What I'm going to be talking about is giving workshops to businesses specifically — educating businesses on how to use artificial intelligence, how their staff members can use it safely, what they should be using it on, what they should not be using it on. It is a really big opportunity right now.

The most I've personally been paid for this is $4,000 for one hour of work. I used to make that in a month. Making $4,000 — that's about £3,000-£3,500 — in one hour is pretty mind-blowing.

The Corporate AI Skills Gap

In 2025, we saw a lot of big companies using artificial intelligence and making a mess of it. Deloitte is the example I always use because they made a mistake not once, but twice. They didn't learn from their mistake.

Deloitte did a report for the Australian government, and it was full of AI errors. It had hallucinations, made-up footnotes, made-up academics. Somebody actually tried to track down one of these academics at the University of Sydney that was included in this report and realized they don't exist.

Deloitte had charged the Australian government $440,000 Australian dollars for this report. Obviously their staff members had just chucked it through artificial intelligence and then just given that report to the Australian government. They got found out and had to refund some of the money.

The problem here wasn't that they'd used AI. Everyone's using AI — that's where we're going and it's getting better and better. The problem was they had not checked the AI's response. They hadn't bothered to actually use their human experts to see if the output was worthwhile. That is not an AI problem. That is a training problem.

The Shadow AI Crisis

There was an MIT study that found of the companies surveyed, 90% of staff members said they were using AI. However, only 40% of the companies had provided them with AI training. That means an additional 50% — more than were officially sanctioned — were using artificial intelligence.

They're bringing their own ChatGPT to work because they know it's useful, they know it's helpful. They're going to go around whatever rules the business has put in place. There's a huge gap. We call this "shadow IT" — when staff members use their own IT at work without it being sanctioned by leadership.

The Capability Overhang

There's now something called the capability overhang. Ethan Mollick talks about this. OpenAI put out a tweet at Christmas saying this is the big problem right now. AI is accelerating, it's getting faster and better and better. We humans are not using it in a better way than we were a couple of years ago.

Most people are still using ChatGPT as a replacement for Google. That's a fine first step, but AI can do so much more. With Google, you ask questions. With ChatGPT, you can have it help you ask better questions. Subtle but incredibly important difference.

You Don't Need to Be a PhD

A lot of you will be thinking, "I'm not a computer scientist. I'm not a coder. I don't know how to build models." You don't need to know as much as you think you do.

There's a story I like to tell of a charity I worked with. They'd had some AI training from KPMG. The guy was an old white dude with two PhDs who'd written a textbook on machine learning. He came in and started talking about backpropagation, gradient descent, neural nets, how LLMs actually work. Fascinating stuff, but it is not useful for using ChatGPT or Claude on a daily basis.

I went in a few weeks later and basically said, "Can you use WhatsApp?" They said yes. I said, "Okay, cool. Well that is a chat interface. So is ChatGPT." The lights in their eyes started lighting up — "Oh God, I can use this!"

The 60-Minute Workshop Structure

A one-hour workshop is fairly simple. An introduction is about 10 minutes — you're talking about them, not about yourself. Next is mindset (10 minutes) — you need to get them over psychological blocks first.

The most important part is an exercise (20-30 minutes). You need to walk them through an exercise actually using what you've taught them. Using AI is a skill. I could talk about prompting and best practices, but as soon as they leave the room, they haven't actually learned anything. We need to get people using AI inside of the workshop so that it sticks.

After the exercise, talk about safety (10 minutes) — how to use AI safely, whatever the company's policies are. Then wrap up (10 minutes) with one clear next action.

The Confidence Ladder

There's a confidence ladder you can build up. Start with free, familiar faces, and online — that's the easiest. Then work your way up: maybe start charging, maybe do it on stage or in front of a room, do it to companies you don't know. You move up step by step.

The largest room I've given a workshop to was about 400-500 people. If I had tried to do that at the beginning of my journey, I would've been physically sick. But I worked my way up to that.

That's how you command larger fees. If you're talking to 400 people and charging $4,000, that's $10 per person — that's cheap for them. For a 50-person room, $1,000 for one hour of your time is $20 per person. That's not much for a training budget.

Workshop vs Keynote

It's critical to understand the distinction between a workshop and a keynote speech. A keynote is a performance. A workshop is a conversation. You're not on a TED stage delivering a memorized speech. You're a facilitator in a room full of professionals, helping them solve problems. An effective workshop is interactive, with less than 50% of the time spent on "lecturing."