Welcome back!
In this month’s update:
Drawn from our last 30 client conversations and analysed by Claude, here are the five challenges we hear most:
Mixed skill levels and uneven adoption. 77% of clients see the same picture: power users pulling ahead while the rest of the team finds its feet. The gap keeps widening.
Surface-level AI usage dominates. Three in four clients say their teams use AI for the basics but skip the features that move the needle: Claude Skills, agentic workflows, advanced integrations.
Ad-hoc training and informal sharing. Learning happens colleague-to-colleague. Pockets of capability form, but no shared baseline, and the people who need help most don’t ask.
Increased pressure to prove ROI and maximise licence value. Licences have been bought. The question from the SLT is whether they’re paying back, and most firms can’t say with confidence.
Growing shadow AI use and an AI use policy no one has read. The “best” tool changes each month and people reach for whatever’s being talked about. Plenty of firms have an AI use policy but tell us almost no one knows what’s in it…
Confidential strategic sessions with Tom Hewitson, our Chief AI Officer, for senior leaders working through:
We’ve got CTOs and CIOs are already signed up.
Drop josh@generalpurpose.com a line to find out more.
Two rollouts this spring, both following the same path. Mastering ChatGPT to start, AI Activation Programme to embed it, and 1:1 AI Coaching for power users.
We trained the team at Cowshed this April, the iconic British beauty brand. The post-training numbers came back as follows:
We were also in Brussels last month to run Mastering ChatGPT for 50 of Montagu’s investment team. Montagu is a leading pan-European mid-market private equity firm with €14 billion in assets under management.
The session kicked off a broader programme of work, including the AI Activation Programme to embed AI use across the firm and 1:1 AI Coaching for individuals working on more advanced use cases.
Read more about our work in private equity here
Montagu’s investment team kicking off a full day of Mastering ChatGPT
We’re the Official Training Partner for The AI Summit London 2026 alongside London Business School. On 9 June Tom, Josh and the full instructor team are running a full-day skills accelerator:
Read the press release from Informa here.
Subscribers get 20% off tickets with code GP20OFFDELEGATE. Book here.
Excitingly, we’ve recently launched our new website:
We build as we preach (or teach) with no developers or agency spend needed.
Sneak peak for our subscribers
Our next open enrolment ChatGPT Essentials runs on Friday 22 May, 9.30am-1pm.
For every corporate team we train, we fund scholarship places for unemployed graduates, the group most likely to be affected by AI’s impact on the labour market. The May session is our next round.
If you’d like to attend, book here.
If you’re a graduate or student, email hi@generalpurpose.com for a 100% discount code.
As ever, drop us a line at hi@generalpurpose.com if you want to talk about any of the above, or forward this on to a colleague who’d find it useful.
Thanks for joining,
The General Purpose team
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