Artificial Intelligence Fundamentals for Professionals (AI9)
Duration: 5 days
Most professionals do not need another presentation about what AI might do one day. They need to sit down, use the tools and produce something real. This hands-on, beginner-friendly programme is built around a single running project: each delegate builds a complete fictional business using AI, from the first idea through to a market plan, a brand, a website, marketing assets and an operating toolkit.
Every tool and technique is introduced because the business needs it next, so skills are learned in context and applied immediately. By the final day, delegates have produced a portfolio of assets they created themselves and a personal AI playbook of techniques they can take straight back to their own role.
The programme is tool-agnostic, developing transferable skills rather than any single product and is designed to be data-safe throughout as delegates work on a fictional business rather than real organisational data.
This course is designed for professionals who want to use AI confidently and practically in their everyday work, regardless of sector or seniority. No prior AI experience is required. It suits individual contributors, specialists and managers across government, public sector and private organisations and is especially well suited to delegates in regulated environments, as the programme is designed so that no sensitive or organisational data is ever required.
Foundations, Prompting and Research
- Responsible use of AI: what it is good and bad at, and what should never be entered into a public tool
- How generative AI works and the main tools available today
- The fundamentals of prompting: role, context, task, format, examples and constraints
- Iterating a response when the first answer is not quite right
- Using AI for research and turning a vague idea into a clear one
- Applied to the business: choosing a business idea, running market and competitor research, defining a target audience and pressure-testing the concept
Asset produced: A business concept and a short market research brief.
Brand, Content and Your First AI Assistant
- Moving from research to positioning: name, value proposition and brand voice
- Generating written assets: web copy, product descriptions, social posts and emails
- Working with documents and images as inputs, not just text
- Building a simple, reusable AI assistant tuned to a brand voice
- Editing and quality-checking AI writing so it sounds human and on-brand
Asset produced: A brand kit, a set of written assets and a reusable AI assistant.
Web, Visuals and Creative
- Building a website with no-code, AI-assisted site builders
- Generating images and graphics for marketing and brand
- Creating short video with AI, from script to finished clip
- Using an AI avatar as a spokesperson
- Generating music, a jingle and a simple voiceover
- Building a polished pitch or marketing deck with an AI presentation tool
Asset produced: A live or prototyped website plus a complete launch and marketing package.
AI for Everyday Work and Operations
- Using AI on documents and data: summarising reports, analysing a spreadsheet and drafting policies and plans
- Planning and project work: timelines, briefs, standard procedures and internal communications
- Spotting repetitive work and turning it into a repeatable workflow with reusable templates
- Prompt chaining: breaking a bigger task into steps AI can handle reliably
- Agentic and desktop AI tools that carry out multi-step work
Asset produced: An operations toolkit: a business plan, reusable templates and a task-automation map.
Responsible AI Essentials and Showcase
- Responsible AI in depth: privacy, bias, verifying output, hallucinations, intellectual property and when not to use AI
- Applying everything to real work without breaching data or organisational rules
- Building a personal AI playbook of workflows for use in a delegate’s own role
- Showcase: each delegate or team presents their business and the assets built across the week
- Where to go next and how to keep skills current as tools change
Asset produced: A completed business portfolio and a personal AI action plan.
At the end of this course, delegates will be able to:
- Write clear, structured prompts and iterate to get reliable, useful results
- Use AI to research a topic, market or audience and judge the quality of what comes back
- Build a simple, reusable AI assistant for a recurring task
- Create written, web, visual, video and audio content to a usable standard
- Use AI for everyday operational work: analysis, planning, drafting and summarising
- Identify repetitive work and turn it into a repeatable AI workflow
- Apply practical guardrails for safe, responsible AI use, including what should never be shared
- Leave with a portfolio of self-made assets and a personal AI playbook for their own role