Newsletter | September 2026
From Caversham House this month: 3 strategic insights on the trends reshaping how organisations think about AI, 3 tools we've been testing at the frontline and 3 training courses to help your teams build real capability.
1. The Month in View: 3 Strategic Trends
Curated insights to help you read the room and lead the shift.
Trend 1: Protect the junior pipeline, then rebuild it
Entry-level hiring is already slowing in AI-exposed work. The risk is the talent pipeline dries up. A better approach is to nurture junior talent, treating early careers as a residency in judgement, not a short internship.
- Goldman Sachs finds job pressure is steepest for entry-level workers, across more than 800 US occupations (CNBC / Goldman Sachs).
- When AI adoption reaches only 15 to 20% in major developed markets, that is already enough to move jobs; a 10% rise in occupational AI exposure hit junior hiring several times harder than overall employment (Goldman Sachs).
- Prompting is not literacy: graduates need to explain why they used AI, verify what it produced, and own the result, with clear rules on when AI is required, permitted or banned (The Conversation).
Call to action: Do not leave junior capability to universities, and do not freeze the graduate intake. Rebuild the first years of work as structured practice: real client exposure, explicit AI rules, and judgement that still has to be learned on the job.
- Protect entry-level hiring in AI-exposed functions; treat a freeze as a pipeline risk, not a productivity win
- Put accountable AI literacy into onboarding: juniors explain, verify and own AI-assisted work from day one
- Publish when AI is required, permitted or banned, so early-career staff are not guessing the rules
Relevant courses:
Designing AI onboarding for early-career starters
Read more:
Goldman Finds AI Already Squeezing Jobs for Entry-Level Workers | Students Need Accountable AI Literacy Not Only Technical Skills | From Intern to Leader via EY Career Residency Path
Trend 2: Training is the real AI investment
Businesses rank AI as their main strategic priority, with training the most planned spend for the next year. That investment pays off when it builds transferable judgement, not better ChatGPT users.
- 67% of learning teams rank AI as their top strategy priority, yet 75% report significant skills gaps and only 14% say they are very effective at upskilling (Fosway).
- Among US workers involved in AI decisions, AI training is the most planned investment for the next 12 months at 39%, ahead of more agents at 21% (Liferay / No Jitter).
- Teaching Copilot or ChatGPT is tool training; durable capability is knowing where AI adds value, how to judge output quality, and how to protect information across tools (Caversham House).
Call to action: Put training ahead of the next round of licences. Design programmes around transferable competencies, and measure when, why and how people use AI, not how many seats you issued.
- Rank AI, skills and transformation above compliance in the L&D agenda; treat the 75% skills-gap figure as a capability failure (Fosway)
- Move learning into the flow of work; few teams are advanced at measuring impact or in-workflow practice
- Upskill learning professionals themselves so they can train the workforce without waiting for a vendor course
Relevant courses:
Read more:
Why AI Tools Alone Do Not Build AI Skills | AI Surges to the Top of Learning Strategy Priorities | AI Training Is the Most Planned Investment Over Next Year
Trend 3: Middle managers will make or break agents
Agentic programmes are effective when managers champion everyday use. Process design and capability building are core requirements to enable successful transformations.
- Successful AI transformations follow a 1:3:5 pattern: for every dollar spent on agentic technology, spend three on process redesign and five on capability building and adoption (McKinsey).
- 99% of CHROs say AI matters to strategy, yet half lack confidence in managers' ability to guide employee AI use; when managers strongly champion AI, 33% of employees say work has been transformed, versus 4% when they do not (Gallup).
- Nearly 30% of surveyed firms already run agents in production and another 26% are piloting them; people now need to review agent decisions, not only prompt assistants (Liferay / No Jitter).
Call to action: Spend more on process redesign and adoption than on the agents themselves. Give middle managers capacity and coaching, not another one-off course, and pair every agent with a human approval workflow.
- Budget to the 1:3:5 pattern; measure better work, not logins
- Design for the four fears middle managers face: being found out, accountability without control, the unknown, and losing professional edge
- Make managers the primary lever for AI-positive culture, with ongoing support so capability building does not become another burden
- Train people to review agent decisions, with human approval, security and trust treated as adoption blockers rather than afterthoughts
Relevant courses:
When AI Agents Join Your Team: Governance for Leaders
Read more:
How Leaders Can Close the Agentic AI Adoption Gap | How Manager Support Shapes AI Effects on Workplace Culture | AI Training Is the Most Planned Investment Over Next Year
2. Tools
This month our design team has been testing Copilot across Excel, Word and PowerPoint for their design requirements. Here are their three top one-prompt features:
1. Word: Using Copilot to build a contents page, headers, footers and page numbers
Make sure section titles use Word's built-in Heading styles first; Copilot builds the contents page from those.
Prompt: Create a table of contents, then add a header with the document title and today's date, and add page numbers to the footer.
2. Excel: Using Copilot to apply a theme across a workbook
Copilot's @theme-design skill reads the sheet and applies a coordinated look in one pass: colour palette, table and header styling, chart formatting, borders and layout so the important numbers stand out. It does not change your formulas or data.
Prompt: @theme-design Apply an Excel theme across this workbook. Keep the existing formulas, values, sheet names and table structure.
3. PowerPoint: Using Copilot to match a new deck to an existing one
Attach the reference deck (the one whose look you want to copy) in the Copilot pane, add your content or source file if needed, then use the prompt.
Prompt: Create a 10-slide presentation using the supplied content. Use the attached deck as the visual reference. Match its layouts, theme, colours and overall style.
3. Training Update: Learning Spotlight
Team leaders · 30 min
Designing AI onboarding for early-career starters
This course helps you build your organisation's AI onboarding training for early-career starters: your organisation's tools, its rules, its escalation routes, and the habits you want them to build from day one. You can use this information to build your own course, deliver a presentation or create a document.
Takeaway: A complete seven-section outline with a plan to keep the content current, text for a presentation, and a quick reference document for your early-career starters.
All staff · Pop-up course · 15 minutes
Keeping Up Without Burning Out: Managing the AI Update Avalanche
With more major AI model releases and tool changes in a single month than most industries see in a year, employees need a sustainable system for staying current, not a strategy that requires constant effort to maintain.
Takeaway: A personal AI learning system: a one-page template for building a simple, sustainable habit of staying current, including a suggested weekly routine, a curated shortlist of reliable sources and a format for sharing one insight per month with your team.
C-Suite and senior leaders · 30–45 min
Updated with latest research
Hiring an AI-First CTO
Equip leaders with a structured approach to hiring an AI-first CTO who can drive technology strategy, AI-enabled transformation and sustainable competitive advantage.
Takeaway: A job description for an AI-first CTO that leaders can use to shape recruiting, assessment and onboarding.
Ready to take the next step?
- Already a subscriber? These modules are live in your training portal now.
- Thinking about subscribing? Take a look at our 2026 Training Subscriptions to see what's included and how it works for your team.
- Want to talk strategy? Book a briefing or contact us and we can work through your 2026 AI priorities together.