AI and Digital Literacy for Professionals – Beginner (AI5-1)
Duration: 1 day
This practical one-day programme is designed for professionals who are new to artificial intelligence and want to build the confidence to use it in their everyday work. The morning is dedicated to the single most important skill in working with AI: writing prompts that get useful, reliable results. The afternoon opens up the wider generative AI ecosystem, exploring how different tools work together across text, research, audio and slides through a hands-on research and transformation exercise. The day is grounded in real workplace tasks rather than theory. A short, practical guardrails section at the start of the day covers safe and responsible business use, framed concretely rather than abstractly.
This course is designed for non-technical professionals who are new to AI and want to start using it confidently and responsibly in their everyday work. It is suitable for roles across HR, marketing, finance, operations and customer service, and for managers who want to make informed decisions about AI in their teams. It is not designed for participants who already use AI tools regularly in their work. Those participants should attend the Intermediate course in this series.
Prompting Techniques
- Practical guardrails for business use: what to share, what to keep out, common pitfalls
- Demystifying AI: what generative AI is, what it isn’t, and what it’s actually good at
- The fundamentals of effective prompting: structure, role, context, examples and constraints
- Common prompt patterns for writing, summarising, analysing and brainstorming
- Iterating on outputs: how to refine a response when the first answer isn’t quite right
- Hands-on: each participant writes and refines a prompt for a real task from their own work
Exploring the Generative AI Ecosystem and Multimodality
- Beyond chat: a tour of the wider generative AI ecosystem across text, research, audio and slides
- Choosing the right tool for the job (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Suno and Gamma)
- Multimodal AI in practice: working with images, PDFs and audio as inputs, not just text
- Hands-on research and transformation exercise: participants pick a topic, use AI to research it, then transform the output into multiple formats (written brief, slide deck, audio summary)
- Identifying immediate workplace applications and building a personal AI starter kit
At the end of this course, delegates will be able to:
- Write effective prompts using clear structure, role, context and examples
- Iterate on AI outputs to get closer to what they actually need
- Navigate the wider generative AI ecosystem confidently across text, research, audio and slide tools
- Use multimodal AI to work with images, documents and audio as inputs
- Run a structured research task using AI and transform the output into multiple formats
- Apply practical guardrails for safe business use
- Identify three immediate AI use cases relevant to their own role