Today I’m going to walk you through my one hour workshop. It’s a big one!

Let’s get started

Preparing your Material

I recommend you focus on a one hour workshop as your first educational offer.

One hour is a great place to start because

• it’s less for you to prep

• it’s a lower price point for clients than a half day / full day

• it fits easily in a company’s schedule (ie. a lunch talk) - lower friction

• it’ll leave them wanting more

Also notice that this is a workshop. Not a presentation. I recommend this because

• it’s less work for you (!) - I spend maybe 30 minutes talking in a 60 minute workshop

• AI is a skill and needs to be practiced. Simply telling them about how to use AI won’t help anyone.

What I’m going to do in this Part is literally outline the core 1-hour workshop I deliver. I charge between $1000-4000 for this one hour workshop, depending on audience size and industry.

You can borrow my workshop structure and use it as a jumping off point.

Or, hell, you can use it wholesale.

I’m actually looking into licensing out my teaching material so that people can teach this globally. Reply to this email if this sound interesting - we’re looking for beta testers amongst our premium subscribers first.

Learning outcomes

One hour is not a long time.

Especially because we’ll have exercises. Do you know how long exercises take? Goodness me! Forever!

Because of our limited time we need to limit what we’re teaching.

We’re aiming for quality over quantity. Skills over knowledge. Action over theory.

If you go up and teach them 30 things about using AI in business they won’t remember anything. It’s overload. And they’ll switch off.

Instead we’re going to have 3 learning outcomes

1. AI is a useful tool for my work and I need to start using it

2. How to use AI properly

3. I don’t need to be scared of AI

That’s it.

If people walk away with these learnings I’m happy. And so is the client company who wants their staff to have a basic foundation in AI and wanting to learn more.

In an hour that’s a result!

Structure

My structure is as follows

• Intro (5 minutes)

• How to think about AI (15 minutes, lecture)

• RISEN framework exercise (20 minutes, exercise)

• Q&A (5 minutes)

• Concerns about AI (10 minutes, lecture)

• Q&A (5 minutes)

An Intro, three main sections and two Q&As.

Notice how I switch formats every 15-20 minutes. This is to keep energy up.

Talk for more than 20 minutes and people get bored. Run an exercise for more than 20 minutes and they’ll get distracted.

Switch back and forth between them? You keep people engaged because there’s alway something new.

The Q&As are in there to (obviously) answer questions but also as time buffers.

Are people enjoying and learning from the exercise? Extend it out and cut the Q&A. Running over? Cut the Q&A. Worst comes to the worst you can answer questions after the session. Think of Q&A as structural buffers to help you control the timings.

Rundown of each section

Introduction

Make it about them. And keep it short.

At the beginning you have the benefit of the doubt from the audience. They assume you know what you are talking about and it’s going to be helpful. It’s your job to maintain that goodwill for the duration of the workshop.

To kick this off on the right note I literally spend the first minute or two getting them to like me.

Sounds wild but it’s effective.

I personally use humour and vulnerability. Because that’s me. You’ll need to use what’s true to you.

This is the part of the workshop I actually prepare the most - my silly jokes for the first few minutes. If I can get them to laugh they relax. That done I can crack on.

Once you’ve made them realise “ok I can relax I’m in good hands” we tell them what they’ll be learning.

We do not tell them "why you are here”. I hate this slide. But people always use it.

Most of them are here because their boss told them to be. Let’s be honest.

Instead I hit them with a quick “what we’ll be learning” - a slide with the sections on it. And tell them it’ll mainly be exercises so they won’t just be sitting listening to me for an hour.

And then, at the very end, I’ll tell them who I am with a quick slide and introduction

This comes at the end because the introduction is about them. Not me. I just tack it on as a “I know what I’m talking about, you are in safe hands” reminder.

How to Think about AI

This first section is focused on making people want to start using AI.

This is the most straight “lecture” part of the workshop.

The main points I make are

• think of AI as a hyper-intelligent assistant

• who still needs context and instructions

• learning how to instruct the AI is the skill we’re focusing on

• thankfully it’s not about coding, it’s not technical

• using AI is like using Whatsapp

• it’s a communication skill

• specifically the communication skill is called prompt engineering

I use this section to get everyone on board. Especially the technophobic. And make sure they know it’s all about clear communication, not code. People who started off looking terrified quickly relax during this section

RISEN framework

I then immediately roll us into the main exercise.

This is the meat of the workshop - running them through my RISEN prompt engineering framework.

This takes 20 minutes because they are doing it live with me.

I have them add in parts of the framework bit by bit to see how it affects their end results. I ask for show and tell. I ask for them to compare with neighbours. All this takes time but makes the exercise much more powerful.

Importantly I tailor my example prompt for this exercise. Depending on what the company is and what department I’m talking to.

This is crucial to make the exercise relevant. If I’m talking to a law firm and my exercise is all about creating prompts for social media posts for a farm equipment company the exercise is not valuable.

Choosing the specific example prompt therefore is one of the most important preparation tasks before the workshop. And we gather that information in discovery, which I’ll cover in the next Part.

First Q&A

I use the first Q&A to deal with questions about the RISEN framework. I ask specifically for questions related to what we just covered.

One that nearly always comes up is that we could have just done the task instead of writing such a long complex prompt.

This one is so common that I sometimes address it directly before the Q&A or wait for it to pop up. Either way I literally have additional slides ready to go.

One on how common the question is

And one on the answer (better prompts made using the RISEN framework are reusable again and again. They are business assets) :

As you do more workshops you’ll know the common questions and will be able to answer them easily. Make sure to let the question asker complete the question though - even if you know what they are about to ask!

Concerns about AI

After the exercise I switch back to lecture mode and address head-on the reservations people in the room have about AI.

How do I know what they worry about? What scares them?

I’m a mind reader! Nah- I use a sneaky tactic. A survey!

Before every workshop I send out a survey. I’ll cover this in detail in the next Part.

The survey specifically has a question - what are your biggest concerns about using AI professionally?

From this I get a lovely chart of their concerns

I use this to structure this final section, hitting 2-3 of the biggest concerns.

I don’t tell them the concerns are stupid. They are often valid!

But I do show them where genuine issues are and how to avoid them.

For example here’s a bit on “Privacy Concerns”

I show them how to turn off OpenAI’s use of their data to train their model. And quickly show them the paid options which give better privacy protection.

I’ll do this quickly for each of the main 2-3 concerns to basically bust those barriers and help with AI uptake.

Final Q&A

To wrap it all up I end with a 5 minute Q&A.

This tends to be a lot more freeform and it’s where people will bring up stuff they’ve read in the news (which is why it’s helpful to keep up to date!).

Anything that is overly complex I suggest you ask the question answering to chat with you after the event. We want to keep this generally valuable for everyone and not let it go into the weeds and scare people off AI again!

My favourite questions here are when people ask a specific business problem and how I’d use AI to help. These are great because I can immediately help one person go away and use AI to deal with something that’s been annoying for them. When others see this in action they start to think about what they can use AI for to.

Wrapping up

Phew. That was a long one. And I could talk in a lot more detail about my workshop. Hopefully this gives you an idea of the structure, timing and content though.

You’ll notice it’s very high level. And there isn’t that much “in it”. Yet I charge $1000-4000/hour for this.

That’s because this is what companies need right now. They don’t need more detail. They don’t need more technical. They don’t need more advanced.

They need enough to get their staff members all on the same page with AI.

In the next Part I’ll show you how to begin to acquire clients.

Keep prompting,

Kyle