Following the April kickoff sessions, the TCAI Practice Lab is now continuing as an ongoing peer-learning and inquiry space for transformation practitioners exploring how AI is reshaping sustainability transformation work.
The Lab is designed as a cumulative journey rather than a set of stand-alone events. Each session builds on the last, helping participants develop shared language, practical insight, and collective wisdom around AI practice for sustainability transformations.
Participants are encouraged to join regularly, contribute examples from their own work, and help shape a broader understanding of effective, ethical, and context-sensitive AI use.
The next phase of the Practice Lab will move from shared reflection into hands-on inquiry. Participants will work with real workflows from their own practice, explore where AI may or may not support those workflows, and reflect on the ethical and practical implications of AI-supported change.
The aim is not to advocate for AI adoption, but to build a more nuanced understanding of how different kinds of work, intelligence, judgment, and collaboration interact.
Upcoming Practice Lab Sessions
Session 2: Mapping a Real Workflow
Tuesday 2 June, 16:00 CEST
What do we actually do as practitioners, and where do different kinds of intelligence matter?
Participants will be asked to bring a real workflow or recurring activity from their day-to-day work. That could include regular sensemaking activities and staying on top of developments in their field, team coordination, planning events, synthesising reports, or more technical work like systems mapping or facilitation.
Together, we will map our workflows step by step and identify where human capacities such as judgment, relational thinking, collective sensemaking, tacit or embodied knowledge, creativity, and discernment matter most. The aim is not to advocate for AI adoption, but to develop a more nuanced understanding of how different kinds of work and intelligence interact.
Session 3: Exploring AI Augmentation and Its Limits
Tuesday 23 June, 16:00 CEST
Where could AI help — and where shouldn’t it?
Building on the workflows mapped in Session 2, we will explore where AI tools or AI-supported processes could potentially augment parts of the workflow.
This includes identifying possible AI interventions, exploring existing tools or examples, discussing risks and unintended consequences, and naming which parts of the workflow participants do not want to augment — and why.
The session will also consider questions of dependency, deskilling, loss of tacit knowledge, trust, and democratic legitimacy.
Session 4: Reflection, Implementation, and Ethical Consideration
Tuesday 14 July, 16:00 CEST
Should we actually do this?
This session creates space to reflect more deeply on the implications of the augmented workflows explored in the previous sessions.
Participants will consider what it would realistically take to implement these changes, what forms of trust or organizational buy-in would be needed, what safeguards may be necessary, and how these choices sit ethically and politically.
The session will invite participants to reflect not only on what AI can do, but on what kinds of practice we want to cultivate.
Session 5: Documenting and Sharing Emerging AI Practices
Tuesday 11 August, 16:00 CEST
This session will focus on exploring and organizing emerging examples of AI use in transformation practice.
Participants will collaboratively examine relevant cases, reports, tools, and practitioner examples to identify recurring tensions, promising practices, and unresolved questions. Together, we will experiment with lightweight ways of collecting, tagging, synthesizing, and making sense of these materials, while also reflecting critically on what kinds of knowledge work should — and should not — be augmented by AI.
Session 6: Exploring and Organising Emerging Insights
Tuesday 1 September, 16:00 CEST
Participants will take ownership of one or two source texts from the shared knowledge base and come together in small pods to identify, discuss, and organise recurring themes, tensions, and examples.
This session will help the group begin making sense of what is emerging across the knowledge base, while connecting external insights back to participants’ own practices and questions.
Session 7: Surfacing and Refining Emerging Patterns
Tuesday 22 September, 16:00 CEST
This hands-on session will focus on documenting, refining, and connecting potential patterns of practice that may contribute to the broader AI4ST pattern language.
Participants will work together to identify what kinds of AI use appear effective, context-sensitive, ethically grounded, and relevant to sustainability transformation practice.
Join the Practice Lab
The TCAI Practice Lab is open to transformation practitioners, researchers, educators, facilitators, evaluators, community builders, and others working at the intersection of systems change, sustainability, and social learning.
You do not need to be an AI expert. The Lab welcomes people who are actively experimenting with AI, people who are cautious or skeptical, and people who are still forming their questions.
Because this is a cumulative inquiry, we encourage participants to join on a regular basis rather than only attending individual sessions.
