In recent months, Colton Hess, MBA/MPH 26, has taught more than 50 students across Haas to use Claude Code through AI “activation sessions.” Their enthusiasm inspired led Hess to launch Activation Playbook, a practice that helps impact-focused leaders and teams more effectively build with AI tools.
“My plan coming into Haas was to build something at the intersection of health and tech. I was deeply interested in health wearables and the idea that we have more data than ever about our bodies and daily life, but we haven’t yet converted this into better health outcomes at scale.
That led me to building Rhythmicly, a startup in the sleep space. The process of building that product and startup forced me to be a very early adopter of agentic tools like Claude Code which completely changed the way I worked. With a chatbot you’re using AI’s brain… with agentic tools, you’re using its hands, and one person can suddenly do what used to take a team. It almost felt like a secret I was in on that I had to share with others, and that’s what led to this new practice.
So my work at Haas all started very organically, helping show my fellow students that the gap between having an idea and making it something real is smaller than ever. It started with me sitting my friends down in the courtyard and showing them what these tools could help them do: helping them get the “activation energy” up to just start playing with the tools and realizing the power it gives them.
I started calling these Activation Sessions, where I meet people where they are and hold their hand while they get started. We pick something real they want to build or a problem they want to solve and we build a prototype around it together. By the end, something exists that didn’t exist before, and more importantly, they built it, and have seen how intuitive it is to build with AI. I like to say, “if you can describe it, you can build it,” and I love seeing the “wow” moment in each session where that really sinks in for people.
My next step is scaling Activation Playbook to more organizations, offering one-on-one sessions, executive AI coaching, and “applied AI in residence” offerings, where I meet with an organization’s leaders and learn about the team, the challenges, and the culture, and host workshops and activation sessions with the team. I like sitting down with leaders who know they need to understand AI more, but feel like they can’t keep up and don’t have time to do this on their own. I can help show them the ropes and help them feel empowered to build real things with these tools and can also be a sounding board on their team’s AI strategy.
I love this work because it helps people navigate the world differently. They see a problem and start imagining how to build the solution. When they do a tedious process they immediately think, “There’s got to be a better way.” I love getting a peek into the challenges leaders are wrestling with and helping them think through how to use these tools to scale their impact and serve their mission more effectively. This technology is powerful enough to reshape how organizations and entire fields work, so how and where we use it really matters. I want to do my part pointing this force toward the right problems in thoughtful ways.
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