The Thirty Minutes a Week Changing Our Relationship With AI

How we're building internal AI capability without pretending to have the perfect recipe

Picture the same discovery being made three times, by three different people, in three different corners of the company, and none of them ever finding out about each other.

That’s roughly what was happening with AI at REBORRN.

Not because people weren’t experimenting (they were, constantly), but because the learnings were siloed. They stayed close to whoever did the work, attached to individual projects and quietly disappearing when the next thing came along.

Useful patterns would surface and then vanish, hard-won lessons would evaporate, and we weren’t accumulating any of it. “People were working with generative AI in different ways, but mostly on their own,” Radu Gavrila, our Engagement Manager and long-time AI practitioner, notes. “We didn’t have a place where we could talk, listen, and pick things up from each other.”

To bridge that gap, we launched Ctrl+Alt+AI.

Hosted by Radu, this weekly thirty-minute session is open to anyone willing to step out of delivery mode. It’s a space to talk honestly about how AI is applied across the business.

The name is a nod to the famous keyboard shortcut, the combination you hit to rise above the many applications you’re juggling and see everything at once. In the same way, Ctrl+Alt+AI is a weekly thirty-minute pause from project delivery, multitasking, and the constant forward motion of client work. A moment to zoom out and see the bigger picture.

We haven’t found the perfect recipe yet. And that’s kind of the point.

We are transparent about the fact that we are still in “beta.” We’ve experimented with session lengths, tested pre-session project spotlights to build anticipation, and even run demo “battles” to compare different AI approaches side-by-side.

We remain in a continuous learning mode; each iteration sharpens our sense of what “useful” means, brings in new examples (what a power to have!), new tools, and new methods, with one rule remaining a constant: whatever we talk about must be grounded in reality.

Amidst the tinkering, the spirit remains constant: it is a space where unfinished thinking is welcome, where failed experiments are as valuable as successful ones, and where nobody has to pretend they have it all figured out.

The session also serves as a necessary counterweight to a hidden risk. Radu has observed how easily AI can quietly erode human judgment. “A lot of people out there are trying to outsource their thinking entirely,” he warns. He likens it to zero gravity; when muscles stop being used, they weaken.

Ctrl+Alt+AI exists to prevent that atrophy. It is a place to stay sharp, stay curious, and stay in the driver’s seat. “I see AI as a challenger, a mirror, a spotter,” Radu explains. “Something that helps you push further, as long as you’re the one steering.”

It’s also an expression of something we practice all the time with our clients. Where others arrive with pre-packaged answers and spend the engagement convincing you they fit, we start with the problem. And then, instead of presenting our thinking through a deck, we build something nimble and test it in real time. The prototype is the fastest way to find out if we’ve understood the question.

Internally, we call this Demo not Memo: the principle that a working prototype, no matter how rough, will always move a conversation further than a polished document. We’re excited to share more of this practice, rooted in our core belief that the fastest way to learn is to build.

The most powerful Ctrl+Alt+AI sessions prove this out. The shift in the room doesn’t happen during the discovery of a new tool, but at the exact moment someone shows what they actually made with it.

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We don’t yet know exactly what this ritual looks like at its best. But we know what we’d lose without it.

Without Ctrl+Alt+AI, AI-enhanced capabilities stay individual, or at best, locked within the boundaries of projects. With it, it becomes a shared muscle, one that makes REBORRN better, even 1% at a time.