Ivee Claude Cowork Workshop
Nobody in that room had their hands on a keyboard except me.
The question I was chasing
What does a watch-only demo actually leave behind, when nobody in the room gets to build anything?
Ivee is the UK government's official AI events provider. They contracted me for one session inside a programme I had no hand in designing: 150 people, online, on Claude Cowork. Ivee trains the general public, so the room ran from chat-box-only to already building. I opened on the arc from chat to cowork to code, because a demo only lands if the room knows which layer it is watching. After that, everything had to survive one test. Would anyone actually do this on Monday?
The constraints
Online, one screen, and 150 people who could only watch. Every format that actually teaches this, a cohort, a hackathon, a pairing session, was off the table. At 150 there is no one-to-one, and nothing they took away could depend on their setup matching mine.
The demos also had to be small enough to finish live. That ruled out anything I could not get from nothing to done in front of the room. Most impressive AI work is impressive because of the hours nobody sees.
The decisions that mattered
Show the admin, not the spectacle. The file demos were receipts and invoices: Cowork reading a folder, using vision to read the receipts, then building the expense report from them. Everyone in that room has that job. Almost nobody has one that generative video solves. It cost me the applause moment and bought the recognition one.
Use Ivee's own brand guidelines, not a sandbox. The Chrome demo summarised real blog posts into short social posts, then handed them to Canva to lay out against Ivee's actual brand rules. A demo on invented brand guidelines proves the model can write. A demo on the client's proves the output could go out.
End on a skill, not on a demo. Everything before it was watchable and unrepeatable. So I built the chain into a Claude skill in front of the room: blog post in, short social posts out, Canva producing the visuals. The session finished on one command that reruns all of it.
Built with: Claude Cowork, Claude in Chrome, Claude Skills, Canva
Where it landed
The skill runs. One command takes a blog post and returns short social posts with Canva visuals on Ivee's brand. It was built in front of the room rather than shown to it.
The limit is in how fast it looked. I built that skill quickly because I already knew the shape of it before I started typing. A room watching that learns the thing is possible, not that they can do it by Thursday. If I ran the session again I would build something slower and worse on purpose, and let the room watch me get it wrong.
Part of the Rolling Waves work archive.