AI Escape Room — the escape room team activity with AI
Writing prompts together to find the way out
Teams solve puzzles by writing prompts together, generating images and verifying information. Every good prompt brings them closer to the exit.
- Collaborating under pressure
- Learning to steer a prompt
- Roles: prompter, verifier, storyteller
- Several teams at once, each on its own route
- Closes with a debrief on your actual work
What will you be doing?
This escape room is not about locks but about prompts. Your group lands in a scenario — a company where an AI system has gone off the rails, say, or a mystery that only clever prompting can unpick. Teams work for two and a half hours under gentle time pressure to get out of the scenario. Each team gets its own narrative route, so no two teams do exactly the same thing.
Programme
00:00 — Briefing (15 min)
An introduction to the scenario, the teams and the roles (prompter, verifier, storyteller).
00:15 — Puzzle 1: Information flood (25 min)
Teams have to pull the right facts out of a mountain of documents using AI summaries — without being led astray by invented details.
00:40 — Puzzle 2: Image and word (30 min)
Generating an image that matches a specific description. It teaches you how word choice steers what you get.
01:10 — Short break (10 min)
01:20 — Puzzle 3: Negotiate with an AI (30 min)
Teams negotiate with an AI persona to prise a code out of it. It shows how adjusting a prompt changes behaviour.
01:50 — Final puzzle (30 min)
All the pieces come together. Only teams that solved the earlier puzzles properly have every ingredient for the final code.
02:20 — Debrief and reflection (10 min)
We pick out the most instructive moments together.
What do participants need to bring?
- One laptop per team — not per person. If you're planning this for an evening or a Christmas party or end-of-year event, work out beforehand who brings the laptops; at a party venue that's the one thing you really do have to arrange.
- Patience and humour — puzzles sometimes fail, and that's part of the learning
Which kind of team is this for?
Teams who want to collaborate under pressure while experiencing how AI tools help or get in the way in a realistic scenario. It works very well for product, innovation and operations teams, but just as well for a mixed group on a team outing or at an end-of-year event — no prior knowledge is needed anywhere.
Which teams is this for?
Teams who want to practise collaborating and build an instinct for AI.