You bought the licenses and issued the mandate. Now spend one day building with AI yourself, so your team follows what you do, not just what you said.
On Friday, October 16, fifteen executives will build Birchwood Financial, a fictional bank, from the ground up — credit, risk, underwriting, sales, and marketing, with an AI coach at their side.
Not a case study, and not another “AI theory” talk. One day, hands-on, engineered to build the thing no briefing can: your own fluency and confidence to lead with AI.
You won’t write a line of code. You’ll do the building by directing AI: you set the strategy, judge the output, and call what “good” looks like, while an AI coach beside you keeps you moving and turns intent into working software.
That’s where fluency comes from — not another briefing, but reps. You leave knowing first-hand what AI can do, what it can’t, and how fast it really moves. Most executives will keep reading about it. For one day, you’ll live inside it.
The day is built around one uncomfortable question: if you were building your business today, with AI underneath it, what would you build — and why aren't you?
Senior lending executive · last AI Lending Lab cohort
A room of senior Canadian lending leaders built their first working AI in a single day. More from the room:
Being hands-on with Claude and actively experimenting with the tool.
Knowing others were in the same boat, with similar challenges, and how easy it was to create solutions.
How simple the tools are to use. I left knowing it’s far less daunting than I expected.
The hands-on experience, working alongside an AI power user, made me realize this is real, and something we need to move on. Now!
Each department is a real part of running a lender. You lead one, and by day’s end you walk out with a working AI tool for it, not a slide about it. Pick the seat closest to your world.
Build an AI tool that reads a real borrower’s file and returns an approve-or-decline decision, with the reasoning it used shown in plain view.
Live decisionBuild an AI tool that watches the loan book and flags a borrower heading for trouble before it turns into a loss.
Risk flag raisedBuild an AI tool that turns a messy application into a clear, structured recommendation in minutes instead of days.
Packet → decisionBuild an AI tool that scores every new borrower inquiry and routes it to the right person the moment it arrives.
Lead scored & routedBuild an AI tool that creates targeted campaigns and personalized offers for the right borrowers, instead of a mass blast.
Campaign liveOne synthetic borrower walks through all five departments — sourced, qualified, underwritten, decisioned, and watched — live, on stage.
Birchwood is open
At your level, you're not short on information about AI — you're drowning in it. What no report, keynote, or pilot deck can give you is the one thing that actually changes how you lead: fluency, earned by building with AI yourself. That's what this day is for. Here's what you walk away with.
You've nodded through enough AI briefings. In one day you cross the line most leaders never do — from describing what AI might do to building with it yourself. That quiet, earned confidence changes every room you walk into afterward.
You'll leave able to look at any process, product, or P&L and instantly see the version rebuilt with AI underneath it. It isn't a fact you memorize — it's a way of seeing you can't switch off. You'll use it Monday, and every week after.
You've seen the demos and read the reports. What's been missing is the certainty to act. A day with your hands on the build gives you the judgment to greenlight, kill, or redirect AI bets worth many multiples of a seat here.
You'll watch a few people and AI build in hours what used to take a department a year. Your expectations for your own teams — speed, cost, ambition — recalibrate permanently. You can't un-see it.
Somewhere under the meetings and the managing is the leader who got into this to create things. For a day, you're that person again — making, not just approving. Most people leave more energized about their work than they've been in years.
A small, curated room of senior decision-makers wrestling with exactly what you are. The candor and the relationships you find here are the kind a thousand-person conference can't manufacture.
You're not paying for a day. You're paying for how you'll lead the decade of AI that follows it.
We're looking for senior leaders in lending and financial services who own a function and a P&L — chief lending, risk, credit, and digital officers, and heads of innovation. If you've sat through enough AI keynotes and still don't know what it means for your desk, this is built for you.
The Variable is an operator-led AI advisory firm. We help leadership teams move AI from theory to traction — and we've shipped it inside regulated, paper-heavy industries, not just advised on it.
Birchwood is how we make the lesson impossible to forget. The fastest way to change how a leader thinks about AI is to put them in the seat and have them build.
Most AI advice ends in a slide deck. Ours ends in a working bank.
Seats are limited to fifteen and filled by application. Tell us who you are and which department you'd run.