I’ve been tinkering with a new way to use AI for facilitation and workshop design. For a long time my routine looked like everyone else’s: open ChatGPT, type “help me design a workshop,” and start from scratch every time. The answers were fine, but they kept drifting toward the same thing. More slides, more talking points, more content.
So I built something different: a ChatGPT plugin with specialized facilitation skills built into it. It’s called Facilitation & Workshop Design, and the idea behind it is simple. I want AI to help design better participant experiences, not just produce more material to deliver.
It’s made for facilitators, trainers, meeting leaders, L&D professionals, conference speakers, team leaders, and anyone else who brings people together and wants the time to be productive.
What the Facilitation & Workshop Design plugin does
The plugin gives ChatGPT reusable expertise for the facilitation tasks I see people struggle with most. Instead of one giant set of instructions trying to do everything, it currently holds five specialized AI skills:
- Session Architect
- Activity Selector
- Presentation-to-Participation Converter
- Facilitation Guide Builder
- Session Critic
You don’t need to know which skill to call. Describe your situation and ChatGPT picks the right one. For example:
Help me design a 90-minute workshop for 30 managers on improving cross-functional collaboration.
I have 25 minutes of presentation content. Help me turn this into something much more interactive.
Review this agenda and tell me where participants are going to disengage.
Behind the scenes, each skill applies the facilitation principles I’ve used in workshops for more than twenty years.
Session Architect: design the whole experience
Session Architect designs complete sessions: workshops, meetings, retreats, trainings, offsites, conference sessions, and interactive keynotes. Rather than starting with slides and talking points, it works through a sequence closer to how I actually design:
Purpose → Participants → Outcomes → Experience → Participation → Facilitation → Outputs → Transfer
That order matters. One of the easiest traps with AI is using it to generate more information for you to deliver. For facilitation, the more useful question is what participants should actually be doing. Session Architect considers the audience, the outcomes you want, the time you have, the activities, your facilitation approach, what people produce, and what happens after everyone goes home.
Activity Selector: find the right activity for the moment
Sometimes you don’t need a whole workshop. You need one good activity. Activity Selector recommends activities based on your objective, group size, available time, format (in-person, virtual, or hybrid), participant experience, energy level, and where you are in the session. You might ask:
I have 40 people and 15 minutes. I want them to connect with someone they don’t know and talk about a real innovation challenge.
What’s a good alternative to brainstorming for this group?
Give me a 10-minute reflection activity after this exercise.
The goal is the right activity for the purpose of the session, rather than a long list of fun exercises. If you want to go further with idea generation specifically, our guide to facilitating brainstorming and innovation in groups covers the methods I use most.
Presentation-to-Participation Converter: turn a talk into an experience
This may be my favorite of the five. Early in my career I was all-in on being a speaker, and it took graduate school research on how people learn to show me I needed to become a facilitator. I wrote about that in the shift from presenter to facilitator, and I’ve spent years since helping other presenters make the same move.
The Converter looks at your presentation content and asks where participants could become active. A typical talk runs Listen → Listen → Listen → Q&A. A redesigned one might run Listen briefly → Reflect → Discuss → Apply → Create → Share. Give it an outline, a slide deck, an agenda, or one section of content:
I have a 45-minute conference presentation. I need to cover these five ideas, but I don’t want to lecture for 45 minutes. Redesign it.
It will usually keep a few short pieces of essential content and turn other sections into pair conversations, challenges, practice, polling, reflection, or collaborative creation. Interaction for its own sake isn’t the point. The point is a better experience for the people in the room.
Facilitation Guide Builder: from agenda to run-of-show
A good agenda isn’t always enough once you’re standing in front of the group. You need to know what to say, how to give instructions, how much time to allow, how to transition, what to ask in the debrief, what materials to bring, and what to do when an activity runs long.
Facilitation Guide Builder turns an agenda or session design into a detailed run-of-show with facilitator notes, participant instructions, timing, transitions, debrief questions, a materials list, contingency plans, and optional language for introducing each activity. I’ve found this especially useful when someone else will be facilitating a session I designed.
Session Critic: improve a session you already have
Session Critic works in the opposite direction. Paste or upload an agenda you already have and ask things like:
Where is this session too presentation-heavy?
What are the biggest risks in this workshop?
Which activities aren’t serving a clear purpose?
Or just “Make this better.” It looks for the problems I see most often when reviewing other people’s designs: long stretches of passive listening, unclear outcomes, unrealistic timing, weak transitions, activities with no debrief, no participant choice, and missed chances for people to apply what they’re learning.
The facilitation philosophy built into the skills
A few ideas run through all five skills.
Participant experience over content delivery
The amount of content you deliver is a different thing from the quality of the experience. Participants may learn more from five minutes applying an idea to a real challenge than from another twenty minutes of explanation.
Presenter to facilitator
Presenters tend to ask, “What should I say?” Facilitators are more likely to ask, “What should participants experience?” Presentation still has a place. Sometimes a concise explanation, story, or demonstration is exactly what a group needs. The skills treat presentation as a deliberate choice rather than the automatic default.
Purpose before activity
Adding an icebreaker or a breakout room doesn’t make a session engaging on its own. Every activity should have a reason to be there, so the skills first ask what participants are trying to do:
- Connect
- Understand
- Generate
- Prioritize
- Decide
- Practice
- Create
- Reflect
- Commit
The purpose then points to the participation method.
Participants as producers
Some of the most useful workshops I’ve led end with participants having made something: an idea, a prototype, a plan, a map, a story, a decision, an experiment, or a next step. People leave as producers rather than only consumers of information. That’s a core idea in our design thinking workshops, and it shapes how the plugin designs sessions too.
Why build this as a ChatGPT plugin?
I’ve built specialized GPTs and AI tools for several years. ChatGPT now supports plugins that contain reusable skills, which opens up a new way to package professional expertise. Instead of building a separate AI assistant for every narrow task, one plugin can hold several related skills. Here the plugin covers facilitation and workshop design broadly, and each skill specializes in one part of that work.
I’m also making the underlying skills compatible with Claude Skills, so the methods don’t have to belong to one AI platform. That may matter more as reusable AI skills become common across tools.
What could come next
These five skills are a starting point. I’ve mapped out many other facilitation skills that could join the collection, including:
- Outcome Clarifier
- Audience Analyzer
- Agenda Builder
- Activity Inventor
- Discussion Designer
- Reflection Designer
- Connection Activity Designer
- Question Designer
- Transition Builder
- Debrief Designer
- Facilitator Coach
- Engagement Diagnostician
- Difficult Group Navigator
- Time Rescue Coach
- Energy Manager
- Inclusive Participation Designer
- Virtual Workshop Designer
- Hybrid Session Designer
- Large-Group Experience Designer
- AI Facilitation Designer
- Workshop Evaluator
- Transfer & Action Designer
I’m deliberately not building all of these at once. Like any prototype, I’d rather see which skills facilitators actually use and grow the collection from there.
Try the Facilitation & Workshop Design plugin
The plugin is currently going through review for the ChatGPT plugin directory, and the link will appear right here once it’s listed. The first version includes Session Architect, Activity Selector, Presentation-to-Participation Converter, Facilitation Guide Builder, and Session Critic. If you’d like to try it before then, send us a note.
When you do try it, give it a real session you’re working on. Good starting prompts:
Help me design a 2-hour workshop.
Recommend an activity for this objective.
Turn this presentation into a participatory session.
Build a facilitator guide from this agenda.
Critique this workshop and tell me what you’d change.
This is an experiment in something I think we’ll see much more of: turning professional methods into reusable AI skills. For facilitators, that shouldn’t mean replacing the human part of facilitation. Ideally it means spending less time generating generic content and more time designing experiences where people connect, think, create, and act together.
If you want to build these skills yourself rather than through AI, our AI facilitation training for program designers and facilitators and facilitation workshop are good places to start.
Which facilitation skill would you most want added next?
Facilitation & Workshop Design is published by InnovationTraining.org (Innovation Learning LLC). Use is subject to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Questions about the plugin go to app support.