What to Look for in AI Training
When anyone can generate an AI training course in ninety seconds, what exactly are organizations paying for?
Ask your AI tool of choice to build “a four-hour AI workshop with facilitator notes, exercises, and a slide outline.” Ninety seconds later you have something that’s nearly as good as what plenty of organizations are paying thousands of dollars to outsource. Hand the AI-generated content to your HR person and they’ll run the training just fine. In plenty of companies, better than fine, because HR already knows your people. An outside trainer parachuting in for a half-day workshop doesn’t have that insider knowledge.
So if the curriculum can write itself, what are you paying for in an AI training? Definitely not another rundown of the great ChatGPT-versus-Claude showdown. You’re paying for something a lot harder to generate: understanding where AI belongs inside your business.
Because knowing what AI can do isn’t the same as knowing where it should be used — and no off-the-shelf workshop can answer the one question that matters: what repetitive work does our team do every week, and where could AI remove friction without sacrificing our competitive advantage?
No AI-generated curriculum, however comprehensive, can answer that for you.
AI Trainings, Increasingly, Are Found Lacking
Living in this new era of AI washing can be baffling. What is said is rarely what is true, especially when applied across the larger business landscape. We’ve been promised great time savings and productivity hacks that have not held up to reality. Now it seems AI trainings are also being found lacking.
While AI upskilling remains a top priority for leadership teams, employees are pushing back. Not because they don’t want education. But because the education isn’t helping.
The most recent finding? A new AI Readiness Report from workforce training platform Docebo just put a number on it: 85% of employees say they can’t take what they learned in AI training and apply it to their job.
➤ Read More: Your voice has the power to move people to take action. Don’t let AI write you out of your own story Read: Your Voice is Power..
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The Real Competitive Advantage
Five years ago, organizations invested in AI (and related trainings) because they were afraid of being left behind. Now, almost 80% of learners say the AI trainings aren’t tailored to them. More troubling, Less than two-thirds of leaders don’t know why that’s a problem. In other words, you have a workforce asking for better training and leadership that doesn’t understand what that means.
In other words, AI training are not (or should not be) about the tools. They should be about helping people use that technology to make better decisions. To improve the work they’re already doing by connecting what they know with what your customers want.
And that looks different depending on the business. An accounting firm, a chamber of commerce, and a museum might all use the same AI model. But they don’t need the same solutions. While one team is reviewing financial statements, another is justifying the cost of membership. Or writing grants. The technology is identical. The inputs and outputs are not. Which means one-size fits all tools trainings no longer work. If they ever did.
Ask how AI can increase your competitive advantage.
– Monica Poling
Stop Measuring for Productivity
Yes, everyone wants to save time. But what you value isn’t what your employees value — and it’s certainly not what your customers value. Which means productivity is a hard to measure. You can use AI to do “more” but more doesn’t automatically mean valuable.
BetterUp Labs and Stanford’s Social Media Lab gave this a name last year: workslop. AI-generated work that looks finished but isn’t — polished on the surface, shallow underneath. 40% of workers say they had to untangle colleague-produced workslop .in just one moth.
Goldman Sachs looked at the S&P 500 and found 90% of those companies can’t even quantify what AI has done for them. The results weren’t “disappointing.” They just had no productivity measure at all.
None of this means AI doesn’t work. It means the metric everyone’s chasing — hours saved, “10x productivity” — is measuring the wrong layer.
Ask whether AI increases your competitive advantage instead.
➤ Read More: For years, Claude AI lived in ChatGPT’s shadow, but that is rapidly changing. Read why now everyone is talking about Claude AI.
What AI Training Should Do For You
So if the productivity story is mostly overhyped, where does AI training really earn its keep?
The through-line: AI’s real value isn’t speed for its own sake. It’s removing friction that drains your competitive advantage — the wait, the blank page, the disconnected data, the meeting you needed just to compare two options. That’s your business moving at the pace your judgment deserves.
AI training built on your actual workflow. Training should start with your meetings, your documents, your customer interactions, your repetitive tasks, even your filing systems — not a stock prompt template that could belong to anybody.
AI training that has a defined outcome, not just a completion rate. Most organizations training on AI right now have no KPI for whether the AI training is working. Reduced grant-writing time, better customer response, more detailed sales prep — pick a real business problem to solve.
AI training that includes judgment, not just tools. AI can draft, summarize, and brainstorm. It still can’t decide what’s worth doing. The training that actually sticks teaches people to recognize a good output, question a weak one, and know when the decision still belongs to a human.
AI training that leaves people something to use tomorrow. The best AI training doesn’t leave people saying “that was interesting.” It leaves them saying “I know exactly where I’m going to use this.” If nobody in the room can name that thing on the way out, the training didn’t work — no matter how good it felt.
Each of these is a competitive-advantage question in disguise.
✅ Green Flags: What to Watch For
Knowledge bases or knowledge graphs. Most organizations are sitting on decades of disorganized institutional knowledge. Look for a trainer who understands the latest technology and how it can systematize your knowledge.
Workflow production. Although the term workflow is the overhyped media darling of the year, it is an important part of AI training. It implies a trainer grounded in logic — someone who can hand you a blueprint for ‘WHEN this happens, THEN here’s how AI can do its best work.’
Accessible automation. Agentic AI is top of mind for everyone but it still feels terrifying for anyone outside of enterprise businesses. Too many trainers enjoy the “secret rope” automation provides. An upsell after the training. So, if your training does not include at least one simple automation, even a daily calendar review or task summarizer, that training is out of date.
Competitive-advantage mapping. Before any tool gets opened, a good trainer asks what your competitors can’t do — the thing that’s specific to how you do business, not what any AI model can generate. If the training starts with prompts instead of your position in the market, it’s teaching a skill anyone can Google. Look for a trainer who wants to know what makes you different before they show you what AI can do.
TL;DR: What to Look for in an AI Training
Anyone can prompt Claude for a an AI training curriculum, and plenty of HR teams could run it as well as an outside vendor. So the curriculum is no longer the product worth paying for. What’s worth paying for is integration: AI built into the workflows your team already runs. The productivity numbers back up why this matters — nearly 40% of “time saved” with AI gets eaten by rework, and 90% of S&P 500 companies can’t even quantify what AI has done for them. Training that works is built on your real workflow, tied to a real outcome, aimed at judgment instead of tool use.
Key Takeaways
- Curriculum for AI training is essentially free. Integration is the real value. Anyone can prompt Claude for a training deck. What can’t be generated is AI built into how your specific business runs and how to improved your competitive advantage.
- Ask “does this increase our advantage,” not “did this save time.” Saved time that gets spent on rework isn’t an advantage. A system that changes what your team can do is.
- AI’s real value is friction removal, not speed. Faster decisions, a faster start, connected data, clean information — that’s the actual return.
- Good training leaves something behind. A template, a knowledge base, a new way of approaching work — not just a memory of an afternoon well spent.
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