Nobody learns AI by watching

Your company sends its staff to an AI training session. Two hours of slides, a speaker, a handout at the end. Or the modern variant: a video series on the learning platform that everyone works through at their own pace, more or less attentively, usually while doing something else. The box gets ticked. And on Monday nobody works any differently than before.

That is the format, not the people. AI is a skill, not a body of knowledge. You cannot acquire it by listening, any more than you can acquire cycling or negotiating that way. Skills grow through doing, with feedback at the moment of doing. Someone who hears a talk about good prompts knows afterwards that context matters. Someone who writes a poor prompt and gets a clarifying question back in the same breath can actually do it afterwards.

A video does not know your company. It does not notice when your attention drifts. It does not adjust its pace, so it bores the experienced and loses the beginners. Above all, it never asks back. Yet asking back is exactly the ability that separates an AI from a search engine, and the one your people need to master.

The tutor is the medium. In our workplace AI training, participants work through every unit as a conversation with Claude, the frontier model from Anthropic. They work with the AI on their own tasks from the very first minute. The tutor demonstrates by example instead of quizzing for definitions, and delivers something usable straight away: a draft, a structure, the one question that matters. That way participants experience during the course what good AI actually does in daily work.

On your own company, not on a case study. From module 2 onwards, each unit produces a work product about your own organisation: a process profile, a data map, a quick-win profile. What comes out of it stays useful. At the end you hold an honest assessment of where you stand, in place of a handout.

Verifiable. Three practical questions close each unit, and all three have to be right. Complete a module and you receive a certificate. Six modules, roughly one to one and a half hours per module, in the browser, at your own pace, in German and English. No technical background required.

When do you switch. Your company will build AI competence. The only open question is how. As long as the answer is slides and training videos, you are paying for attendance rather than ability. Modules 1 and 2 of our workplace AI training are free for the first 50 seats, up to two per company. Try it on yourself before you decide it for your team.

Knowledge can be presented. Ability has to be practised.

Author: Georges Leuenberger, in dialogue with Claude (Anthropic).