AI training for employees: practise on your own work

What AI training for employees is — and what it is not

AI training for employees is a session at your premises where your staff learn to work with AI on their own tasks. Not a textbook case study, but the documents on their desk. By the end, real work is done, and that is not a by-product but the point.

The word training covers four different things. That distinction decides whether this page is any use to you:

• Training AI models. Labelling data, fine-tuning, annotation work. A trade in its own right, and not what we do.
• An online course for yourself. The makers of the big AI models publish free learning material, and the course platforms have plenty for very little money. A fine start, and you need not hire anyone for it.
• A one-off workshop or inspiration session. Ninety minutes, everyone leaves enthusiastic, and two weeks later nobody works differently. Useful as a kick-off, worthless as an end point.
• Training on your own work, in your own systems, with your own data. That is what we do. It costs more than an online course and sticks better, because people learn by doing rather than by being told.

Who is in the room

The make-up of the group matters more to the result than the content does. We usually train one of these four groups:

• Directors and management. Short session, high stakes. Not so the director writes prompts, but so they can judge which proposal is realistic and what to ask a supplier. At a construction firm: seeing which part of the estimate you never hand to a model.
• Admin and back office. The biggest and most rewarding group. Purchase invoices, order confirmations, debtor mail, standard letters. This is where the repetitive work sits, so this is where the effect shows the same day.
• Field staff and the shop floor. Engineers, drivers and site supervisors are not at a desk, so that session is about the phone: dictating job sheets instead of typing them, a day report finished in the van.
• Mixed, straight across the departments. Usually the best option. Within an hour such a group exposes where work gets stuck between two departments — the planner who cannot tell what the engineer filled in, the admin team that cannot read the order sales wrote. That conversation does not happen with only the back office in the room.

What a half-day looks like

A half-day is four hours at your office with eight to twelve people. The format is not fixed — we adapt it to whatever comes in that morning — but this is the pattern:

1. 01Beforehand, in a short call: what work are we doing that day? We ask for two or three real tasks due this week anyway. At an accounting firm a stack of incoming documents; at a wholesaler a run of quote requests.
2. 02First hour — what the technology is and is not. Short, no hype. What a language model is good at, where it produces nonsense with total confidence, and how you spot the difference. We deliberately let it get one wrong; people remember that better than a warning.
3. 03Second hour — watching your own work. Someone does a task the way they always do, we watch, and together we strip out the steps nobody needs to do any more.
4. 04Third hour — doing it yourself, hands on the keyboard. Everyone works on their own task while we walk around. This is what you do not get from a course: what does and does not go into a prompt, and how you check whether the answer holds up.
5. 05Fourth hour — writing down what works. The findings go into a one-page work instruction and saved prompts that are ready for next time. Without this step the training has evaporated in three weeks.
6. 06Afterwards — a short debrief with the manager: what we saw, what the group is picking up, and which process deserves real automation rather than manual work with AI bolted on.

Support after an implementation: where projects stall

The second reason people call us is different. Something has been built — an integration, an automation, an assistant that prepares documents — and technically it runs fine. Only half the team still works the old way.

That is not obstruction. It is usually one of three things: the new way is unclear at a busy moment, someone made a mistake with it in week one and went back to what they knew, or nobody explained what still has to be checked. So people check everything, and the time saved is gone.

Adoption support is the dullest service we offer and the most useful. Watching along in the first weeks, building in the exceptions that only surface in real life, adjusting the work instruction, and letting whoever already does it well demonstrate to the rest. At a haulage company that mainly meant the late-shift planner got the same explanation as the early one — the sort of thing nobody puts in a project plan.

Whoever trains is the same person who builds. Not a principle, just practical: someone who built the integration sees during the session why an exception goes wrong and fixes it that same week.

What AI training for employees costs

Our rates do not vary per client. There is no price per participant: whether six or twelve people are in the room, you pay for the time.

• A half-day (4 hours) on site: €596 excluding VAT and travel costs. The usual format for one department or one mixed group.
• A full day: €1,192 excluding VAT and travel costs. Worth it for several departments or sites, or a group too large for one session.
• Our hourly rate for advice and support is €149. Adoption support comes out of that, or out of the hours budget agreed for the build.
• Outside our invoice: the AI tool subscriptions and the hours of your own people. Count that last one honestly — freeing up twelve people for half a day is usually the biggest item on this page.

AI literacy and the EU AI Act

Search for whether AI training is mandatory and you end up at the European AI Act. Article 4 asks organisations that provide or use AI systems to take measures so their staff have a sufficient level of AI literacy: enough understanding of what the system does, what the risks are and how to judge the output.

What that means for you depends on what you use, in which role and at what risk. The regulation prescribes no particular course, no number of hours and no certificate. So we do not sell training with a compliance stamp on it; take legal advice if you want certainty about what applies to your organisation.

What is practical: training on your own work is one way to build that literacy, and it is sensible to record who had what and when. An attendance list and the one-page work instruction are enough. Our article on the AI Act for SMEs explains the rest.

What you need to arrange yourself

Four things decide whether a training session delivers anything, and all four sit with you.

• Actually free people up. A session where the phone keeps ringing and half the group slips out is wasted money. Put it on a quiet morning.
• A real process to practise on. The most important one. Without a concrete task the training becomes a demonstration, and a demonstration does not stick.
• Permission for the data you practise with. We work with your real documents, so agree in advance what may and may not go into an AI tool: no medical data, no personnel files, an anonymised version when in doubt. Anyone taking GDPR seriously settles this before the session.
• Someone who picks it up afterwards. There are always three loose ends after a training day; without an owner they stay loose.

When training is not the answer

There are situations in which we advise against training, even when you ask for it.

If the work mainly consists of retyping between two systems, training is a detour: you teach people to do faster what they should not be doing at all. An integration takes that work over — more expensive once, nothing after that. Training is never a substitute for a system that takes the work off your hands.

If nobody can explain how the process runs today, writing it down is the next step. Four hours of practice on a process that differs per employee produces four ways of working.

If you only want the basics — what is a language model, how do you ask a good question — start with the free material online. Come back when the question has become: how do we apply this to our own quotes and planning.

And if what you are really after is support for a decision the shop floor does not back, training will not fix that. That is a conversation, not a course.

Frequently asked questions

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Book a half-day on your own shop floor

A half-day (4 hours) at your premises costs €596 excluding VAT and travel costs. Not sure training is the right answer? Start with the free AI scan or book an intro call — we will tell you honestly if you are better off building than training.