Anora Foundations moves its team from AI theory to practical use in a half-day sprint

Anora’s team had already been through AI sessions. They explained the technology, but they didn’t leave people able to use it on a Monday morning.

The starting point was also uneven. A couple of Anora’s managers were already well ahead, using AI on their own work most days and pushing at what it could do. Most of the business had not started at all.

Like most contractors, Anora runs on recurring, document-heavy work spread across site, engineering and office teams. The question wasn’t whether AI mattered. It was how to get a mixed team, with very different roles and levels of experience, using it safely and usefully on real work.

The sprint ran in two stages.

Before the day, Anora moved off personal accounts and onto a business licence, with each approved tool connected at the business level and write and delete actions set to need approval — so people could point AI at company email and files without anything being changed by accident.

Each participant ran a ten-minute check of their own beforehand: sign in, connect one approved work account, and confirm it returned the right file. They also completed a five-minute questionnaire about their role and the recurring work that takes up their week, which Tam used to shape the session around how Anora actually operates.

On the day, the team spent four hours on site at Anora’s Brisbane office, working from a purpose-built workbook. Each person brought one real task from their week and worked through it hands-on, learning how to:

• Recognise where AI is useful, and where it is still unreliable
• Give AI the right instructions, source material and output format
• Work with the company's own email, files and systems, inside the limits set beforehand
• Check outputs for missing information, unsupported claims and wrong assumptions
• Turn one real task into a workflow they can keep improving
• Codify the way a senior person works through a job, so others can follow it

The team left the sprint with hands-on experience on their own tasks, a shared way of working with AI, and clear ideas for where it could help across the business.

The room stayed with it for the full four hours, and people kept raising work they wanted to try it on next. The managers who were already using AI went further than they had managed on their own, and everyone else finished on the same footing.

They also finished the day on one business licence with agreed rules for company, client and commercial information, in place of the personal accounts people had been signing up for on their own.

The team rated the session 9 out of 10 overall, and the only criticism was that it ended too soon.