How do I run an AI workshop for non-technical business owners?

A friend running an AI consultancy held a paid workshop for 25 people. Three became clients at $2,000 a month each. That's the real reason to run workshops: they're the top of the funnel.

Do people actually show up?

Yes. I put one line in my newsletter: I know a lot about AI, a lot of people want to learn it and don't know where to turn. About 95 people signed up and around 35 showed up. Retelling it later, I put it at about 100 signups and 40-some in the room. That was one mention, to a general consumer list of roughly 20,000 subscribers.

I taught AI 101. How to use ChatGPT, custom GPTs, the basics anybody on Twitter already knows. People were blown away. Afterward I got emails asking for my slide deck and when I'd do it again. Months later, one attendee emailed to say the class was so impactful and to ask another question.

Signups and attendance aren't the same thing. A teammate with an events background told me 30% to 40% attendance from signups is typically good. I once got 90 signups for a room that held 45 and was hoping at least half wouldn't come.

What did I get wrong the first time?

I had no plan to sell anything. No retargeting, no call to action, not even a sign-in sheet. I built the slideshow the morning of. I just wanted to see if people would show up and care, and they did. I should have had a better plan to capture some value. Next time: business cards, emails collected at the door.

The older lesson came a year to eighteen months before that first event. I was serious about the same idea and started a Facebook page. It went nowhere. I had no audience because I had no local newsletter, and I didn't know how to run Facebook ads. With no way to get the word out, I stopped.

Who is it for?

Mostly small business owners who are scared of AI because they know it's coming. They keep hearing about it and keep putting it off. They don't want online courses or to research it themselves. They want a real person in front of them who can answer questions, and they don't want to pay a consultant thousands of dollars.

Start lower than you think. A lot of people basically don't know how to use ChatGPT at the most basic level. That's also the edge: national trainers can teach thousands of people, but they can't compete with you locally, because they don't live there.

How do I find a room?

Call your chamber of commerce. I'm a member of mine, so I told them I had people who wanted to learn AI, I'd teach them for free, and I didn't know where to go. They knew exactly the place: a senior living home with a big movie theater room, a big screen and about 40 to 50 seats.

Venues are also where this stalls. I once had about 100 people on a list and canceled because I didn't have time to find a venue. Another time I called two chambers and nobody called back. If that's your bottleneck, skip the room. Host free Zoom office hours for anyone local, once a week or every two weeks. Post it in local Facebook groups, use Luma (it's free) so you capture emails and people get reminders, and keep it casual.

"Casual is unintimidating. Professional is scary, right? What if I'm too stupid?"

Even if only one person shows up, you get to help them, and they're going to love you.

What format should it use?

Hands-on and longer than a talk. I've designed mine as a roughly three-hour session with prompt exercises, not a passive one-hour presentation. A venue host I worked with and I landed on the same rule independently: lead with mindset and curiosity, not tool tutorials. We adopted a group "prompt-off" exercise to get people doing instead of watching.

Show them their own business. At one of my meetups, an independent insurance agent's entire use of AI was uploading quotes into ChatGPT and asking it to compare them. I opened Codex on my laptop and asked for the top 10 things it could build to automate an independent agent's work. It listed 10 or 15. He couldn't believe all of it could be done, and none of it was rocket science.

You don't need to spend long on the curriculum. Ask ChatGPT for a three-hour beginner AI course outline. I'd build the presentation itself with AI in about an hour.

What should I charge?

Nothing, the first time. Do it free to get the word out and get practice, so you don't charge people and then do a bad job. After that, people will pay hundreds of dollars for this. The numbers I've been working with:

Format	Price I've weighed
Public AI 101, a few hours	About $100 to $300 a person
Two-hour build-it-live meetup with food	About $250 a person
In-person class for seniors	$99, so 30 to 40 people is about $3,000
Company training, 20+ employees	About $4,000 for two hours

I've seen others charge companies $3,000 to $5,000 to come in for three hours and teach their team the basics. Seniors want to learn AI, want to meet in person and generally have money. The downside is you won't get many big clients from them on the back end.

Should I plan everything before announcing it?

"Always launch things before you make the full plans."

For the AI 101 event I built a polished registration site with a hero section, why-attend cards, what you'll learn, and a pricing page that looked like a million-dollar business would use it. I didn't have a venue. The site said "venue upon registration," and I'd deal with that if people signed up.

My process for the site: I don't prompt the site builder directly. I describe the goal out loud to ChatGPT (the o3 model at the time) and have it write the detailed prompt, then paste that into the site builder, v0.

How do I fill the room?

Through an audience that already trusts you. A local newsletter gives you that, and running one usually teaches you Facebook ads too. For one session I planned to promote through a co-owned newsletter with 6,000 to 7,000 subscribers in the right city, not my other brands.

What do I sell after the workshop?

Implementation, plus relationships. A room of 20 small business owners is 20 relationships with people who could advertise in your newsletter or hire you for more AI work. Even the tire-kickers spread the word, and some have a spouse or boss who's the real buyer.

You show what's possible, and people ask how to do it. Your answer: watch 8,000 YouTube videos and spend forever, or pay me and I'll just do it. Price that follow-on work as a membership or a productized setup, covered in projects vs. memberships.

Another local newsletter operator told me how it happened for him. A city contact who loved his newsletter asked for something, he did it fast with AI, they asked how, and it became a paid training. Then that contact referred him to another department.

Training a company's staff is a different setup. See corporate AI training that sticks.