Teaching a design org to think with AI -- not just use it.
THE ROYAL ACADEMY OF AI
Most AI upskilling programs teach tools. The Royal Academy of AI taught something harder: permission to be confused, and the confidence to ask better questions from that confusion. As program lead, I designed and launched an internal educational initiative across MAI's entire Design and Research studio -- not just designers, but researchers, product people, ops, and admin. Everyone. One year. One goal: make every person in the org AI proficient and fearless.
The premise was deliberately bold. Not a workshop series. Not a certification checklist. A community built around experimentation, where the point wasn't to get things right immediately but to erase the barriers between imagination and action. We wanted people moving from "does this work?" to "does this work for whom?" -- from "is this usable?" to "by whom, and at what cost to others?" That shift in questioning is the difference between people who use AI and people who design with it responsibly.
Alongside the Academy, the team built vibe coding projects and AI-assisted workflows that directly accelerated product work -- token gap automation tools, layout test utilities, governance assistants, and responsive demo prototypes that compressed weeks of work into days.
MY ROLE
Program lead and creative director. Designed the curriculum, led the initiative org-wide alongside Leadership, and built the community infrastructure that made it stick.