Blog
November 2026
If you're a corporate trainer, facilitator or consultant who uses business simulations in leadership, sales or team workshops, the hard part is getting one that is right for both your customer and you. Off-the-shelf business games aren't specific to your customer's business, and since any other trainer can license the same game, they don't help you stand out with your own approach. A custom game means undertaking a full development project with lots of testing.
oTree AI (OTAI) removes this barrier. You describe your custom design to our AI agent, which builds a working multiplayer version that participants can play on their phones or laptops. It's not the type of vibe coding you will find elsewhere, but rather a rigorously designed system that gives you the same end-to-end dependability and polish you expect from off-the-shelf software. It's based on oTree, a battle-tested platform that thousands of academic and industry researchers have used to run live interactive experiments with groups of people. The hard parts of real-time play, like grouping people, timing rounds and handling dropouts, are already solved.
The games that work best put people in a situation where their incentives pull against each other, and let the consequences play out over a few rounds. Some formats facilitators ask for:
You aren't limited to a catalog. If the client is a hospital, the supply chain can move blood units instead of beer; if it's a bank, the shared budget can be a risk limit. The scenario text, the numbers and the round structure are whatever you describe.
Write the brief the way you'd explain it to a co-facilitator. The more concrete the numbers, the closer the first version will be. For example:
"Teams of 4 people, each team is a regional sales office. Every quarter, each office decides how to split 100 hours between chasing new accounts and servicing existing ones. New accounts pay off two quarters later, and neglected existing accounts start to churn. Six quarters. After each quarter, show each team its revenue and its rank against the other offices."
Then refine it in the same conversation: add a market shock in quarter 4, rename the regions to match the client's, or have each team discuss and submit one joint decision instead of individual ones.
Test it before the workshop. OTAI's bots can play through the whole game, including participants who never submit anything, and then you can play it yourself in a few browser tabs to check that the story makes sense from each role.
Create a session with a few more participants than you expect. Unused slots don't matter. On the session's Links tab, next to the session-wide link, click the QR code button. It opens a full-screen QR code you can put on the projector. Participants scan it with their phone camera and they're in. Nobody installs an app or creates an account, so there's nothing for the client's IT department to approve. The link is also shown in large text below the code, for anyone who prefers to type it.
A simulation in a workshop isn't a self-paced e-learning module. You want everyone to start together, and you want to stop the action when there's something worth talking about.
For this, ask OTAI for an admin gate, for example: "Participants should wait on a page after the briefing until I start the game, and again after each quarter until I release them." Participants who reach a gate see a waiting screen. When you're ready, click Open gate in the session's Monitor tab, and everyone moves on at once. Latecomers who reach a gate you've already opened go straight through. The Monitor tab also shows who has joined and what page each person is on, so you can see when a team is stuck.
The debrief is where the learning happens, and it's far more convincing when the data comes from the people in the room instead of a case study about someone else.
Ask OTAI for an admin report and describe the charts you want, for example: "A line chart of each team's orders per round alongside actual customer demand, so the amplification up the chain is visible." The charts appear in the session's My Charts tab, which you can show on the projector. Each time you click Refresh, the charts update with the latest data and animate to the new values, so you can pause between rounds and ask the group what they think is going on.
Afterwards you can download every decision as a spreadsheet, which is useful for a follow-up report to the client or for comparing how different cohorts played the same game.
Once a game works, it's yours to reuse. Run it again for the next group next month, or copy the project and adapt it for a different client in a few messages. For a recurring program, create a room: its link never changes, so you can put it in the joining instructions once, and start a fresh session in it for each cohort.
Pick an exercise you already run on paper, or one you've always wanted to run but couldn't find a game for. Describe it to OTAI, let the bots play it, and do a dry run with a few colleagues to rehearse your debrief.