It was a real pleasure spending time with the team. Here's everything we covered, in a form anyone at the Guild can pick up and use, plus a couple of the resources we said we'd send across.
The Guild's instinct is the right one. Cautious, staged, policy-led, with the team brought along rather than pushed. A small team holds a lot of trust here, across a publishing rhythm, an awards calendar that runs a year ahead, and a network of producers, retailers, judges and sponsors who notice tone shifts quickly. AI can quietly take work off the team in all of those places, but the order in which it's introduced matters more than the speed.
The point of this page is to make the next step shorter than the last. A clear water cooler policy you can put up tomorrow. A fuller AI policy bundle you can adapt at your own pace. A starting set of moves for marketing and editorial. A nod to the operational and awards work some of you are already automating. And, on Copilot specifically, the one habit that protects the work the team puts in.
One side of A4. Visual. Memorable. Designed to live where the team will actually see it, not in a folder no one opens. Print it, pin it up, and the bulk of the day-to-day questions answer themselves. The version below is keyed to Microsoft Copilot, since that's the tool the team is using.
Our shared rules for getting the most out of Copilot, without putting the Guild, our subscribers, or our partners at risk.
The water cooler policy sets the culture. It doesn't replace the policy your auditors, partners and trustees will eventually want to see. The right shape is three short documents, in three different voices, each doing one job.
Two to four pages. For the team. Permitted and prohibited actions, how sensitive material gets handled, the accepted tools list, who can install what, the escalation path when someone's not sure. Written so anyone at the Guild can read it once and act on it without coming back to you.
One to two pages. For members, sponsors, judges and anyone who asks how the Guild manages AI. Transparency commitments. What we will and won't put through AI tools. The version you can hand to a partner who asks. Short, principled, signed by leadership.
The one above. One side of A4. In plain English. The version your most reluctant team member could read on a Monday morning and walk away knowing what's expected. Direct, human, no legalese.
Paste this into Copilot or Claude. It will ask you a small set of questions about the Guild, the team's appetite, and the data you handle, then write all three documents in order. Edit as needed.
Help me draft an AI policy for my organisation. I need three versions in three different voices. The three versions: 1. INTERNAL POLICY. Two to four pages. For my team. Covers permitted and prohibited actions, how sensitive material gets handled, the accepted tools list, who can install what, the escalation path when someone is not sure. Written so anyone on the team can read it once and act on it without coming back to me. 2. EXTERNAL POLICY. One to two pages. For members, partners, sponsors or anyone who asks how we manage AI. Transparency commitments. What we will and will not put through AI tools. The version I can hand to a partner who asks. Short, principled, signed by leadership. 3. WATER COOLER POLICY. One side of A4. In plain English. Sets the culture in public, not in a binder. The version my most reluctant team member could read on a Monday morning and walk away knowing what is expected. Direct, human, no legalese. To draft these well, ask me questions one at a time, maximum of twelve in total. Cover: - What we do, who we serve, how sensitive the data is - Our current AI tools and which ones we want on the accepted list - Our risk appetite and any regulatory context - Our cultural starting point: are people excited, hesitant, or somewhere in between - Any specific incidents or near-misses that have shaped our thinking When you have enough, draft all three documents. Show them to me in order. Use British English. No em dashes. No jargon. No "in today's fast-paced world".
If only one thing on this page gets done before next week, make it this. On the free Copilot the team is using, the protection that keeps prompts out of the wider training pool only kicks in when each person is signed in with their Guild work account. Personal account, no protection. Work account, commercial data protection applies. Same product, two very different stories.
So the discipline is small, but it is the whole game. Open Copilot. Look at the top corner. If it shows your Guild email, you're safe to draft, brainstorm and edit. If it shows a personal address or none at all, sign out, sign back in with the Guild account, and only then prompt. The two-second check in the water cooler policy above is exactly this habit.
When the Guild moves to a paid Microsoft 365 Copilot plan, an extra setting appears that controls whether prompts are used to improve the model. The simple advice when that day comes: turn it off. Until then, the sign-in habit is your protection. The policy tells people what to put in. The sign-in makes sure what they put in stays inside.
One of the most underused things AI can do for a media business is sit in for an audience before you publish. A synthetic focus group is exactly that. You describe the audience in detail, paste in the piece, and AI plays back how three or four different reader profiles would actually respond. Not as a replacement for real readers. As a way to catch the things you'd otherwise only learn after publication.
The same trick works on a subject line, a campaign idea, a sponsor proposal, an awards announcement. It is fastest at exactly the moment when you are most likely to skip the test, which is the moment that benefits most from one.
Paste this into Copilot or Claude. Replace the bracketed bits. The richer the audience descriptions, the more useful the response.
I want to run a synthetic focus group on a piece of work before I publish it. The audience: [describe in detail. Who they are, what they care about, what they read, what they buy, what they distrust. Three or four distinct profiles is plenty.] The piece: [paste the article, subject line, campaign concept, headline, proposal or whatever you want tested] For each profile, tell me: 1. The first reaction in their own voice (one or two sentences, sounding like them, not a summary). 2. What they would believe more strongly after reading this. 3. What would feel off, generic, or like it was not written for them. 4. The one change that would make this land harder for them specifically. Then, across all profiles, give me three things this piece is doing well, three things it is not doing well, and the single sharpest edit you would make. Use British English. No em dashes. No marketing speak.
A common AI failure mode is taking a piece of writing with personality and ironing it flat. This prompt does the opposite. Paste in two or three short examples of Guild writing you like, paste in the new piece, and Copilot will sharpen it without losing the voice.
Here's a piece of writing I want to sharpen, in the voice of the Guild of Fine Food. To learn the voice, read these two or three short examples first. Notice the rhythm, the level of warmth, the way the Guild talks about producers, food and trade, and the things the Guild would never write. Examples of Guild writing: """ [paste two or three short pieces, 200 to 400 words each, that sound exactly like the Guild] """ The piece I want sharpened: """ [paste the new piece here] """ Show me three things: 1. Two or three lines that already sound like the Guild, that I should keep. 2. Two or three lines that sound generic, formal, or like marketing copy that could have come from anyone, with a specific rewrite for each in the Guild's voice. 3. The opening sentence redone three different ways, so I can pick the one that lands. Do not rewrite the whole piece. Just sharpen what is there. Use British English. No em dashes.
There is already a thread of useful AI work running through the operational side of the Guild, particularly around the awards. Anything that involves reading the same document type at scale, lifting fields out of forms, sorting entries into categories, or generating standard pieces of correspondence is genuinely good ground for AI to take on. Done well, it gives the team back the parts of the cycle that used to disappear into manual handling.
A few principles to keep that work safe as it grows. Anything that touches entry data, judging scores or producer details runs on the work account, never personal. Outputs get a human eye before they go anywhere external, even where the AI is doing 90 per cent of the lift. And the rule of thumb is the same one the policy sets: if it's safe in the Guild's own systems, it's safe in Copilot. If it isn't, it isn't.
If it would help to have a fresh pair of eyes on what's already in motion, or to sketch what the next automation could look like, just say. The faster these get pressure-tested against the policy, the more confidently they can scale.
There's a long list of tools we could put here. We are deliberately keeping it short. One we mentioned in the room, one that earns its keep daily on our side, one that will earn its keep on yours.
You think faster than you type. The emails put off because writing them feels heavier than thinking them, the long replies compressed into three words, the meeting write-ups that never quite get done. That's a quiet tax on the day. Wispr Flow takes the tax away. Hold a key, talk, watch clean text appear wherever your cursor is. Brilliant for editorial drafting on the move, member updates, awards admin and the long parts of any proposal.
If you'd like a look, it's at wisprflow.ai.
Take what's useful, leave the rest. The water cooler policy is the easiest first move. The setting on Copilot is the most valuable second. Everything else can be picked up at a pace that suits the Guild.
If anything on this page raises a question, or if a member of the team would like a hand using one of the prompts on a real piece of work, just reply to this and we'll find a way in.
The AI Potential team