Run a Use Case Discovery Workshop
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Facilitate a team workshop that identifies and prioritizes AI use cases.
September 17, 2025 · Last updated on June 8, 2026Use Case Discovery Workshop Playbook
A Use Case Discovery Workshop is a live, role-aligned session where colleagues with similar goals reflect on current workflows, surface recurring pain points, and identify where AI could create visible value.
The workshop creates protected time to examine day-to-day work, identify friction, and decide which opportunities are worth testing first.
Participants do not need to be advanced AI users, and they do not need to build a complete solution during the session.
The goal is to leave with a small number of workflows that matter to the team, are clear enough to test, with enough potential value to justify follow-up, and with defined next steps and owners.
Including a discovery workshop as part of a team or department offsite, during an adoption-planning cycle works well., especially when a team has many ideas but no clear priorities, and needs to move from scattered experimentation to a more structured set of use cases.
How to Use This Playbook
This guide is designed for Leaders and Activators who are planning or facilitating the workshop.
Leaders
Leaders should:
- Define why the workshop matters
- Connect the session to team or organization priorities
- Identify the right participants
- Clarify who will make final prioritization decisions
- Help remove barriers that require sponsorship or cross-functional support
- Reinforce the use cases selected for follow-up
Activators
Activators can:
- Help prepare and facilitate the session
- Bring relevant examples
- Push participants from broad ideas to concrete workflows
- Help the group evaluate readiness and complexity
- Capture owners, first milestones, and support needs
- Support testing and follow-through after the workshop
Before the session, align on who will make final decisions, who will facilitate, and who will own follow-up.
How to Prepare
1. Define the Scope and Participants
Choose a department, function, team, or role group with enough shared context to discuss similar work.
The best workshops are specific enough that participants recognize one another’s workflows, goals, and pain points.
Avoid a group so broad that every idea requires a different context, system, or decision-maker.
2. Identify the Facilitation Team
Assign:
- A primary facilitator
- A note-taker
- A timekeeper
- One or more Activators or experienced users who can support small groups
Activators are not expected to provide the answer to every idea. Their role is to help participants become more specific, identify hidden dependencies, and connect the discussion to practical AI patterns.
3. Choose the Right Frame
Keep the session focused on work the team already performs.
Avoid starting with a broad question such as:
How can we use AI?
Instead, ask:
- What recurring work takes the most time?
- What outputs are created repeatedly?
- What work varies too much across people or teams?
- Where do handoffs create friction?
- What tasks are important but difficult to complete reliably?
- Where do people spend time searching, rewriting, checking, or clarifying?
4. Share Pre-Work
Ask each participant to bring:
- One or two recurring tasks or workflows
- A pain point associated with the work
- A real example, such as notes, drafts, reports, templates, messages, SOPs, checklists, or recurring outputs
Ask participants to reflect on:
- How often the work happens
- What makes it difficult or inconsistent
- What starts the workflow
- What output is required
- Who uses or depends on the result
5. Set Up the Workshop Space
Choose a workspace such as a virtual whiteboard, shared document, spreadsheet, or a physical wall with sticky notes!
Prepare columns or swimlanes that move participants from observations to decisions: Workflow → Pain Point → Frequency → Impact / Value → Complexity / Effort → Readiness → AI Opportunity → Owner / Next Step.
You may also tag ideas by team, priority, readiness, required support, or decision status.
Before the session, confirm participants can access the workshop board or doc, any AI tools used during optional live testing, approved files or example inputs, and collaboration tools.
If needed, prepare a backup workspace so an access issue does not stop the session.
Sample Agenda: 90 Minutes
Time | Activity | Description |
|---|---|---|
0:00–0:10 | Welcome and framing | Introduce the objective, agenda, and ground rules. Reinforce that the goal is to identify useful workflows, not solve everything in one session. |
0:10–0:20 | Prioritization lens | Explain impact/value, complexity/effort, frequency, and readiness. |
0:20–0:35 | Workflow discovery | Participants identify recurring workflows, pain points, handoffs, inputs, and outputs. |
0:35–0:55 | Use case discovery | Small groups map workflows to possible AI opportunities. |
0:55–1:10 | Prioritization | Groups evaluate ideas, make tradeoffs, and identify the strongest candidates. |
1:10–1:20 | Optional live test | Try one or two promising workflows using real or representative inputs. |
1:20–1:27 | Commitments and owners | Select one to three use cases, assign owners, and define first milestones. |
1:27–1:30 | Close | Recap decisions, follow-up timing, and what happens next. |
Facilitation Guide
Start With a Shared Frame
Use language such as:
Today is not about finding every possible way to use AI. It is about identifying the workflows where AI has the best chance to create visible value without overwhelming the team. We will look for use cases that happen often, matter to the business, have clear inputs and outputs, and are realistic to test.
Move Participants From Tasks to Workflows
A repeated task can be a useful starting point, but it may not show the full workflow.
For example:
AI for reporting
should become:
Drafting the weekly leadership update from team notes, project updates, and open risks.
If it helps the group, prompt them with questions such as:
- Who performs this work?
- Who depends on the output?
- What triggers the workflow?
- What happens immediately before and after it?
- Which tools, systems, or people are involved?
- Where does information change hands?
- Where is work manually checked, rewritten, clarified, or cleaned up?
- What does a good final output look like?
- What still requires human judgment?
- What would need to be true for another person to repeat the workflow?
This helps the group avoid choosing a use case that appears simple but depends on hidden handoffs, unclear inputs, or unresolved ownership.
Use Real Work
Use the examples participants brought to determine:
- Whether the workflow is clearly defined
- Whether the necessary inputs exist
- Whether AI could produce a useful output
- What human judgment remains necessary
- What access, governance, or process constraints may exist
Prioritize and Make Tradeoffs
Evaluate each candidate use case using four criteria.
Dimension | Questions to Ask |
Impact / Value | Could this improve speed, quality, consistency, customer experience, coordination, or reliability? |
Complexity / Effort | How much clarification, process change, governance, access, integration, or support would be required? |
Frequency | How often does the workflow happen, and how often could the value repeat? |
Readiness | Are the inputs, outputs, users, owner, and success criteria clear enough to test? |
Use these categories to support the discussion:
Category | Meaning | Recommended Action |
Quick Wins | High potential value and relatively low effort or dependency. | Start here. |
Strategic Initiatives | High potential value but significant coordination, sponsorship, governance, or technical support. | Capture and sequence for later. |
Nice-to-Haves | Relatively low value and low effort. | Consider only if capacity allows. |
Thankless Tasks | Low value and high effort. | Avoid for now. |
These categories are discussion tools, not automatic decisions. A workflow may move categories as the team learns more.
A strong workshop should end with one to three priorities, not a long list of equally weighted ideas. Ask:
- Which use case is most likely to create visible value soon?
- Which workflow happens often enough for the value to compound?
- Which idea has the clearest inputs and outputs?
- Which workflow can be tested with the least coordination?
- Which idea sounds valuable but is not ready?
- Which use case requires leadership, governance, admin, or technical support before it can move forward?
Include Every Voice
Use silent brainstorming, individual reflection, small groups, or structured turn-taking so the loudest participants do not shape the entire list. Invite participants to write ideas independently before group discussion.
Protect Decision Time
Keep the framing and discovery portions moving so the group has enough time to prioritize and make commitments. Do not allow brainstorming to consume the time needed to select owners and first milestones.
Keep the First Test Small
Encourage teams to test one meaningful part of the workflow. The first test should answer one practical question rather than redesign the entire process, deploy broadly, or solve every dependency at once.
Minimum Details to Capture
For each promising use case, record:
Field | What to Capture |
Workflow | The work or process being improved. |
User or Team | Who performs the workflow. |
Pain Point | What is slow, difficult, inconsistent, or manual today. |
Potential Value | What could improve and why it matters. |
Complexity / Effort | Dependencies, approvals, systems, or process changes required. |
Frequency | How often the workflow happens. |
Readiness | Whether the inputs, outputs, owner, and success criteria are clear enough to test. |
Owner | Who will lead the next step. |
Partners Needed | Leader, Workspace Admin, functional owner, technical partner, or other stakeholder. |
Reusable Asset Needed | Prompt, Skill, Workspace Agent, workflow guide, template, checklist, or other support. |
First Milestone | The next observable action or test. |
Evidence to Collect | The signal that will help determine whether the use case is worth continuing. |
Workshop Outcomes and Follow-Up
A strong workshop should produce a concise recap that separates ideas from decisions.
Include:
- The main workflows and pain points discussed
- The one to three use cases selected for follow-up and why those use cases were prioritized
- Ideas captured for later
- First milestones and owners
- Support or escalation needs
- Evidence each owner will collect
- The follow-up date
Do not close the workshop until each selected use case has a named owner, first milestone, review date, and definition of what progress looks like.
Move Selected Use Cases Into Testing
Move one to three selected use cases into a small test over the next two to four weeks.
Useful early signals may include:
- Users trying the workflow
- Repeat use
- Time or steps reduced
- Fewer revisions
- Improved quality
- Increased consistency
- Reuse across teammates
- Fewer dropped handoffs
- More reliable completion of a recurring output
Use these signals directionally. The workshop identifies opportunities; the test determines whether the expected value appears in real work.
Turn Validated Wins Into Reusable Assets
If a workflow produces a credible result, package it so another person can try it. Activators can help refine the workflow, support testing, and package what works.
Possible assets might include prompt templates, Skills,Workspace Agents, workflow guides, checklists / standard operation procedures, or demo recordings.
The progression is: Raw idea → testable workflow → validated use case → reusable asset
Sample Participant Pre-Work Message
Hi team,
We will be running a Use Case Discovery Workshop to identify where AI could help improve real workflows across our team.
The goal is not to generate every possible AI idea or build a complete solution during the session. We want to identify a short list of workflows worth testing because they happen often, create meaningful friction, and have clear potential value.
Before the workshop, please bring one or two examples of recurring work you do today.
These could be tasks that are:
- Time-consuming
- Repetitive
- Inconsistent
- Manual
- Difficult to complete reliably
For each example, note:
- What the workflow or task is
- How often it happens
- What makes it slow, difficult, or inconsistent
- What input starts the work
- What output must be created
- Who uses or depends on the output
We will use these examples to identify which use cases are most valuable, practical, and ready to test.
Next Steps
Before the Workshop
- Confirm the scope, participants, facilitator, and decision-maker.
- Prepare the workspace and prioritization framework.
- Send the pre-work and confirm access.
During the Workshop
- Move from real workflow pain points to one to three prioritized use cases.
- Capture the required details, owners, milestones, and support needs.
- Confirm what happens next before closing.
After the Workshop
- Send the recap.
- Begin the first tests.
- Resolve or escalate barriers.
- Review progress at the agreed milestone.
- Package validated workflows for reuse.
Leaders should reinforce priorities and remove barriers.
Activators should support testing, capture learning, and help turn validated workflows into reusable assets.
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