What happens at an NHS AI Promptathon?

The event was deliberately built around participation rather than presentations. Nobody sat and watched a slide deck for six hours. Delegates from a wide range of NHS organisations and disciplines spent the day identifying real problems from their own roles. Then they built solutions to them using Copilot.

Gurpreet Sajjan of NHS England opened the day with a line that set the tone for everything that followed.

“The organisations I’ve seen getting the most from Copilot are not the ones talking about it the most. It’s the ones giving space to experiment.”

By the end of the day, seven teams stood up and presented what they’d built. Many more shared ideas informally with the organisers. Every idea came from a real, everyday frustration. Every solution was built by the person living with the problem, not a specialist working from a brief.

What NHS staff are building with Copilot

One team built a Copilot agent to flag missing information in patient referrals and clinical handovers. Small admin errors here can delay a patient’s treatment, so catching them early matters as much for the patient as for the team.

Another focused on accessibility. NHS communications need to meet strict standards, including WCAG 2.2 and GOV.UK guidance. Their solution checks content against those standards automatically. That means patients and colleagues with additional needs get information they can use, not just information that’s technically been sent. 

A third team tackled contract management. They used Copilot to analyse contract and finance data. It surfaced underperformance that might otherwise go unnoticed until it’s too late.

Elsewhere in the room, ideas appeared just as quickly. One person built a tool to triage their mailbox after annual leave. Another sketched out an agent to support EDI expertise across their organisation. Neither idea took more than an afternoon to take shape.

None of these needed a major transformation programme. They just needed a genuine problem and the confidence to try solving it with the tools in front of them.

As one attendee put it on the day:

“Having Copilot and not using it properly is like having the latest iPhone and only using it to make phone calls.”

How are NHS staff sharing what they learn?

One reason adoption is spreading so quickly across parts of the NHS is the Copilot Café. Nicola Eddon founded this weekly community session in 2024. Every Friday, NHS colleagues share how they’re using Copilot with their peers.

It’s grown to 81,000 members, with 400 to 500 people dialling in most weeks. Every session gets recorded and indexed. That means almost 100 sessions’ worth of real NHS use cases are already searchable. Anyone with an NHS.net login can access them.

That’s adoption built from the ground up. Nobody had to wait for a strategy document to give them permission.

None of this makes the wider challenges disappear. Governance and security still need proper attention at NHS scale. But they’re rarely why one team’s adoption stalls, culture usually gets there first.

The examples here are mostly about admin, workflow and communication. For a look at how AI is also being used in clinical settings, like diagnostics and imaging, our earlier piece on AI use cases in the NHS covers that ground in more detail.

How can other NHS teams start?

Start smaller than you think you need to. The teams at the Promptathon didn’t begin with a strategy. They began with one frustrating task and a willingness to test whether Copilot could help.

Encourage staff to bring a real, specific problem rather than a vague ambition to “use more AI.” The clearest use cases at the event all started with a concrete pain point, not a broad goal.

Give people a safe space to experiment. That might be a structured session like a Promptathon, or something as informal as the Copilot Café. Learning happens faster in a room with peers than it does from a policy document.

One NHS attendee summed up why sharing matters as much as building:

“How you use Copilot is not something you keep to yourself. It’s about sharing and helping to unlock the potential of what’s possible.”

The Copilot Café’s model, recording and indexing every session, means good ideas don’t disappear after one conversation. They become searchable knowledge other teams can build on.

If you want support getting started, we can help you find where Copilot fits your teams first.

The room in London didn’t need permission from anyone above them. They just needed the space to try. That’s still the fastest way to find out what Copilot can do for your team, and for the patients you’re there to help.