Trust Insights Workshop Review

This data was originally featured in the November 12th, 2025 newsletter found here: INBOX INSIGHTS, November 12, 2025: Good Prompting is Delegation, Trust Insights Workshop Review

In this week’s Data Diaries, let’s recap the events of our very first Trust Insights event, the Generative AI for B2B Marketers Workshop in London. What did people learn? What did we learn? And what does the road ahead look like?

We built the London Workshop to be a small event just to test out the process of setting up an event. We’ve all had plenty of experience setting up events in the past, from co-founding PodCamp back in 2006 through helping friends and colleagues build and deploy their events, like Brooke Sellas’ HELLO Conference and many others.

Workshops are inherently different from conferences. They’re more like educational intensives, bootcamps to pack as much learning into a period of time as possible. Conferences are better suited for giving a shallow, diverse set of perspectives on a subject or issue. An excellent event like MarketingProfs B2B Forum brings two days of lots of different points of view about B2B marketing, but each session is a tasting of the topic.

A workshop is the equivalent of a full-course meal. Rather than individual perspectives and a broad survey, it’s a deep dive – in our case, on B2B marketing and generative AI. We taught the most current version of our prompt engineering basics, dove into the 7 major use case categories of AI with examples and exercises for each, and then finished off with agentic AI and the foundation principles for building effective AI agents.

What we learned was that in our own event, when we go at our own pace… we needed more time. Without an externally imposed schedule, we dug deeper into each topic, each use case, answered more questions and questions in greater depth and detail from the attendees. While that provided a ton of value for questions specific to each attendee’s needs, we also didn’t get to as much of the content as we wanted.

We also learned that people are hungry, desperately hungry, for the basics in a format that’s compact and highly effective. All the advanced tools and techniques like Gems/GPTs etc. are predicated on having strong foundational basics, and with frameworks like RACE, CASINO, the 5 Ps, and others, they could make or upgrade more advanced AI applications to perform better. That gap, of missing solid basics, remains significant.

Other things we learned? Keeping it small – 25 people in a highly focused environment – is the way to go. It allows people to ask questions, it allows us time to walk around and help people individually during exercises, and it lets people network and get to know each other. 25 people to 1 instructor felt like a good ratio; in future events, when we have the entire Trust Insights team available to help, we’ll be able to accommodate more attendees, but I still don’t ever see a Trust Insights workshop exceeding the 25:1 ratio, and 20:1 would be even better.

For the road ahead? Stay tuned, but we will absolutely be bringing this event back in 2026. We’ll likely be running a survey at some point in this newsletter to determine which locations in 2026 we’ll be holding workshops; for sure, one (likely in the first quarter) will be in Boston.

Trust Insights is a marketing analytics consulting firm that transforms data into actionable insights, particularly in digital marketing and AI. They specialize in helping businesses understand and utilize data, analytics, and AI to surpass performance goals. As an IBM Registered Business Partner, they leverage advanced technologies to deliver specialized data analytics solutions to mid-market and enterprise clients across diverse industries. Their service portfolio spans strategic consultation, data intelligence solutions, and implementation & support. Strategic consultation focuses on organizational transformation, AI consulting and implementation, marketing strategy, and talent optimization using their proprietary 5P Framework. Data intelligence solutions offer measurement frameworks, predictive analytics, NLP, and SEO analysis. Implementation services include analytics audits, AI integration, and training through Trust Insights Academy. Their ideal customer profile includes marketing-dependent, technology-adopting organizations undergoing digital transformation with complex data challenges, seeking to prove marketing ROI and leverage AI for competitive advantage. Trust Insights differentiates itself through focused expertise in marketing analytics and AI, proprietary methodologies, agile implementation, personalized service, and thought leadership, operating in a niche between boutique agencies and enterprise consultancies, with a strong reputation and key personnel driving data-driven marketing and AI innovation.