A monthly retro asking specifically 'what did our AI-assisted workflows actually do this month' is a different exercise from a quarterly board-numbers review, and most Australian businesses running any AI in production don't have either. This one is smaller, more frequent, and focused on the agents and workflows themselves rather than the broader business metrics they feed into.
What makes it different from a broader business review
A quarterly business review looks at revenue, margin and the numbers AI-assisted work fed into. The AI retro looks one level down: which specific workflows ran, how many times, what broke, what surprised someone, and what's worth changing before next month. It's closer to an engineering team's sprint retro than a finance report, and it needs to happen more often than quarterly because AI workflows drift and degrade faster than most other business processes.
A simple structure that fits in 30 minutes
What ran -- a quick list of the AI-assisted workflows actually in use this month, not a comprehensive audit, just a shared picture.
What broke or surprised someone -- the most useful part of the whole session, and the one most teams skip because it feels like admitting a problem.
What's worth changing -- one or two concrete adjustments, not a long wishlist nobody will action.
What to watch next month -- a short list carried forward, so the retro builds on itself rather than starting fresh each time.
Why 'what broke' matters more than it sounds
Most Australian businesses running AI in production have at least one small thing quietly not working as well as it used to -- a prompt that's drifted, a connector that occasionally times out, a workflow that's technically still running but producing output someone's been manually correcting without telling anyone. A monthly retro is often the first time this kind of quiet, unreported friction actually gets said out loud, because there's a specific, low-stakes moment designed for exactly that admission.
A worked example
A 30-person Melbourne retailer running five AI-assisted workflows started a monthly 25-minute retro and found, in month two, that their customer email drafting tool had been producing subtly off-tone responses for three weeks because a product line change hadn't been reflected in its context -- something nobody had flagged individually because each instance seemed minor, but that added up to a real, if small, service-quality dip. The fix took an afternoon once named; the cost of not naming it was three weeks of slightly-off customer communication nobody had connected to a single cause.
This doesn't need special software or a formal agenda template -- a recurring calendar invite and the four questions above, discussed by whoever's actually closest to the workflows, is the whole system. Keep a running note of what was raised each month so patterns across months become visible, which a one-off conversation never surfaces.
Who should run it and what it costs
This doesn't need to be run by whoever's most senior -- it works better run by whoever's actually closest to the day-to-day use of the workflows, even if that's a relatively junior team member. Their proximity to the actual friction points matters more than seniority for a session whose whole purpose is surfacing small, easily-missed problems. Total cost for a small team: roughly 30 minutes a month from three or four people, call it $150-250 in loaded time, against the risk of quiet, uncaught degradation that a business spending $2,000-5,000 a month on AI tooling can genuinely not afford to let compound unnoticed for a full quarter.
Starting without waiting for a perfect first agenda
The first session will feel a bit unstructured, and that is fine. Run it once with just the four questions above, adjust the format based on what actually got useful discussion going, and treat month one as a trial rather than a finished process. Most Australian teams that keep this going past month two find it settles into a natural rhythm on its own without needing a formal facilitator or template.
It also pairs well with, but is not a substitute for, the accountability structure discussed elsewhere -- someone still needs to own the follow-through on whatever the retro surfaces, or the same issue quietly reappears next month having never actually been fixed, just discussed.
Set the first session on the calendar this week, thirty minutes, four questions, whoever is closest to the workflows in the room. That is the entire barrier to starting, and it is lower than it probably feels right now.
If you want a starter agenda for this specific to your workflows, ask through /contact.
