Prompting for Originality: How Devin McNulty Is AI-Enabling His Workshop Business

In this episode, Devin McNulty, founder of Funmentum Labs and creator of Funware, joins us to explore what happens when you treat fun not as fluff—but as a powerful lever for doing serious work. After 15 years of leading high-stakes strategy and innovation workshops for Fortune 500 teams, Devin set out to scale his approach. The result: Funware, an AI-powered facilitation tool that helps hybrid teams run faster, more creative workshops—without needing a pro facilitator in the room. He shares how it works: from AI that rephrases vague challenges into crisp prompts, to bots that throw out just-bad-enough ideas to unlock new thinking. We dive into the deep end of design choices—why Devin treats AI like a co-facilitator, not a thought partner, and how he builds in levity and timing to shift posture in skeptical rooms. He talks about “pre-training” AI the same way you’d brief a human teammate, and what it means to productize your own facilitation brain. The conversation is also a blueprint for AI-first entrepreneurship: how to turn creative intuition into software, how to build with (and not for) users, and how to design tools that spark real interaction—not just outputs. Whether you're leading workshops, building internal tools, or trying to make your team more idea-generative, this episode is packed with insights on creative AI, team dynamics, and the future of facilitation.