Six months ago, Riseup Labs made a deliberate commitment: to build an AI-first culture from the ground up. This month, we took stock of how far we have come — and charted the path forward.
We hosted an internal AI-First Culture Workshop led by Mohammad Mahdee-uz Zaman, an AI transformation consultant with an impressive track record spanning AWS, Dell, and Verizon. His work today is focused on helping businesses move beyond surface-level AI adoption into genuine, organisation-wide transformation — which made him exactly the right person to lead this session.
Two Sessions, One Goal
The workshop was structured across two dedicated sessions to ensure every function at Riseup Labs received focused, relevant guidance.
The first session was designed for our business-focused teams — Sales, Marketing, Product Management, and Operations. The second was tailored for our engineering side — Developers, Designers, QA, DevOps, and Project Managers. Each group explored how AI applies specifically to their workflows, their challenges, and their opportunities.
Where We Stand After Six Months
Since launching the AI-First Culture Initiative, Riseup Labs has made meaningful progress. AI tools have become a genuine part of how we work — embedded across teams and day-to-day processes rather than sitting on the margins.
That is a real achievement, and one we are proud of. But the workshop was also honest about what comes next.
Using AI tools is one thing. Evolving your business processes around AI-native thinking is another. The distinction matters. True AI-nativity is not about stacking tools onto existing workflows — it is about rethinking those workflows from first principles, identifying where AI can create compounding value, and spotting new business opportunities that simply did not exist before the AI era.
That is the frontier this workshop pushed us toward.
What We Covered
Alongside the strategic discussion, the sessions introduced new tools and approaches for boosting productivity across both business and engineering functions. A dedicated Q&A segment gave our teams space to surface lingering questions, explore edge cases, and dig deeper into areas where the path forward was not yet clear.
What Comes Next
The AI-First Culture journey at Riseup Labs is ongoing, and our next session will push further into AI-native thinking — with a specific focus on unlocking untapped business opportunities in the AI-first era. We are not just asking how we can use AI better. We are asking what becomes possible for our clients, our products, and our organisation when AI is built into the foundation of how we think.
That is the question driving us forward.
This page was last edited on 8 June 2026, at 5:30 pm
Start a conversation with our team to solve complex challenges and move forward with confidence.
