The usual alternative
What a self-paced online course cannot give you
Most people wanting to get better with AI reach first for a course. That instinct is reasonable: for baseline awareness of a fast-moving field, a cheap self-paced course is a sensible tool. The limits are structural rather than a matter of quality.
A course can make you aware. It cannot make you capable at your own desk.
A self-paced online course
- Video is fluent to watch, and that fluency feels like understanding without producing it.
- Learning at your own pace usually means consuming everything at once, the opposite of what makes learning last.
- Testing, where it appears, certifies completion rather than functioning as retrieval practice.
- Generic content can only address the generic professional, and how closely practice resembles the real job determines whether anything transfers.
- What it hands you is a set of use cases, and use cases date as fast as the tools do.
This work
- Built on your own live work, never on tidy demonstration cases.
- Spaced across weeks, with the gaps where the learning happens.
- Assistants and automations built from your own material, on your own machine.
- The capacity to meet an unfamiliar task next month and see the opportunity in it yourself.
That experimental disposition is the actual product, and it is what keeps you effective as the tools change beneath you.
What you learn
Three skills for working with large language models, built on your own work.
It is very easy to accept an output that seems good enough and settle, and to miss that something far better was one sentence away.
01
Spot the task
Identifying the tasks inside your own role where a large language model genuinely helps.
02
Work the model
Prompting and conversing in a way that gets the most out of it, injecting your own professional expertise into the conversation rather than accepting whatever comes back.
- Claude
- ChatGPT
- Gemini
- Copilot
03
Think with it
The creative, flexible, experimental thinking that makes both of those possible. Not a set of prompts. How to think with the tool.
The engagement
How it works
Four stages. What happens in each, and what you are left with.
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01
Discovery
A structured examination of what you actually do week to week: your recurring tasks, the software you already use, the artefacts you are responsible for producing. Gathered systematically, so the picture is comprehensive rather than anecdotal.
You are left withA comprehensive picture of your week, which everything after this is built on.
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02
The build, done for you
You almost certainly sit on a wealth of material you rely on constantly: reference documents, past reports, templates, datasets, style guides. Most of it sits inert. Away from the sessions, we build automations and custom assistants that draw on those sources directly, configured on your own machine.
You are left withThe repetitive parts of your work taking a fraction of the time, starting from your own best material rather than a blank page.
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03
The coaching
Sessions are spaced across weeks rather than crammed into a day, and the gaps are where the learning happens. Real tasks, attempted on live work, become the raw material for the next session: what worked, what broke, where you got stuck, solved in real time.
You are left withSkill that transfers, because it was built on your own material and never on tidy demonstration cases.
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04
Sustain
Light-touch support between and after sessions. The engagement is wrapped in a visible scaffold rather than ending abruptly at the final meeting.
You are left withCapability as the deliverable, not attendance.
Three sessions is a sensible default, but the number matters less than the design.
Let’s begin
Start with a conversation.
Every engagement begins the same way: a conversation about what you’re trying to change. The shape of the work is developed with you from there.