AI at Work · For owners and operations leaders of teams of 10 to 150

Your team has AI. Your work hasn't changed yet.

I help organizations find where work gets stuck. Then I connect AI to the tools you already use, like email, shared drives, spreadsheets, and your CRM, so routine work takes less of your team's week.

Ask about a pilot workshopStart with a 90-minute workshop for your team. Pilot fee $2,500.

Justine Bassett, smiling, in a warm office

Sound familiar?

You pay for ChatGPT or Copilot. A few people use it. Nothing about how work moves has changed.
Someone rebuilds the same report by hand every week.
Follow-up depends on someone remembering.
What your business knows lives in inboxes and in two or three people's heads.
You're not sure what's safe to put into AI, so people either avoid it or don't ask.

The tools can now handle much of this. What's missing is someone who understands both the tools and your work.

What AI-enabled work can look like

An illustration of the kind of change we look for.

Monday morning, before

A property manager starts the week opening email, checking maintenance requests, scanning a lease spreadsheet, and reconstructing what needs attention.

Monday morning, after

A briefing is waiting with open issues, upcoming renewals, unanswered requests, and draft follow-ups ready for review. She still makes every decision.

She just doesn't spend the first hour finding the work.

That's the shift we explore: given what's possible now, why are we still doing it this way?

What we might find, and fix

Every organization is different, so we start by looking at your work. These are the kinds of improvements that often turn up, and that we can build together once we know which ones are worth it.

A morning briefing that's already done

Open issues, unanswered requests, and upcoming deadlines are pulled from your email, calendar, and files, with drafts ready for review.

An assistant that knows your business

It works from the policies, past proposals, pricing, and examples you approve, so new staff can find answers and drafts sound like you.

Handoffs that move on their own

A form comes in, the CRM updates, the right person is notified, and the follow-up is drafted.

Spreadsheets you can ask questions of

The data you already keep becomes a live dashboard that shows what's changing, what's unusual, and where to look next.

Clear guardrails

You decide which tools are approved, what data can go where, and who reviews AI output before it reaches a customer.

Whatever we build, a person stays in charge of the decisions and reviews anything that goes to a customer. Your team spends less time finding and moving work, and more time doing it.

Recent work

A health practice that stopped reordering from memory

Supplies at a small health practice were reordered by memory, so some things ran short while others piled up. I used AI to analyze their inventory and set minimum stock levels and reorder points, then redesigned the forms staff and patients use every day. I built the changes with the people who would use them, so they stuck.

Start with a workshop: bring the work that drives your team crazy.

Your team doesn't need to know much about AI. They just need to know what feels repetitive, tedious, unnecessarily manual, or harder than it should be. Everyone knows that.

Map the work

Together we get the real work out of people's heads and onto the table: recurring tasks, handoffs, reports, meetings, follow-ups, searches, and all the little things that quietly consume a week.

Find the friction

We look for where people are repeatedly searching, copying, summarizing, checking, formatting, chasing, or recreating something that already exists.

Try it yourself

Everyone works hands-on with the same sample inbox, written to look like your team's real work, and turns a cluttered pile of messages into a prioritized list and drafted replies. No setup, no IT approvals, and no real company data.

See one of your tasks transformed

In our planning conversation, we choose one recurring task from your team's actual work. I build a working version in advance and walk through the before and after live, so everyone sees what changes and where human judgment still matters.

Choose what to try

The team sorts the opportunities by value and effort and picks one manageable experiment to test first, with an owner and a way to tell whether it helped.

Designed to get the whole room working

Nobody sits through this workshop.

Picture your team on their feet, gathered around laptops and walls of sticky notes, mapping their own work, debating what drives them crazy, and watching ideas take shape in real time.

I'm an experience designer. I design every workshop backward from one goal: a whole team curious, hands-on, and ready to try something new with their own work.

AI can feel intimidating, overhyped, or threatening. In the room, it becomes something people get curious about, together.

“I've been to a hundred of these workshops. This was one of the best.”

A participant at the Finard Properties offsite, Pepperell Mill, Biddeford

“Justine helped our nurses see themselves as innovators… The design sprints brought our team's idea for a microlearning app to life, turning a concept into a tangible, practical tool. Our team left with not only a strong prototype but also the confidence and leadership mindset to continue driving innovation.”

Kathleen Sheehan-Tarte
Director of Nurse Education, MaineHealth

Justine standing beside a long wall covered in colorful sticky notes from a workshop, arms raised in celebration

Different jobs. Familiar friction.

Your workshop is tailored to your organization. During our planning conversation, we choose the examples most relevant to your team. Here are some of the patterns we might explore.

Sales

The CRM nobody updates

Calls happen. Notes live in notebooks. Follow-up depends on memory. AI can help turn meeting notes into structured updates and draft the next communication for review.

Reporting

From spreadsheet to something you can question

Instead of sorting, filtering, and rebuilding the same analysis, turn the data into an interactive view you can explore: What's changing? What's unusual? Where should I look next?

Leadership

Walk into meetings prepared

AI can pull relevant context from notes, files, calendars, and other sources so a leader starts with a useful briefing instead of assembling one from scratch.

Institutional knowledge

When one person carries too much in their head

Examples, standards, processes, and hard-won expertise can become AI-assisted resources that help others work more independently, while judgment stays with the expert.

What people say about working with me

“It was such a success! The team loved it.”

Finard Properties
After a hands-on offsite at the Pepperell Mill campus in Biddeford, Maine

“While framed as an ‘icebreaker’ it really was much more than that: team building, problem-solving, collaboration, strategizing, and fun! It was so effective that we would like to explore… building such a session into the standing agenda.”

Bi-College Deans
University of New England

Meet your guide

I've always been a translator.

I was a political science major who ended up leading a mainframe development team. Since then I've mapped how work moved through Bath Iron Works, built a system adopted across Iridium's 11 global gateways, redesigned how the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History develops visitor experiences, and founded the University of New England's Office of Innovation.

I'm building these systems in my own businesses first, connecting AI to email, files, and everyday tools, so what I show you is something I've actually used.

Different rooms, same job: take something new and intimidating, make it make sense, build what helps, and leave people feeling competent with it.

Named a 2022 Mainer of the Year by Maine Magazine.

“The solution that you built, with virtually no user requirements, was a phenomenal accomplishment…”

Vice President, Business Operations, Iridium

See more of my work →

From first look to working systems

Most teams move through three steps. You can start at any of them, and you decide after each one whether to go further.

See what's possible

A talk for your group

A lively 45 to 60 minute live demonstration of what AI-enabled work looks like, with plenty of time for questions. Built for chambers, associations, peer groups, and leadership teams.

Select community talks offered at no fee. Speaking fee for conferences and private events.

Invite me to speak

Find your opportunities · Where most teams start

AI-Enabled Work Workshop

$2,500

Pilot fee. Standard fee $3,500.

Larger groups priced on request.

A planning conversation with you, a 90-minute hands-on workshop for up to 16 people, a hands-on sample-inbox exercise for everyone, and one of your team's real tasks rebuilt in advance and shown live.

You leave with:

Your AI Opportunity Map

A shared map of your team's recurring work and a shortlist of the best opportunities, ranked by value and effort. Written up and sent within a week.

A plan for your first experiment

One change your team can test on its own, with an owner and a way to tell whether it helped, plus a follow-up call about 30 days later to look at what happened and decide what's next.

Why a pilot: I'm looking for a few teams to find useful opportunities, test one manageable change, and learn together what works in practice. In exchange for the pilot rate, you measure your experiment, and if it produces a meaningful result, I can share the story. You review anything before it's shared, and I can leave your name off. Three pilot spots, booked by December 15, 2026.

Become a pilot partner

Put it to work

Build alongside you

When your team wants help implementing an experiment, we take a priority from your Opportunity Map and build it together: connecting your tools, automating a recurring handoff, or setting up an assistant that knows your business. I build with your team, so the people doing the work know how it runs.

We measure the result against where you started, then decide together what comes next.

Not included in the workshop fee. Scoped and priced separately, from your plan. No ongoing commitment.

Smaller business? Skip the workshop. We can start with one problem and build the fix together. Tell me what it is.

What could your team stop doing by hand three months from now?

Tell me where work feels slower or more manual than it should. A 20-minute call is usually enough to know whether a workshop would help.

justine@wedesignfutures.com