrive stuck at faster and a little nervous. The course moves them to better, and shows them the road to new.

"I want to be better, not replaced."

What people in the room say, once they feel safe to say anything. The course is built around it.

What happens in the room

Think first. Prompt second.

Three-quarter day, 09:00 to 14:00, with a break.

In person at your premises, or online on Teams.

Up to 16 people.

Any approved generative AI: Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini all work. Participants bring a laptop and a login.

No prerequisites. The room usually holds people who use AI daily and people who have never opened it, and both leave with something.

What participants do

  1. Learn the minimum viable prompt (three parts) and the full nine-step method, and use it on the spot.
  2. Build a reusable prompt for a real piece of work, with swappable variables, so one day's effort pays back for a year.
  3. Run the personal profile exercise: a prompt that turns AI into a thinking partner tuned to how you think. It is the part of the day people talk about afterwards.
  4. Work through the guardrails: what never goes into a public tool, your sector's deny-list, and how to use AI responsibly inside the rules you already have.
  5. Leave with the method on a page, the worked examples, and access to the shared resource library.

Participants can claim a CPD certificate of attendance at pathos.com.au/cpd.

Who it is for

  • Give leaders a vocabulary and a method for AI, so they can set direction with confidence.
  • Give teams a sanctioned way to use AI well, with the guardrails built in.
  • Give L&D a course that people rate highly and use the next morning.

Built for public sector agencies, commissions and departments, and for commercial teams who want the same discipline. Delivered through IPAA NSW as a public course, and in-house for individual organisations.

Proof

93%

participant satisfaction, six NSW public sector cohorts, 2026

89% to 95%

lowest and highest cohort scores

4.9 / 5

SAP Australian User Group cohort, Sydney 2026

Six NSW public sector cohorts in 2026. Lowest score 89%. Highest 95%. Average 93%. One room gave it the top score unanimously.

IPAA NSW post-course surveys, 2026.

Delivered in 2026 as a public course through IPAA NSW, for the SAP Australian User Group, and in-house for NSW government departments, commissions and agencies.

Taught by Tim Wilkes, Founder, CEO and Chief Storysmith of Pathos Services; formerly Chief Storytelling Officer and Head of Behavioural Economics at SAP Asia Pacific Japan, and Head of Leadership Development APJ at Workday. He runs Pathos with a team of named AI colleagues who handle research, copy, the website, finance and the diary, so the course is taught by someone who does this all day.

"Keep Tim for these courses. He has such a strong knowledge of the public sector and can speak to everyone's different organisations."

Participant, Practical AI for Leaders, IPAA NSW, June 2026

"Tim has such a natural ability to engage his audiences, regardless of their previous knowledge or experience on the topic."

Participant, Practical AI for Leaders, IPAA NSW, June 2026

"Not to improve, but to say I have rarely seen such a comprehensive and useful set of resources to use after training."

Participant, Practical AI for Leaders, IPAA NSW, February 2026

Before you book

Questions people ask

Will it work for people who have never used AI?

Yes. The method starts from how to think about a task, which everyone can already do. The nervous ones tend to make the biggest jump.

Do we need a particular tool?

No. The course is technology agnostic. Use whatever your organisation has approved, and the method will carry over to the next tool you adopt.

What about security and the public sector rules?

The guardrails are taught as part of the course. Nothing in the exercises asks anyone to put sensitive material into a public tool.

How much effort is it for us?

A room, a date, a list of names and a login each. Tim brings the rest, including a welcome pack sent to participants before the session.

What comes after?

Most organisations run it for one team, then the next. For executive teams ready to decide what AI should do across the whole organisation, Tim runs a separate program. Ask about it when you send the brief.

Not sure whether a three-quarter day is right for your room?

Send the brief and the number of people. Tim will say plainly whether it fits and what he would change.

Send the brief