AI Flight Simulator.
Most AI transformations stumble. Learn how to succeed, in 90 minutes. Teams compete through a five-year AI transformation, feel the counter-intuitive feedback loops firsthand, get humbled, and discover what separates success from failure before it costs them a budget cycle. This simulator powers the AI Flight Lab — the facilitated half-day session we run with your leadership team.
Five-year decisions. No five-year feedback loop.
Your leaders are being asked to make AI investment decisions with five-year consequences and no way to learn from the results in time to matter. Lectures and case studies do not fix this — people have to feel the loops: spend on tech, watch adoption stall, watch value fail to appear.
Mean team improvement after a single debrief.
Each grounded in a specific feedback loop.
Management personas your teams compete against.
A flight simulator, not a case study.
Five years in ninety minutes
Twenty quarters of decisions compress a full transformation into a single session. Events fire deterministically from each team’s own state — every consequence traces back to a specific decision, so the debrief is defensible and no team can blame the dice.
Get humbled, learn, play again
Round 1 humbles naive strategies. The debrief surfaces the feedback loops that produced the result. Round 2 measures the improvement under competitive pressure — teams consistently beat their Round 1 performance by 4–8×.
Calibrated against benchmarks
The model’s optimal strategy converges independently on BCG’s 70% people-first finding. Resistance dynamics reproduce Prosci’s 7× change-management multiplier. Participants discover the empirical research instead of being told it.
Compete with AI — and learn from it.
Your team shares the market with AI opponents, each playing a recognizable management persona — aggressive, cautious, people-first, tech-first. There is something clarifying about being outplayed at AI transformation by an AI.
Measure against expert play
An unscripted AI team reaches $17–22M in value over 20 quarters — expert-tier performance unfolding live, next to your own trajectory. “How did we do?” gets a concrete answer, not a facilitator’s impression.
Watch failure patterns in motion
“Move Fast & Break Things” stops being a warning on a slide. You watch it push tempo to 3× while adoption stalls at 35% — the strategy some of your competitors are running right now, failing in fast-forward.
Any room size works
Four participants and one laptop is a viable session — AI teams fill out the field and keep the competitive dynamic intact. No minimum headcount, no cancelled session.
Nine teachable moments.
Each maps to a specific feedback loop in the model. Participants experience them during play; the facilitator reveals the underlying mechanics at debrief.
Pace generates resistance, which blocks the very outcomes speed was meant to accelerate.
An overloaded innovation team ships less, not more. Congestion collapses the deployment rate.
Value is multiplicative: high capability × low adoption = low value. Adoption dominates.
No deployments → no maturity ceiling → no value. Order of operations matters.
Change management in Year 1 is 7× cheaper than fixing it in Year 5 — Prosci’s number, reproduced.
Training has a 23-month half-life. Stop investing and half of what you built is gone in two years.
Hackathons and low-code multiply every effort — but only once adoption is high enough to support them.
The model’s optimal strategy independently converges on BCG’s 70% people-first finding.
When industry AI maturity advances, standing still destroys value. “Wait and see” loses.
Three formats.
An executive session, an offsite workshop, or an academic module — runs in the browser on our hosted service, scales to 30+ teams, and your facilitators need to run a room, not model AI adoption.
90 Minutes
For executive audiences with limited time who need one powerful experience.
- 35 minutes of play (10 quarters)
- Leaderboard reveal + 2–3 teachable moments
- Reflection worksheet
Half Day
Round 1 humbles the strategy. Round 2 tests new mental models under competitive pressure. Repeated play is load-bearing — this is where the lessons stick.
- Two 40-minute rounds
- Full feedback-loop debrief covering 5 teachable moments
- Measurable Round 1 → Round 2 improvement per team
AI Benchmark
Participants play alongside AI teams configured with specific management personas, watching archetype trajectories unfold next to their own.
- Works with as few as 4 participants
- AI teams set the pace
- Round 2 compares human vs. archetype trajectories
Learn what separates AI success from failure. Now, not in five years.
Go for a test flight with your own team, or request the 35-page facilitator guide and judge the pedagogy yourself.