AI Business Retreat 2026: A Recap of One Day in Spooner

Coulee Tech's AI Business Retreat 2026 was a one-day AI business retreat in Wisconsin, held Tuesday, September 15, 2026 at The Island, a lakeside lodge in Spooner. The published program had 20 hands-on sessions in three parallel tracks (Leadership, Sales and Marketing, and Builder), plus an optional fire-pit evening the night before. Every session was built on one rule: work on real business data, not toy demos. Below is the day track by track, what each session covered, and a five-step version of the method you can run yourself if you missed it.

What was the AI Business Retreat 2026 in Wisconsin?#

It was a working day, not a conference. The AI Business Retreat 2026 in Spooner, Wisconsin was built on the AI Business Maturity Model (AIBMM), a five-level ladder for how a company uses AI. Every session was pinned to a rung on that ladder, and the day was designed around one arc: score where you stand, see AI run on data like yours, build something, then write the plan.

The five levels, as the retreat used them:

1. AI Drifter: sporadic AI use with no strategy or guidelines.
2. Prompted Operator: saved, reusable prompts, with a person checking the output.
3. Agent Builder: AI connected to a real system, running defined steps with traceability.
4. Agent Manager: several agents working together, with governance and QA.
5. Physical Integrator: AI connected to physical processes and equipment.

Spooner sits in Washburn County, in the northwest corner of Wisconsin (opens in a new tab), within driving distance of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Eau Claire, Hudson, Duluth and La Crosse. For anyone who could not make the drive, the retreat offered a live remote seat.

Who was on the faculty#

The retreat page lists six instructors across the three tracks:

• Rod Holum: Certified AIBMM Master Coach; CEO and founder of Coulee Tech.
• Aaron Libner: Certified AIBMM Executive Coach; president of Coulee Tech's Eau Claire market.
• Rene Miller: Certified AIBMM Executive Coach; CEO and co-founder of Ener Systems.
• Greg Brainerd: Certified AIBMM Coach; founder and CEO of Braintek.
• Tim Holum: Builder Track instructor; software developer and co-founder of Coulee Tech.
• Jer Holum: AI coach at Coulee Tech; founder of Web Devy.

The night before: Prompt & Pour at the fire pit#

The optional kickoff was Prompt & Pour on Monday, September 14, from 4:30 to 8:00 p.m. at the fire pit. It was planned as a bring-your-own-beverage evening with no agenda, a chance for instructors and attendees to trade prompts and ideas before the working day.

The shared sessions that opened and closed the day#

The agenda opened and closed with everyone together. In between, the three tracks ran side by side, and anyone could switch tracks at any time. The full retreat agenda shows all three columns together.

The working lunch builds a live dashboard from raw exports (QuickBooks, a job system and spreadsheets) to replace re-keying numbers into a Friday report. The closing session is built to turn the day into a written 90-day plan: your scored maturity level, the criteria for the next level, one workflow to ship in 30 days, and what to delegate, build or buy. The agenda closed with an optional lakeside social from 4:30 to 7:30 p.m.

Leadership Track: AI decisions for owners and CEOs#

This track was written for owners and CEOs who need an honest read on where they stand, straight answers on security and liability, and a plan they can defend to a board.

The lessons that apply to any company:

• Know where the data goes before you pick a model. The buyer's guide compares ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Gemini on strengths, costs and blind spots, then covers the account settings that change where your data goes, plus confidentiality, liability and insurance.
• Give your first AI assistant one job, such as reporting, follow-up or scheduling. Set what it can read during the build, review it 15 minutes a week, and remember that when AI builds it, there is still code someone has to own.
• Your weekly questions are the dashboard spec. The Owner's Cockpit turns them into four panes (cash, backlog, jobs and people) meant to be read in 5 minutes a morning.
• A takeoff is not a bid. AI can pull counts, lengths and areas from a plan set with sheet references, but an estimator still checks scale, units and low-confidence items. Whether to bid is a separate go/no-go call on fit, capacity, competition, risk and margin.
• Maturity belongs to each workflow, not the whole company. The capstone shows one weekly management job done with a saved prompt and with a tool-connected agent, then designs a first project for your business.

Sales and Marketing Track: one person, backed by AI#

This track was written for the GM, sales leader or office manager who owns the workflow and has been told to make AI happen.

What carries over to any sales and marketing team:

• Get recommended, not just ranked. The GEO session covers how AI assistants decide which businesses to recommend, what still matters from SEO, and a 30-day get-found plan.
• Proposals lose when they read like equipment lists. Rewrite them around the customer's problem, at the same price, with a structure you can reuse on every quote.
• Your crew's photos are the raw material. Job-site photos and phone clips can become a 30-second video ad in your own voice and a month of captioned, scheduled posts.
• Follow-up is a system with a human gate. In the track's longest block, a new lead triggers research, an agent drafts the next touch, a person approves it, and the result is written back to the CRM. Its failure list is worth copying: stale CRM data, invented personalization, brand drift and contacting people too often.
• Mail and a calendar close the loop. AI can write a different postcard for each prospect by industry and neighborhood. The last half hour pulls every channel into a 90-day calendar: an hour a week, with a clear line between what AI drafts and what you approve.

Builder Track: wiring AI to real systems#

This track was for hands-on staff and developers. The agenda lists Tim Holum for all four sessions.

What a technical person can take back to work:

• Write down the rules the agent reads every time. The bootcamp starts with the CLAUDE.md file, which Anthropic describes as instructions you write to give Claude persistent context (opens in a new tab), then wires a real data source with plans, permissions and checkpoints.
• Use one connector standard for many systems. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open-source standard for connecting AI applications to external systems (opens in a new tab). The session uses it, plus plain APIs, to reach a ledger, an inbox and a job database.
• Connect read-only first. Scopes and guardrails are set as each connection is made, not bolted on afterward.
• Keep the old ERP and put AI in front of it for plain-English questions and automated exports, without waiting on the vendor.
• Be honest about what an hour can fix. The teardown breaks a hated task into automatable steps and names what can be solved in an hour and what cannot.

Missed the AI training retreat? Run the same arc in five steps#

The Leadership capstone and the closing roadmap session boil down to five steps you can run with a whiteboard:

1. Score yourself. Place your company on the five levels above. For an outside view, an AI maturity assessment typically takes 2 to 4 weeks, including stakeholder interviews.
2. List three real jobs and pick one. Rate each job on its own, since maturity belongs to the workflow. Start with the one that has a clear payoff and limited risk.
3. Design it on paper. Write down the trigger, the data, the tools, the owner, the approval step and what happens when something goes wrong.
4. Poke holes in it before it runs. Check permissions, failure limits, the audit trail and the handoff to a person. Connect read-only first.
5. Write the starting point and the 90-day target. Add a test for when it is ready for the next level, review it 15 minutes a week, and re-score at day 90.

What comes next#

If you are weighing what kind of training to do next, our AI training for business page compares the formats: a free webinar, a self-paced course and a hands-on working session. If you want an AI workshop in northwest Wisconsin, or anywhere else in the region, for just your own team, private AI workshops and team training can be built around your industry and delivered in person or virtually.

In the Chippewa Valley, Coulee Tech's IT and AI services in Eau Claire serve Eau Claire, Chippewa Falls, Menomonie, Rice Lake and the surrounding area. Aaron Libner, one of the retreat instructors, is president of our Eau Claire market.

Frequently asked questions#

The simplest next step costs nothing. Join the free AIBMM training the first Friday of every month: online at 8 a.m. Central, taught by certified AIBMM coaches, with recordings of past sessions free to watch.