Chow Tai Fook · Design thinking workshop
From concept to pitch: an AI workshop for product development teams.
Chow Tai Fook's Hong Kong product development teams have worked with me three times since 2024: an AI image-generation workshop in 2024, a full-day creative AI workshop in September 2025, and an AI-and-design-thinking programme in January 2026. I designed the 2026 programme and taught it: interviews across six teams first, then design and project-management colleagues mixed into cross-functional groups that went from market research to a complete design proposal, pitched by each group, in one afternoon.
- When
- September 2024 (first) · September 2025 · January 2026
- Audience
- Hong Kong product development: design, planning, craftsmanship, photography, business and operations teams
- Format
- A design-thinking hackathon: five groups, each ending with a five-minute pitch
- My role
- Designed the programme and taught it
The brief
Chow Tai Fook's question was direct: were there AI tools or workflows that could make the design department's proposal planning and design thinking more efficient? Their own internal briefing summarised the bottlenecks in the current workflow in four words: not enough information, time, people or capability.
The programme was built from their own material: each team collected examples of its daily work, then I interviewed the heads of all six teams in one day. The interviews also listed what AI should not be used for, such as exact CMYK colour matching and gold-weight estimation, so the programme focused on concept development and reporting.
How it was designed
- Each group had five minutes to pick a direction, then used ChatGPT or Gemini for market and customer research, with the rule that every idea needed data behind it. Next came mood boards and product visuals in Midjourney and Nano Banana Pro, NotebookLM to pull the material together, and a campaign landing-page prototype in Lovable.
- The sequence borrowed PDCA (plan, do, check, act): ideate, visualise, consolidate, then launch. As I said in the room, the tools will keep changing; what lasts is the judgement to link research, ideas, visuals and the pitch into one chain.
What came out
- 3
- engagements (2024, 2025, 2026)
- 6
- team heads interviewed before the programme
- 5
- groups submitted a finished design proposal
- All five groups finished their proposals in the session, with proposal documents, Lovable landing pages and, from one group, an exported video.
- Chow Tai Fook has worked with me three times. Three days after the September 2025 workshop, the client was already asking about the next engagement.
Feedback
More than an introduction: we worked hands-on with tools and platforms we had never used before. His calm, steady voice also conveyed his professionalism and reliability as a teacher.After last week's class, colleagues felt it was very fulfilling because they learned the latest AI — the response was good.In the room
Workshop photographs taken by the organiser and participants.
Next step
Planning something similar for your team?
Tell me about your team’s work and where it gets stuck. We can decide the right format from there.
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