Who runs the room: facilitators, platform-led sessions and AI facilitation

What does a facilitator actually do?

A facilitator sets the scene, releases injects at the right moment, keeps the group from solving the scenario too early, presses quiet people for a view, and stops the most senior person from answering every question. They also decide when to speed up, slow down or change course. It is a skilled job, and a weak facilitator can turn a good scenario into a polite meeting.

Option 1: your own facilitator

An internal facilitator knows the organisation and costs nothing extra. The risks are independence of judgement inside the room and workload: the same person often writes the scenario, runs it and writes the report. Platforms such as Conducttr are built for this model, giving the facilitator a Scenario Editor and control of what each role sees.

Option 2: a provider runs it

Incident response firms sell facilitated tabletops as a service; CrowdStrike describes its Tabletop Exercise as discussion-based, and Palo Alto Networks offers Unit 42 incident simulation and testing services. Some platforms also run sessions for you: Hack The Box describes Crisis Control as platform-led with facilitator guidance. An outside facilitator brings experience of other incidents and will ask uncomfortable questions. The cost is scheduling and lead time, which usually means fewer exercises a year.

Option 3: software facilitates

Reflex Security describes an AI facilitator, which its blog calls Victoria, that joins the session inside Zoom, Google Meet or Microsoft Teams, with AI agents able to take the seats of roles that are absent and an auto-generated facilitator guide. This removes the scheduling constraint of a human facilitator and makes frequent exercises practical. The questions to ask are how the facilitator handles a group that stalls, whether a human can intervene, and how the session is recorded.

What should you ask any facilitator, human or software?

• How do you handle a group that reaches a decision too fast, or not at all?
• Who decides to change the pace or skip an inject, and is that recorded?
• How do you keep the most senior person from answering for everyone?
• What do you hand over at the end: notes, a timeline, a draft report?

The answers show whether the facilitator is pacing a script or responding to the room, which is the difference between a meeting and an exercise.

How do you choose?

• If the goal is a first exercise with a sceptical executive team, an experienced outside facilitator is often worth the cost.
• If the goal is frequency, every quarter or more, software facilitation or a platform-led format makes it affordable in time.
• If the goal is full control of every inject, your own facilitator with authoring tools fits best.
• Whatever you choose, keep one internal owner responsible for objectives and follow-up; facilitation can be outsourced, accountability cannot.

Our exercise cycle shows, for each platform, whether its public pages describe the platform running the session. See the scoring page.