People keep asking: "What are you actually teaching in the Werchota Chief AI Academy?" So here's a Quickbite sneak peek into Cohort 1, Session 1 — the four moments that made the room go silent.

Quick context: each cohort = small group (5-15 business leaders — CFOs, Chief AI Officers, heads of procurement, HR directors), 4 weekly sessions × 2 hours. Not just listening to Malcolm — also to Maria (co-founder) and Damian (associate partner, head of engineering). And critically: participants talking to each other. Because when you leave the academy, you shouldn't just talk to us — go talk to your peers.

💥 Moment 1: The Software Armageddon

Opened the session with the stock charts: HubSpot down 30-40%, Gartner in free fall since Q3, Adobe Duolingo essentially dead, Salesforce bleeding. None of these companies will literally disappear tomorrow — but the rate of decline is accelerating because their customers can now build the same thing themselves.

Example demoed live: a procurement participant uses IronCloud for contract reviews — €40,000/year. We showed Claude doing the same thing, more personalized, more tailored to her business, for ~$50 in tokens. The room went silent.

The pushback: "But Malcolm, companies are still buying software."

Yes — out of habit. As soon as they understand headless software (no UI, just an MCP server or API key, AI orchestrates it), the whole game changes. We're giving the wrong software to the wrong people right now. Stop rolling out Microsoft Copilot to your knowledge workers. Roll out Claude Code and Codex instead — with compliance-friendly options like OpenCode. Then they can build their own solutions.

🧠 Moment 2: Reverse Prompting (the killer technique)

Someone said: "I tried your prompt 'make me a sexy dashboard' and nothing came out." So we went back to basics — because most people still don't know how to prompt.

The technique: Reverse Prompting. Inspired by how psychologists work — they don't ask you to articulate your trauma in one sentence. They ask you questions, and through your answers, you discover what you actually want to say.

Your command to Claude/ChatGPT:

"Ask me 10 questions, multiple choice, 4-5 answers each. Don't ask all at once — three at a time, wait for my answers, then formulate the next three."

Now the AI is interviewing you. While you answer, you start to actually understand what you want. The AI surfaces concepts you didn't even know existed — "Do you want a Streamlit app, or maybe a web app?" — and you go: "Wait, what's a Streamlit app? Yes, that one."

Promise: Malcolm will pay for your dinner if reverse prompting does not measurably improve your output.

🧠 Moment 3: The Second Brain that called me the WORST salesperson

The werchota.ai "second brain" — built in 48 hours, now running in production on Azure (Victor's setup) — has access to:

Every email from every employee (including mine — anyone in the company can query my inbox)
Every meeting transcript
Everything on SharePoint
Queryable via Teams

Live demo: I asked it to do a SWOT analysis of Malcolm, focused on sales. It ran for 30 minutes. Produced a dashboard that called me out:

"Malcolm is the weakest persona on the entire sales team"
"Rarely has an agenda going into calls"
"Talks all over the place, ends calls with 'OK, bye'"
"No follow-up discipline. No paper sent in 3 days, no follow-up in 1 week"
"Creates information overload for customers"

The room went silent. I love when that happens. Because the point isn't to publicly roast me — it's that a Second Brain lets you do this for everyone in your team. People know their strengths. They struggle to articulate weaknesses. The Second Brain extracts them — and then Marsha can jump in on my post-meeting communication, Alex can cover ABCD, and the team plays to its actual gaps.

🦴 Moment 4: "You've been hiring AI Neanderthals"

I showed them what an AI-native business leader can do — Claude Code, Codex, prompting fluency, voice-to-Excel, MCP servers, headless software integration. Then I asked:

"Be honest. Your last 10 hires. How many can do this?"

Answer in the room: essentially zero.

You're running an AI-powered company while continuously hiring AI Neanderthals. Then you wonder why adoption is slow.

If you want your company to stay Neanderthal-shaped and disappear in the next 1-2 years, continue hiring like this. I don't care. But you should. Remove "Microsoft Office" from your job descriptions. Replace with prompting, AI tool fluency, understanding of where the tech is going. The biggest leverage you have right now is who you hire next.

🎯 Three Monday Actions

Try Reverse Prompting today. Take any messy goal you have, paste it to Claude/ChatGPT with the formula above. Free dinner if it doesn't work.
Audit your last 10 hires against ~10 AI skills (prompting correctly, Claude Code / Codex fluency, MCP understanding, voice-to-Excel, second-brain literacy, etc). Expect 1-2 out of 10. You've been hiring problems — now they need re-training. Going forward, hire people who already use AI natively. Biggest leverage in the company.
Build a Second Brain — even a small one. Don't have to go enterprise like we did. Start with a project: shared email address, project files, meeting transcripts of one initiative. Build it. Query it. Watch what surfaces.

💬 What participants left with

A Swiss consultant: "I realized I don't have a workload problem — I have a cross-department visibility problem. The Second Brain would solve that for me."

Another participant: "I'm going to go try reverse prompting tomorrow. This alone is worth the session."

That's the Chief AI Academy in 18 minutes. Want to come to Cohort 2? See the link below.

⏱️ Timestamps

00:00 — What is a Quickbite + intro to the Chief AI Academy format
02:30 — Who comes: CFOs, Chief AI Officers, procurement, HR directors
05:00 — Moment 1: Software Armageddon — HubSpot, Gartner, Adobe, Salesforce
08:00 — IronCloud €40k/year vs Claude $50 in tokens — live demo
10:00 — Headless software + MCP servers explained
12:00 — Moment 2: Reverse Prompting — the dating-your-psychologist technique
14:00 — Moment 3: Second Brain — the SWOT that called me the worst salesperson
16:00 — Moment 4: AI Neanderthals — your last 10 hires
17:30 — Three Monday actions + participant takeaways

🎙️ About the Host

Malcolm Werchota runs AI adoption programs for companies across Europe — close to 90 companies advised, majority in the DACH region. After 15+ years at Novartis and Schlumberger, today's focus: AI without the bullshit. Lecturer at ESADE and HSLU. Studied in Leoben.

🚀 Resources for Executives

📚 Chief AI Academy — AI for Decision Makers ← Cohort 2 ...