The Challenge: Designing for Power Users Without Leaving Anyone Behind
After three successful cohorts of Generative AI training with Heicoders Academy, Lion Global Investors returned for a fourth engagement. This time, the brief carried a different weight. The session would be attended by roughly 70 participants drawn from across the organisation, and crucially, by members of LGI's most senior leadership, including their Chairman, who is already a confident and frequent user of AI tools.
That mix raised the bar considerably. A standard introductory GenAI programme would risk losing the attention of advanced users who had already moved well past the basics, while still needing to bring along colleagues at varying levels of familiarity. The challenge was to design a single full-day session that stayed relevant and genuinely useful for power users, remained accessible to everyone else, and held the attention of a large, sophisticated audience from start to finish.
Why Heicoders Academy: A Partnership Built on Trust and Track Record
By this point, the partnership between LGI and Heicoders Academy was well established, built over three prior cohorts and a consistent track record of quality. That history meant LGI trusted us not just to repeat a proven format, but to push the programme into more advanced territory for a more demanding audience.
Our instructors are active practitioners who work with these tools daily, not just teach them. That practitioner perspective is what allows us to move beyond introductory prompting and credibly demonstrate where AI is genuinely heading: autonomous agents, workflow automation, and rapid building. The ability to customise the curriculum to the level of the room, rather than to a fixed syllabus, was central to meeting LGI's needs.
The Solution: A Full-Day Journey from Prompting to Building
We designed and delivered a full-day workshop that deliberately progressed from familiar ground to the frontier, so that every participant gained something new regardless of their starting point. The curriculum covered:
- Copilot for Everyday Productivity: Getting practical value from AI assistants embedded in the tools the team already uses, establishing a common foundation for the room.
- Prompt Engineering: Crafting clear, well-structured prompts and refining them iteratively to get reliable, high-quality outputs.
- AI Agents: Understanding how agentic AI differs from a chatbot, and where autonomous agents can take on multi-step tasks rather than one-off responses.
- Workflow Automation with Manus: Putting agents to work on real automation, showing how a tool like Manus can plan and execute end-to-end workflows with minimal supervision.
To make the power of agents tangible rather than abstract, we ran a live demonstration. Using Manus, we built a working digital board game — "Lion Investment Quest" — from scratch during the session. The game is a Monopoly-style experience themed entirely around LGI's own funds and ETFs, turning products like the Global Index Fund, SG Gold ETF, and various regional ETFs into an interactive board. The point was twofold: it showed how quickly an agent can turn an idea into a functioning product, and it modelled a genuinely useful outcome, making investing concepts approachable for a layperson audience.
Given how clearly LGI conveyed the importance of this event, the workshop was conducted by Beh Min Yan, our CEO and Principal Instructor and a former quantitative researcher with a deep understanding of LGI's business. Having a co-founder personally lead the session reflected the weight we placed on getting it right for an audience of this seniority.
Results: A Room Full of Builders, Not Just Users
The workshop was a clear success. The progression from Copilot through to live agent building meant the session held the attention of the full room — advanced users and newcomers alike — which was the central goal given the seniority and AI fluency of some attendees. Seeing a polished, branded product built live in front of them made the potential of AI agents concrete in a way that slides alone could not.
Participants left with a sharper sense of not just how to use AI, but how to direct it to build and automate, and the team is now better positioned to spot opportunities for automation in their own work.
What's Next: A Deepening Partnership
Following this engagement, we are already in discussions with Lion Global Investors on future collaborations. Having taken the team from foundational GenAI through to agents and automation across four cohorts, the partnership continues to deepen as LGI builds an increasingly AI-capable workforce.
