Two weekends in Clonmel where you actually build something
I run these workshops out of Annerpark House in Clonmel because I got tired of conferences where you sit through slides for two days and leave with a tote bag and a vague sense that AI is important. That isn't useful. If you're going to give up a weekend, you should leave with a working thing — a small, deployable piece of organisational intelligence that runs on your own infrastructure and answers a real question your business actually has.
The two dates for next year are 25–26 July 2026 and 29–30 August 2026. Both run Saturday and Sunday, 09:00 to 17:00, with lunch and coffee provided. Numbers are deliberately small so I can sit with each attendee and work through their actual data, not a sanitised demo dataset.
Who these are for
These are not beginner courses and they are not for hobbyists. The people who get the most out of them are:
- Heads of operations and IT in Irish SMEs and mid-market firms who have been asked to "do something with AI" and want a path that doesn't end with their data sitting on someone else's server in another jurisdiction.
- Compliance officers and DPOs in regulated sectors — financial services, legal, healthcare, public bodies — who need to understand what on-premise AI actually looks like before they sign off on anything.
- Founders and CTOs of Irish software companies who want to add an intelligence layer to their own product without handing their customer data to a US foundation model provider.
- Internal data and analytics leads who already have the data plumbing but need a working pattern for question-answering across documents, tickets, contracts, and reports.
If you have never used a command line, this isn't the right weekend. If you have a team that ships software and you want to know how to bolt the Intelligence Brain onto what you already run, it is.
What you'll actually do across the two days
Saturday — the architecture and the build
I start with the architecture, because the architecture is the bit most people get wrong. We walk through how the Intelligence Brain sits behind your firewall, how it ingests documents, how it indexes them, and where the model itself lives. We talk about why the model living on your hardware changes your obligations under GDPR and the EU AI Act, and what that means in practice when your auditor asks.
By lunchtime on Saturday everyone has a Brain instance running on a provided machine, ingesting a sample dataset. By the end of Saturday everyone has swapped that sample dataset for something from their own organisation — anonymised if needed — and is asking it real questions.
Sunday — the integration and the handover
Sunday is about turning the Saturday prototype into something that survives contact with a real environment. We cover authentication, role-based access so that the finance team's questions don't surface HR data, audit logging, backup, and how to integrate the Brain with the systems you already run — typically Microsoft 365, a document management system, a CRM, and whatever ticketing tool you've ended up with.
The afternoon is hands-on troubleshooting. You bring the awkward question — the one your organisation actually needs answered — and we work through how to get the Brain to answer it well, and how to know when it's wrong.
What you take home
- A configured Intelligence Brain build, on a USB drive, that runs on your own hardware on Monday morning.
- The deployment notes specific to your environment — written down, not just in your head.
- A clear view of which questions are worth asking a Brain and which are not. This is the bit nobody else teaches and it saves more money than the workshop costs.
- A direct line to me for thirty days afterwards for the inevitable "I tried to do X and it broke" message.
Practical things — venue, travel, food
Annerpark House is in Clonmel, Co. Tipperary. It's about two hours from Dublin by car, ninety minutes from Cork, and an hour and a half from Limerick. There's parking on site. For people coming from Dublin I'd suggest staying locally on the Saturday night — Clonmel has plenty of hotels and the town is walkable in the evening, which is a more useful debrief than driving home tired.
Lunch is provided both days and accommodates the usual dietary requirements if you let me know in advance. Coffee is constant. The wifi is fast enough for ten people to be downloading model weights at once, which I learned the hard way.
Numbers and signing up
I cap each weekend at twelve people. That isn't a marketing trick — past twelve I can't sit with everyone properly and the value drops. The July weekend usually fills first because of the school holidays.
If you want to come, email me directly with which weekend you're aiming for and a sentence or two about what your organisation does and what you'd want a Brain to answer. I'll come back to you with availability and the practicalities.
What to do next
If you want the broader picture of what the Intelligence Brain is and how organisations are using it before you commit a weekend, start with the Intelligence Brain overview. If you already know you're in financial services or legal and want to see how the Brain handles the specifics of your sector, the vertical pages under that hub are the right next click. Either way — bring a real question. That's what makes the difference.