Last month I watched as the AI demo days I started a few months earlier were opened to the whole company. Tons of people joined. People really loved the session. But some watched the demos and thought, oh, that’s cool, but I don’t think that’s something I would use.

(Which, to be honest, happens in tech too.)

Demo days are one of the things I love bringing from the tech world into the non-tech companies I work with. In tech, a demo day is low friction. It’s not a fancy presentation and it’s not meant to be buttoned up. People share the problems they’re solving and what they’re building, so there’s better alignment and learning happens across teams.

A lot of the companies I work with don’t have examples of knowledge sharing happening across teams, so starting demo days goes against inertia. To fight inertia we had to first build a case for demos, circulate the idea, and then we started small, just the AI champions for the first three months. Attendance was great, people thought the sessions were really helpful, and it did a ton to build community within that group. Four months in, the whole company was invited to present and to attend.

That’s where I first heard “that’s cool, but it’s not something I’d use.”

I’ve been on the other side of this. I presented at a demo day to 20 of my peers: other solopreneurs, fractional leaders and consultants. Four of us presented, and seeing what people were building challenged some of my assumptions.

One person showed how they capture their context and route it to different places so it’s available when they need it. I have something similar, but they did it in a completely different way, tightly integrated with Notion. Another person built a skill that captures outcomes at the end of each week for the tasks they’ve completed, so it’s easier to tell their clients the story of their impact. Super useful for building case studies. (And honestly, on those days when things just aren’t hitting, you could pull it up for a little dopamine hit and know that your work does matter.)

Those demos worked on me because they were about work I already do. I didn’t have to figure out where they fit.

When someone in finance watches a demo from someone in marketing, nobody does that step for them. They have to see their own work in someone else’s, on the spot, and that’s the moment “not for me” happens.

Going forward we’ll add a short discussion about how approaches shown might apply to other roles and brainstorm similar but different tasks. Just to get people’s heads turning a little bit and thinking about where something might be useful to them.

Demo days don’t have to be a ton of work. It’s about getting people together to share what they’re doing. In fact, the less polish, often the better. It’s a place to learn, but it also nudges your cultural towards innovation, and is a natural ground to foster community.

The more demos, the better.

If you want to start demo days in your company, I’m putting what I’ve used into a toolkit: the one-pager I used to socialize the idea, a presenter template and quick reference, and a facilitation guide with the discussion after each demo built in. Get the AI Demo Days Toolkit​

✌️Mariena