1The Challenge
What was the challenge?
Mercer came to us with a sharply defined theme and an honest observation about it. Technology — and AI in particular — is everywhere. It dominates conversation, strategy decks, and industry commentary. Awareness of it is not the problem. The question Mercer wanted to put to its people was the harder one: how do we actually inculcate it into our day-to-day work?
That gap between knowing about a technology and genuinely using it was the brief. The team wanted an experience that closed it — and they wanted the debrief anchored firmly to that theme rather than drifting into generic team-building takeaways. The constraint was tight: one hour, 20 participants, and a need to land something real in that window.
2Our Solution
What solution did we design?
The AI Movie Making Challenge was chosen precisely because it collapses the distance between awareness and application. Teams take on the role of filmmakers — conceiving a story, scripting it, and using AI tools to bring it to screen inside a compressed timeframe.
The value here is direct. Nobody sits through a demonstration of what AI can do; they open the tools and produce something. Within minutes, participants who have only read about generative AI are prompting, iterating, discarding weak outputs, and refining. They discover firsthand that the tool rewards clarity of intent, that the first attempt is rarely the best one, and that the technology amplifies a good idea rather than substituting for one. Those are exactly the lessons that transfer to Monday morning — and they land far harder when discovered than when described.
The one-hour format worked in the activity's favour. With a hard deadline, teams had no room to overthink or hesitate; they had to dive in, which is the whole point.
The AI Movie Making Challenge ran alongside Lost in Space Escape Box.
3How We Did It
How was the programme delivered?
The 20 participants were divided into four teams and briefed on their mission: create an original short film using AI tools, start to finish, within the hour. Teams moved fast — settling on a concept, drafting a script, generating and refining visuals, and assembling the final cut against the clock.
Our two facilitators worked the room throughout, observing how teams approached the unfamiliar tools and where the interesting moments emerged: the first prompt that didn't work, the point where someone stopped asking the tool for an answer and started directing it, the realisation that the constraint was imagination rather than technology.
Those observations shaped the debrief. In line with Mercer's specific request, the conversation stayed anchored to the technology theme — not team dynamics in the abstract, but what participants had just learned about working with AI, and how those habits translate into their actual roles. The film-making was the vehicle; the practical relationship with the technology was the destination.
4Key Outcomes
What were the results?
In a single hour, Mercer's team went from knowing about AI to having built with it. Every participant left having personally produced something using tools many had only read about — which is a meaningfully different position from where they started.
The session delivered on Mercer's core question. Participants experienced the difference between awareness and application, and left with a concrete sense of how these tools behave, where they help, and what it takes to get useful output. The debrief translated that directly into their day-to-day context, turning a creative challenge into a practical entry point for adopting technology at work.
Mercer is a returning client, and this session brought the experience to a new group of participants.