Copy This: The 1-Hour Workshop Structure revealed

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There are lots of ways to make money from transferring your AI knowledge as an AI educator. But there’s a best place to start.

Content creation (YouTube, newsletters, courses) is great. I do it. You're reading it right now. But it takes a long time to build an audience. A long long time. We're talking a couple of years of consistent work before you see real results. Definitely do it, but don't expect it to pay your bills in month one! It’s a long slow burn.

1:1 coaching can work, but it doesn't scale. Can you charge $2,000 for an hour of your time as a coach? Probably not. It lacks scale.

Consulting and advisory work is lucrative. Companies pay (very) well for strategic AI guidance. But you need to get your foot in the door first. Cold outreach to a company saying "hire me as your AI consultant" is a hard sell when they don't know you. You’ve got to build trust.

Workshops are the key

Start with workshops. Here's why:

They scale. 50 people in a room, one hour of your time. That's $20 per head for them, $1,000 for you. The maths works for everyone. Cheap for the customer, expensive for you. Get a few hundred in a room and you are charging $2500-5000++ for an hour.

They open doors. You go in as an educator. You're not selling anything. You're teaching. But once you've stood in front of their team and delivered value, you become the go-to expert. The consulting work, the advisory retainers, the implementation projects... they come after. The workshop is the door opener. Just…one you also get paid for!

They're high-leverage assets. Build a workshop once, deliver it again and again and again. Same slides. Same structure. Same stories. Different audiences. I've delivered the same core workshop dozens of times. Sure you update and tweak but the core remains consistent. Each delivery gets easier. Each delivery gets better. And each one pays just as well.

Start with workshops. Add the rest over time. They stack with workshops as the core offering.

Start With One Hour

OK, we’re doing workshops. Cool. What length? Format? Content?

You might be tempted to go big. A half-day session. A full training programme. A 12-week course. All in, big money, let’s goooo!

Don't.

Start with one hour.

A 1-hour workshop is long enough to deliver real value, short enough that companies will say yes easily, and simple enough that you can deliver it confidently your first time.

Once you've nailed the 1-hour format, you can 100% expand. I personally deliver 30-minute sessions, 60-minute workshops, 2-hour deep dives, and 3-hour half day intensives. Then you can do length eLearning and embedding. I also license the material to other trainers who want to run them in their own organisations. But I started with one hour. I highly recommend you do the same.

One hour. That's your first goal.

The Level Is Lower Than You Think

You’re probably already thinking “oh I don’t know enough!” That’s natural. That’s imposter syndrome. All smart people get it.

I need to tell you something, and you probably won't believe me until you deliver your first workshop.

The public level of AI knowledge is much, much lower than you expect.

You're reading this right now, which means you're already ahead of 99% of people. You've used ChatGPT. You've probably experimented with prompts. You understand the basics.

Most people in your workshops won't even be there yet. I wish I was joking…

Tiffany, one of our workshop kit members, discovered this immediately:

She delivered her first training to accountants and attorneys and had to add screenshots of how to start a new chat. She had to remind people to log in so their work wouldn't disappear. She had to explain that hitting Enter submits the prompt.

These are SMART people - accountants and lawyers. Very smart! Just not yet using AI!

This is the level. This is where most people are.

You are not "behind." You are ahead. Way ahead.

Again, you won’t believe me. No-one does! But go and deliver your first workshop to the public and you’ll see quickly how much more you know than everyone else!

The Basic Structure

OK! What are we putting in our workshop.

You can absolutely build a workshop manually. Here's the framework that works as well as some thinking points:

1. Intro (10 min) – Why this matters for [your niche]

Open with why AI matters specifically for your audience. Not AI in general. AI for them. If you're training real estate agents, talk about how AI is changing property listings and client communication. If you're training teachers, talk about lesson planning and marking. Make it specific. We don’t need more generic trainers.

2. Mindset (10 min) – How to think about AI

This is where you use story and metaphor. Remember the translator examples from Lesson 2? This is where they come in.

"AI is like a really fast paralegal who never sleeps."

"AI is like having an intern who can write 50 variations of your ad copy in 10 seconds."

You need something like this for your industry, your niche, your audience.

Your job is to reframe AI from scary and technical to familiar and useful. (In a few days, I'll give you the Industry Translator tool to generate these for your specific niche.)

3. Hands-on (20 min) – Simple prompting or demo relevant to their work

This is the most important part. Get them doing something. On their phones. On their laptops. Right there in the room.

Using AI is a skill. They have to DO something to learn. It’s not enough to just sit passively.

Pick one simple use case that's relevant to their work. For accountants, maybe it's drafting a client email. For teachers, maybe it's creating a lesson plan. For HR teams, maybe it's writing a job description.

Your workshop will live or die based on this exercise so this is where you’ll focus the majority of your preparation.

4. Safe use & Next steps (10 min) – Ethics, policy, resources

Cover what NOT to put into AI tools. Confidential data. Personal information. Client details. This is the part that makes companies comfortable booking you, because you're addressing their biggest concern. It’s also (honestly!) the least interesting part which is why we put it after the fun and useful exercise.

5. Wrap (10 min) – Recap + their next action

Don't just end. Give them one clear thing to do after they leave. One prompt to try. One task to complete. One resource to bookmark.

That's it. That's a 60-minute workshop. That's what companies pay $1,000 to $4,000 for. And it’ll go FAST.

What You Actually Need to Know

For your first "1 hour “Intro to AI” workshop what you need to know is much much less than you think.

Must know:

• How to use ChatGPT (or Claude, or Gemini) effectively in your niche

• Basic prompting best practices: be specific, give context, iterate

• What NOT to put into AI tools: confidential data, personal information

• 2-3 compelling use cases relevant to your audience

Not needed:

• Coding skills

• Machine learning expertise

• Ability to build AI models

• Deep technical knowledge of neural networks

If someone asks you something you don't know, say: "That's a great question. I don't want to give you wrong information, so let me research that and follow up."

Or my favourite “Amazing question. That’s a little more detailed than will be helpful for a lot of people in this room so let’s take this question offline”.

Then actually follow up. This builds trust and gives you a reason to continue the relationship.

I go through a LOT of other ways to manage the room and deal with know it alls and troublemakers in the AI Workshop Kit. As it’s always a big question!

If you do want to really level up your AI knowledge though I have a tool that helps you discover your current level, work out where you need to get to and how to move from where you are to where you need to be. All available here in the Levels of AI.

But You Don't Have to Build This From Scratch

You can use the framework above and build your workshop manually. Plenty of people do. Very doable.

But I've also built a free tool that does the heavy lifting for you. You know me! It looks like this:

Input your niche, your audience, and a few details about what you want to cover. The tool generates:

• Learning outcomes tailored to your audience

• A complete 60-minute workshop structure with timing

• Specific talking points for each section

• Slide suggestions

• A hands-on exercise relevant to your niche

Here’s a preview:

You can access the 101 AI Workshop Plan tool here: https://aiwithkyle.com/ai-workshop-series/lesson-3-knowledge

Go use that to prepare your basic workshop. And tomorrow we’ll talk about facilitation, delivery and I’ll give you an Industry Translation tool.

See you then,

Kyle