Selected projects
The Audience Agency: Let’s Get Real: AI (2025-2026)
Capabilities: Programme partnership · Long-form cohort facilitation · One-to-one coaching · Workshop design and delivery · Experimental methodology
Engagement: Project partner on The Audience Agency's twelfth Let's Get Real programme, running from April 2025 to March 2026. Brought back as project partner for the 2026 programme.
The challenge
Let's Get Real is The Audience Agency's long-running collaborative action research programme, bringing together cohorts of cultural organisations to work through a shared digital challenge over eight months. In 2025, for the twelfth iteration, the focus was AI. Sixteen organisations took part, including the London Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Academy of Arts, the National Gallery, the Goethe-Institut, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society, and Scottish Ballet. The programme needed a partner who could support around thirty-two individual participants in navigating a technology many felt cautious or conflicted about, while holding space for genuine experimentation and honest learning across dance, music, theatre, museums, and the wider cultural sector.
The approach
The programme design combined two in-person workshops, five online sessions, and structured one-to-one support, supplemented by self-directed learning and peer exchange. My role spanned the full life of the programme, from planning through to supporting the published report. The approach centred on giving participants a soft landing into AI, using emotion as a starting point for engagement rather than technical capability, and framing experimentation as a genuine invitation to fail usefully rather than to produce polished outputs.
The solution
As project partner, I contributed to the planning phase alongside Jane Finnis and Anra Kennedy at The Audience Agency, shaping decisions about session themes, structure, and pacing. I facilitated significant parts of the in-person workshops and contributed to the five online sessions, helping set the tone around AI literacy and emerging concepts.
A core part of the role was one-to-one support with each participating pair, with several sessions delivered to each organisation across the programme. These sessions were tailored to the specific experiments and contexts in play, covering technical ground (model selection, open-source versus closed-source trade-offs, budget and infrastructure alignment), methodological ground (survey design, research framing, feedback mechanisms), and organisational ground (navigating internal resistance, securing sign-off, creating space for experimentation).
I also contributed a short reflective essay, Culture and the Machine, to the published report.
The impact
All sixteen organisations completed experiments that are documented in full in the published report, Let's Get Real: AI, released in March 2026. The report's five recommendations for cultural organisations navigating AI draw directly on the cohort's learning. The Audience Agency has invited me back as project partner for the 2026 edition of Let's Get Real, which will run with a new cohort on an extended theme of social value in AI.
With thanks to Jane Finnis, Anra Kennedy, and the wider team at The Audience Agency for the invitation to partner on this programme, and to the sixteen organisations whose openness and generosity made the work possible.
