Building an AI-native workforce: how Iress moved from theory to practice

At a glance

Across a calendar month, Mantel partnered with Iress to deliver a global AI Immersion Day across every office worldwide, moving 80% of their workforce from passive observers to active AI practitioners. Through 4,000+ hours of hands-on training, and alongside technology partners AWS, Salesforce, Workday, and Atlassian, we helped Iress move beyond AI competence, towards an AI-native culture where innovation sits directly in the hands of subject-matter experts closest to customers and products.

In conjunction with:

AWS

Salesforce

Workday

Atlassian

The challenge: how do we bridge the AI adoption gap?

As the AI transition sweeps through the workplace, broader research shows that the majority of employees who use AI tools do so in an ad hoc manner, without their employers’ endorsement. At Mantel, we specialise in helping organisations not just adopt AI, but fundamentally become AI-native. Our involvement, particularly in designing and delivering the Iress AI Immersion Day, has been a validation of our core belief: that AI competence is built at both the systems level, and at the individual level.

For AI to deliver on its promised value, it must be understood, trusted, and used by both the workforce, and the company. Across their company, Iress didn’t just mandate AI; they invested in our comprehensive literacy program. Together with technology partners such as AWS, Salesforce, Workday and Atlassian, we delivered over 4,000 hours of training, focusing on the teams closest to the client and product. The result is a culture of innovation that sits as close to subject-matter experts as possible.

Building momentum and foundations

In order to prepare the Iress team for Immersion day, and get minds racing about the possibilities AI brings, Mantel pulled together multiple pieces of inspiration content, covering topics such as:

  • Exploring the potential of AI within the Financial Services Industry
  • Building agents and agentic flows
  • Leveraging AI to rapidly synthesise customer insights
  • AI in Automation Testing
  • AI 101 – Your guide to demystifying AI 
  • Intro to agents and agentic coding
  • Effective Agentic Coding – Plan, Act, Review & Iterate Workflow
  • Building and productionising agent tools with MCP

Immersion day: the global crucible of practical skills

The capstone of Iress’s literacy initiative was their global, hands-on Immersion Day, an event we were proud to co-lead alongside their other technology partners. This event moved AI from theory to reality using a three-stage learning approach: “Show, Do Together, Do On Your Own.”

The day focused on four key themes: automation, efficiency, documentation, and literacy. Teams from across the entire organisation were given access to enterprise-grade tools, like Gemini, Atlassian AI, and NotebookLM, and tasked with solving real workflow challenges in real time.

This practical exposure is the tipping point:

  • It builds confidence (now, nearly 80% of Iress’s people actively engage with their AI tools).
  • It crystallises the boundaries of AI application, ensuring employees understand which problems benefit from AI augmentation and which still require human expertise, strategic thinking, and creative problem-solving.

Across the entirety of Immersion day, we ran 5 specialised tracks centered on these key topics:

AI playground foundations
(with AWS)
Bridging marketing and sales: smarter lead conversions
(with Salesforce)
Everyone can build agents: stop talking about it and do it
(with AWS)
Rapid prototyping
Effective Agentic Coding

The path forward: sustained partnership

Iress’s journey demonstrates that becoming AI-native is a yearly transformation, not a quarterly project. It requires continuous learning, iteration, and a culture where curiosity leads to experimentation and innovation. 

Our AI capability training with Iress is centred on leveraging proven platforms and deep expertise to ensure their strategy is secure, scalable, and focused on practical business outcomes. By investing deeply in the skills and confidence of its workforce now, Iress is laying the essential groundwork for the intelligent products, automated systems, and defining client experiences of tomorrow.

Iress isn’t just building an AI-competent workforce; they’re re-architecting their entire organisation to compete in the AI-first future. At Mantel, we don’t just help organisations adopt AI; we help them become AI-native. We’re proud to have partnered with Iress on this journey.

Excerpt from David’s opening keynote speech:

“A lot of the conversations… often start as “okay, cool, we’re doing this thing with AI, how much is it going to save us?” But it’s actually the wrong question. The real question is: “What outcomes can we deliver with AI that genuinely weren’t possible yesterday?”

“Because when you start at automation, all you’re really doing is you’re speeding up yesterday’s experience. If you start with a blank sheet of paper… That’s the exciting thing.”

David Hyman

Co-founder, Special Advisor & Board @ Lendi Group

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