Our “Responsibility to Sanity”: What Can Facilitators Learn from an AI Readiness Tool?

This conference workshop presents Hyper Island’s AI Readiness Assessment Tool. Informed by a number of Future Skills workshops facilitated by Hyper Island and attended by leaders and managers engaging in AI with their coworkers, these sessions have revealed that the friction in AI adoption is rooted in human requirements—Readiness, Confidence, and Clarity—rather than technical limitations. To further investigate this hypothesis, we have designed a Hyper Island-facilitated workshop for Teesside University's Future Facing Learning Conference (2026). This provides a unique opportunity to invite educators to participate and engage in the findings and insights in relation to AI Readiness. In a bid to deepen critical reflections and feedback from participants on the need for such a tool, participants will have the opportunity to interact with a demo of the AI Readiness Tool. The workshop will then explore its outcomes and implications on roles and responsibilities as together we thenconsiderwhat may be required of us as humans in roles such as 'educator' and 'facilitator'? To support us in the process of making sense of our responsibilities, we are guided by three overarching questions: What is our AI Readiness tool, our design decisions and data telling us about individuals, organisations and industry sector needs today? What are we learning in the process about our professional practice as facilitators of exec ed level learners? How might we build on these learnings to inform the future of EdTech Innovation and Practice for leaders learning in/with their organisations and industries? Using the framework designed into the tool, we focus on key domains such as Leadership & Culture and Futures & Innovation, and share our desire for these domains to echo Jaron Lanier’s call to action, stressing the need for a human "responsibility to sanity" when engaging in digital innovation such as AI. Together with participants, we will consider how this may or may not be realistic and actionable in practice, and we will aim to surface insights in the room, retaining our curiosity in the value of humanness across organisational settings and industry sectors. The desired outcomes of this workshop aim to serve as a resource for those seeking to design and facilitate responsible, systematic innovation in AI adoption.