Cultivated AI
Grow, don't Chase.Shalin Shodhan
20 years in games & film.
- Pixar Animation Studios 6 feature films · 3 Academy Awards
- Electronic Arts · Spore BAFTA Award for Technical Achievement
- Lumosity Principal Game Developer
- Masala Games · Founder Detective Dotson · Word Mess (#1 in 21 countries)
- Carnegie Mellon University MET · Entertainment Technology
Two sessions.
Two hours each.
How it works, and what's out there
Why it matters, how it behaves, which tool for what. Half of it hands-on.
Agents, skills and a plan
Build a browser extension, write a skill of your own, start your 90-day plan.
Relax. It's not here for your job.
Teach it the routine parts. Spend the time you get back on the parts that need you.
| Keeping spreadsheets updated | 18 |
| Meeting notes & follow-ups | 14 |
| Invoices & paperwork | 12 |
| Checking competitor prices | 9 |
| The weekly sales report | 9 |
Conviction. Art. Sense. Judgment.
These come from you. Not the machine.
Every AI task is one of three things.
Know
Research · reasoning · brainstorming. Input and output are understanding.
Do
Send an email · make a purchase · book, pay, post. Input: intent. Output: a transaction of some sort.
Delegate these with the most care. A bad draft can be fixed. A bad transaction already happened.
Show
Decks · sites · videos · software. Input: a message. Output: something consumable.
The climb.
It began as a sketch of the brain.
The learning lives in the weights.
Every connection is a number. Training nudges trillions of them until the guesses get good. The finished model is that file of numbers.
It predicts the next word. Nothing more.
Tokens
It reads and writes in chunks, not words. Cost and speed are counted in chunks.
Context
It sees one window of conversation. When the window fills, the oldest lines fall out.
Made-up facts
There is always a next word, even where it knows nothing. A likely word is not a true word.
Where does my data go?
To the model maker's servers, under your plan's rules. Free plans may learn from your chats. Business plans promise not to. Every tool has a toggle.
nothing you wouldn't email an outside vendorThe lay of the land.
Same brief · three machines · live
The wider map.
LLM
The daily drivers, plus the open ones from China.
Images
Product shots, edits, concepts.
Video
Clips from a sentence.
Music & audio
Songs and voices from a brief.
Product photography & branding
Pack shots, backgrounds, brand looks.
Research
Your documents and the open web, with citations.
Software agents
Describe it; they build it. Session 2 lives here.
Open weights: models you can own.
Remember the file of numbers? Some labs publish it. Download it, run it on your own machine. Nothing leaves the building.
Grow, don't chase.
Tools will keep changing under us. What holds: your principles, your examples, your saved sessions.
one team conversation a monthLearn for the AI of tomorrow.
Build around approach, not tools.
Getting the most out of AI is not a technical problem.
It's a communication problem.
Three moves. On repeat.
Pick the right AI for the task.
When in doubt, ask AI which AI to use.
Don't perfect the prompt. Frame the conversation.
The session is the unit, not the message.
Great examples beat great instructions.
Show what good looks like. Show what bad looks like.
Ask AI to ask you questions.
Socratic beats one-shot. Every single time.
AI wants to give you a quick win. Don't take it.
Push back. Ask what it's holding back.
Prompt the back office.
- Pick two chores from your own list: spreadsheets, minutes, invoices.
- Build a reusable prompt for each in the prompt builder.
- Save both. They become skill material in Session 2.
Ask AI for help with AI.
Use the machines on each other.
Ask AI to write your prompts.
- Learn how different media need different prompts: an image, an Instagram post, a song, a research question, a slide show.
- Ask AI to help you.
Iteration is everything.
Three to five passes. Every time.
One image. Five versions.
- Pick one product shot and generate it.
- Then regenerate four more times, changing one thing in the prompt each pass.
- Keep the best version, and note what you changed to get there.
Never trust one machine.
Same task. Three models. Compare.
One cross-check.
- Same task, three machines: Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini.
- Note where they agree, and where they diverge.
- Let a colleague judge the winner, blind.
Always humanize the output.
Nothing ships raw. Deslop every time.
Your sessions become your SOP.
The conversations are the corpus. Guard them.
The fifteen.
All of them, one page →Before Session 2.
- Two saved back-office prompts.
- Five prompts written by AI, one per medium.
- One image, five versions.
- One cross-check across three machines.
- And as a team: which AI do we standardise on? Bring the pick.
Agents, skills and a plan.
Next time, everyone in this room builds real software.