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A Discovery is a time-bounded campaign that asks people across your organisation where AI could help. You invite a group of people, they put forward ideas through chat, their AI assistant or the web, and the ideas are triaged once it closes. Your admins and core team can run one themselves on the Business plan or with Managed Services, or Kowalah can run one with you. A Discovery is the structured way to find the AI opportunities worth pursuing. Instead of one workshop with the leadership team, you invite people from across the business, such as finance analysts, HR managers, ops leads and customer service reps, to put forward ideas against a brief, over a set window.

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Two ways to run one

Run it yourself

Your admins and core team set the brief, invite people, launch it, and triage what comes in. The discovery sits under one of your own projects. Available on the Business plan and with Kowalah Managed Services.

Run it with Kowalah

Your Kowalah team scopes the brief, builds the audience with you, runs the campaign and helps you triage. Usually part of a Kowalah engagement or Managed Services contract.
Both kinds look the same to the people you invite, and both feed the same Opportunities backlog.

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When to run a Discovery

At the start of a programme

Build a pipeline of opportunities before you decide what to build first.

For department-level coverage

Focus on one function, such as Finance, HR or Operations, to surface ideas you’d never hear about from a leadership-only conversation.

When adoption has plateaued

Re-engage people who haven’t put forward ideas yet and find the next wave of work.

Before a Change Enablement rollout

Find the use cases that will make the rollout land: real problems people in the business want solved.

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Run your own Discovery

You need to be an admin or on the core team, and your organisation needs the Business plan or Kowalah Managed Services.
1

Start a discovery

On the Discoveries page, select Start a discovery. Give it a name, choose which of your projects it sits under (or create a new one), and write What you want to find out: the question you’re asking people. Set the date it Closes on.
2

Invite people

On the discovery’s audience tab, paste the email addresses of the people you want to ask, one per line or as “Name <email>”. Select Add people. They don’t need a Kowalah account yet; they’re added to your organisation when they sign up.
3

Launch

The discovery starts as a draft, which you can change freely with Edit brief. When it has a goal, a close date and at least one person invited, select Launch. Kowalah emails everyone an invitation and tells you how many were sent. If any couldn’t be sent, re-send them from the audience list.
4

Keep it going

While it’s live, you can keep inviting people (they’re invited straight away), remove people, and move the close date later. Watch who has responded on the audience tab.
5

Close it and triage

Close the discovery when the window ends, or earlier if you have enough. It stops taking ideas and moves into triage. See Triage and promotion.
You can do all of this in a conversation with the Kowalah Plugin in Claude or ChatGPT: draft the brief, set it up, invite people and close it. Launching happens in the platform, so the plugin gives you a link to launch it.

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A Discovery run with Kowalah

1

Kowalah scopes the Discovery

Your Kowalah partner sets a goal, the dates and a target number of opportunities (typically 20 to 30). They also write the business value context, a short brief that helps score incoming ideas in line with your strategy.
2

You build the audience together

Kowalah works with you to nominate the people to invite. You can keep adding people throughout; the audience isn’t fixed at launch.
3

It launches and runs

Each person gets an invitation through the channels you’ve enabled, and can put forward ideas at any time during the window, in their own words. People who haven’t responded get reminders before the close date.
4

It closes

After the close date, no new ideas can be added to the Discovery, though people can still raise opportunities on their own. Kowalah helps you triage, and summarises the top opportunities and recommended next steps.
Discoveries Kowalah runs are managed by your Kowalah team, so you can’t edit them yourself.

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What you see in the platform

Each Discovery has a page that shows:
If responses are low halfway through, widen the audience or sharpen the question while there’s still time.

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Channels

People can respond through any combination of these: Enable the channels your audience already uses rather than asking them to learn a new tool to take part.

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Audience

Each person invited is tracked with their email, optional display name and department, their status (invited, responded or declined), and when they were invited and first responded. Anyone invited can put forward as many ideas as they like; the target number is for the Discovery as a whole.

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After the Discovery closes

The ideas it surfaced become your backlog. Your AI lead triages them, then takes the shortlist forward:
  • Into one of your own projects, as deliverables your team or a partner delivers
  • To Kowalah, as a request for Kowalah to take on
  • As an Expert Request, for a scoped piece of expert work
  • Parked, to come back to later
The Discovery stays in the platform as a record of what was asked, who took part and what came out of it.

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Identifier

Every Discovery gets an ID like DISC-0001, scoped to your organisation. You’ll see it on the Discovery page, on opportunities that came from it, and in chats that refer to it.

Opportunities

The ideas a Discovery surfaces, and how they’re triaged

ICE scoring

How ideas are scored

Prompts for AI leads

Run a discovery and triage it in Claude or ChatGPT

Projects

Where promoted ideas become deliverables