The single most useful 15 minutes in a winery's AI rollout happens on Friday afternoon, with the team standing around a counter, holding paper coffee cups, while one person walks through one thing she did with AI that week. No projector and no Slack channel. The whole ritual fits inside the time between the last appointment of the day and the wine the team shares before going home.
I keep telling winery owners about this format because it is the cheapest and most reliable piece of the 60-day play. Atlassian's research found that AI-focused retros bolted onto an existing team rhythm produced a 34% lift in AI alignment across the team. The mechanism is unsexy. People copy what they see other people doing. A 15-minute end-of-shift demo turns one champion's quiet wins into a habit the rest of the team can picture using themselves.
The wins shared in show-and-tell come from work the team already wanted off its plate. I wrote about how to pick that work in the hated-task rule. This post is about what happens after the hated-task wins start landing: how you make them visible to everyone else without turning the visibility itself into a chore.
The format, in one paragraph
End of shift on Friday. Same time every week. The team gathers wherever they already gather (the bar, the production floor, the back office). One person shows one thing she did with AI that week. Five to seven minutes is plenty. Two other people can chime in if they want, but nobody else is required to share. The leader runs the rotation, not a volunteer sign-up sheet. After 15 minutes the meeting is over and the team goes home or pours wine. The whole point is that the ritual does not feel like a meeting.
That is the format. Most of the rest of this post is about what makes that format work and what kills it.
Why physical-in-the-room beats a Slack channel
Most articles about AI adoption rituals default to the digital version: a #ai-wins channel where people drop screenshots, or a Notion doc that quietly accumulates entries. That pattern works at a software company. It does not work in a tasting room or a cellar.
Two reasons. First, the people who most need to see the demo are the ones least likely to scroll a Slack channel. Riley behind the tasting bar is on her phone for guest messages and POS lookups, not for an internal channel about AI. Sam in production is not scrolling at all during a shift. If the win lives in a channel only the already-engaged read, the win does not spread.
Second, physical proximity carries information that a screenshot does not. When the tasting bar lead watches the wine club coordinator pull up her phone, open Claude, paste in a club member's message, and read out the draft she got back, she sees two things at once. The use is allowed, and the coordinator's body language has changed from someone who was dreading the task into someone who is no longer dreading it. A Slack message can transmit the prompt. It cannot transmit the relief on the coordinator's face when she shows it.
Slack-channel-first rituals are also easier to fake. People drop the impressive prompt they crafted on Thursday night, not the messy thing they tried at 2 p.m. that almost worked. In a 15-minute live demo, the messy attempt is the demo. That is the version other people can copy.
Rotation, not volunteer-only
The biggest mistake a leader makes with this ritual is treating it as a volunteer slot. Volunteer-only show-and-tell collapses into the same one or two people sharing every week. After a month, the team reads it as "the enthusiast hour," and the people who needed the modeling most stop paying attention.
Rotate the slot the way a tasting room rotates who closes. Maren is up this Friday. Diego next Friday. Priya the week after. The leader keeps the rotation list and tells each person on Monday that she has the slot Friday. (Not Wednesday. Not the day before. Monday gives her four shifts to find one thing worth showing.) If a person is genuinely stuck on what to show, the leader sits with her for 10 minutes Wednesday morning and helps her find one moment from her week that counts.
The reason rotation works is that it changes who the audience identifies with. When the rotation puts the cellar lead in front of the team to demo a 90-second use of AI on inventory variance notes, the rest of the cellar staff sees one of their own doing it, not the manager who already loves the tool. The 34% Atlassian number is downstream of that identification. Adoption spreads along the lines of "she's like me and she's doing it."
I want to make this distinction precise because it is the trap most rollouts fall into. The wrong way to run show-and-tell is to say "anyone who has an AI win this week, come share it." That sentence selects for the same person every week. The right way is to say "Priya, you're up this Friday. Five minutes. Something you did this week. I'll help you pick if you want."
What "one thing" looks like in practice
The format gets soft when "one thing" balloons into "everything I did with AI this week." Cap it explicitly. One task. One prompt. One result. The demo should answer three questions in five minutes: what did you put in, what did the model give you back, what did you do with it. Then a minute of two questions from the room, and you are done.
To make this concrete, here is what one slot looked like at Not Really Wines — our openly fictional demo winery (notreallywines.vercel.app) that we run as a working showcase for the kind of vault and workflow we set up for real clients. Priya, who runs DTC and The Society subscription program, had her slot in week four of the rollout. She held up her phone, showed the team a member email asking about why a Society shipment was three days late, read out the two-paragraph reply Claude drafted from the apology template Priya had loaded the week before, and described the one sentence she changed before sending it. Tessa from hospitality asked what was in the template file. Diego from the cellar asked whether Claude would catch when a shipment delay was the cellar's fault versus the warehouse's. Six minutes total. By the following Monday, Tessa had asked Priya to help her set up the same template for tasting bar booking complaints.
That is the entire mechanism. One person demos one thing, someone in a different function asks one question, and the handoff becomes the next person's habit.
How the ritual feeds itself
A team that runs show-and-tell for four weeks starts producing its own raw material. End-of-shift one-line jots — the sticky-note version where each active user writes one sentence Friday about what AI helped with that week — become the candidate list for next week's slot. The shared prompt library fills out because the demos surface prompts worth saving. The "deep interview" pattern Klarna uses on a quarterly cadence (a 15-minute 1:1 between the leader and each active AI user) gets easier because the leader already knows from Friday what each person is working on.
Two things compound. The rotation list grows past the original champion, and the prompt library grows past the original starter folder. The leader's 1:1 cadence gets easier in the background because she already knows what each person is working on. None of this requires a new tool or a new meeting. It is one 15-minute slot on Friday, week after week, while the team is already standing together.
If you read the 3x-a-week-for-8-weeks rule earlier in this series, the show-and-tell ritual is what protects the eight-week window. The habit-formation threshold from Microsoft's research is three uses a week for seven to eight weeks. The thing that pulls a champion through those eight weeks is the small public moment at the end of each one. Without the moment, the use rate decays in week three. With the moment, the champion has a soft external reason to keep showing up.
What kills the ritual
A few patterns flatten the 34% number to zero.
Treating it as a meeting. The moment show-and-tell gets a calendar invite, an agenda, and a recurring Zoom link, it transforms into the thing everyone else on the team is already overloaded with. Keep it where the team already is. Keep it 15 minutes. Do not let it grow.
Mandating attendance. Voluntary in form, expected in substance. If the closer wraps up the bar and goes home before show-and-tell on her week off, fine. If the same closer misses six weeks running, that is information about whether the ritual is working for her, not a discipline problem.
Mandating sharing. Rotation cues, not commands. If Diego is genuinely terrified of the spot, the leader takes his slot once and pairs with him on a 10-minute Wednesday session before his next turn. The fix is preparation, not pressure.
Putting it on Slack. The temptation will be strong. Someone will say "let's also post a recap so people who missed can read it." Don't. The whole asset of the ritual is that it happens in the room. A recap in a channel is the wrong shape — short enough to skim, long enough to ignore, just visible enough that the leader believes the team got it. They didn't get it. They got the Slack version of it.
Letting the same enthusiast take every slot. Even with a rotation, if Priya keeps trading slots because she has the best material, you have re-created volunteer-only with extra steps. The slot is non-tradable.
What show-and-tell does not do
It does not get a non-user to start using AI on its own. That is what the champion's individual setup and the second-employee handoff do. Show-and-tell is downstream of both. It amplifies use; it does not create it.
It does not replace the day 60 retro. Friday is for visibility. Day 60 is for the longer conversation about what worked, what got abandoned, and which three or four employees should come into the play next.
It does not work in months one to two of a rollout if there is only one user. Wait until at least three people are actively using AI on real tasks before formalizing the rotation. Before that, the leader and the champion can demo to each other every Friday — that is two people watching one person, which is fine, and is the seed of the ritual. The full rotation kicks in when the team grows.
How this fits the larger menu
Show-and-tell is the lead activity in the engagement menu, but it is not the only one. The post next door, five activities to engage your team on AI, walks through the supporting menu: the prompt-of-the-week posted in the break room, the use-case bingo card with a bottle as the prize, the $20-with-Claude challenge for first-time users, the weekly AI office hours, the weirdest-prompt-of-the-month. Pick one or two of those per phase, and run show-and-tell every Friday from week three onward.
The reason show-and-tell anchors the menu is that it is the cheapest item in cognitive and calendar load and the highest in adoption signal. Fifteen minutes a week, no new tool, no new vocabulary, no surveillance. A 34% adoption lift over teams that did not bolt it on. Most rollouts skip the ritual because it feels too small to matter, and the smallness is the feature.
If you want help getting this running
We run a one-hour webinar for winery leaders called Employee AI Engagement: How to Get Your Team Using AI Without Killing Adoption. We walk through the 60-day play, the role of the Friday ritual inside it, and the four or five other activities that work for teams who do their work standing up rather than sitting in front of a screen. Check the webinar schedule for the next date and to register. If you want a sketch of how this looks for your specific team before the webinar, we run short audits at NunnCurtis Labs.
Part of a 20-post series on employee AI adoption for wineries — see the full series under AI Adoption.