The hardest part of our Genie rollout wasn't building the room. It was 9am the next morning — when people still opened Excel.
We rolled out a Genie Space to a UK enterprise Finance function (heavy excel users). The room was scoped well and the answers were good. But adoption wasn't rising — and not because the platform was hard. It was stalling because we needed to train people properly, not only how to use Genie, but also how to think in Genie.
The gap was a mental model.
- Excel filtering is deterministic: you already know the rows you want, so you slice down to them.
- Genie is a conversation. You ask a colleague a question that comes back, and refine— a follow-up, a correction, a "now break that down by region." People who keep the Excel model try and give up when the first answer isn't exact. People who treat Genie as a colleague they iterate with get there in three turns.
So our training had to cover three things, not one: how to use the platform, how to prompt, and how to change the mental model. Here's the sequence that worked.
- Step 1: Lead with the mindset, not the UI. Open every session with the reframe — Genie is not a search box or a filter; it's a colleague you ask, then push back on. Spend the first ten minutes here, before anyone touches the screen. If people keep the filtering model, no amount of UI training sticks.
- Step 2: Show the magic before the mechanics. Start with one genuinely impressive answer to a question they actually ask on a Monday morning — before you explain how it works. The "how" only lands once they want it.
- Step 3: Teach prompting as a skill. Three habits: be specific (name the measure, the period, the grouping), give context, and — above all — iterate. Model a real exchange live: a vague first question, a mediocre answer, then two follow-ups that sharpen it. The lesson people need to see is that the follow-up is the skill, not the opening question.
Show them exactly what "iterating like you would with a colleague" looks like (check the screenshots below)
- You: What is our monthly actual cost?
- Genie: Monthly spend for the past year
- You: Can you split each month with subcategories and present in the stacked bar view?
- Genie: [returns a bar chart view]
- You: Can you do a month-by-month comparison on different categories
- Genie: [returns the month-by-month change per category]
4. Step 4: Split the group into breakout rooms (Small groups of 7–9). Big enough for discussion, small enough that
everyone can present their question in the room. People don't change a habit by watching a demo; they change it by doing it once, with help
5. Step 5: Let peers teach the next cohort. The person who "got it" this week becomes part of the champion's network and teaches/presents in next session. A colleague saying "I used to export to Excel too" moves more people than any expert — and it scales the rollout without a central team as the bottleneck.
the bottleneck.
6. Step 6: Anchor the new habit to the old trigger. Find the specific task the old tool owned at 9am, and rehearse doing that exact task in Genie. A habit only changes when the new thing beats the old thing at the moment you'd have reached for it.
What good looks like (expected outcome)
By the end of one session, every participant has done the full loop themselves at least once: asked a real question, hit a mediocre answer, and recovered it with a follow-up — without you touching their keyboard. That single recovery is the moment the mental model flips. Within a couple of weeks you should see people opening Genie for the recurring Monday-morning question they used to export to Excel for — that's the real success metric, not how many people attended the training.
Common errors (and how to fix them)
- Chasing one perfect prompt. People write a long, exact question, get a wrong answer, and quit. Fix: ask something short, then refine — the follow-up is the tool, not the opening line.
- Prompts too vague. "Show me sales" gets a vague answer. Fix: name the measure, the period, and the grouping.
- Reverting to Excel the moment an answer looks off. Fix: correct Genie in-thread, the way you'd correct a colleague ("no, I meant net not gross") — don't abandon the conversation.
- Teaching the buttons first. UI-led training leaves the Excel mindset intact. Fix: mindset first, mechanics second.
- Training a big room with no opportunity for each person to try it out with others. In a room of 30, most people never type anything. Fix: keep it to 7–9 so everyone actually asks a question.
The takeaway: a Genie Room only creates value when someone chooses it over their old habit. That's won in how you teach, not in what you build — and the thing you're really teaching isn't the product. It's a new way of asking.
