Core AI Course

What a Core AI Course is

A core AI course is a training session that runs to a published outline. It is not built from scratch for each client. Six of the courses in the catalogue are core courses, and each is published with its outline, so what a session covers can be read before anyone is contacted.

The word core matters as much as the word course. These six are the entry point into the catalogue. The rest of the catalogue is considerably larger, and the core AI courses page names every course grouped the way the catalogue groups them.

The six

The foundation course is Generative Artificial Intelligence: The Basics and Beyond. It is the one everything else builds on, and it is suitable for all staff, beginners and intermediates. It covers what a large language model is doing, how to prompt one, and the everyday jobs staff reach for first: meeting minutes, summarising a long document, drafting and building a deck.

The HR course is built for HR teams and stands on its own, with seven use cases run end to end. The admin and document workflows course takes the tasks staff named themselves and works through them on the organisation’s own files. The agents and personalisation course is the step past chat: scheduled prompts, agents and personalising the tool to a role.

The Copilot course is a complete introduction to Microsoft 365 Copilot across Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Teams. The one-to-one course is a private programme for one person, built around their working week, with no syllabus at all.

The order they run in

The catalogue page gives the order: a foundation for everyone, then the function-specific sessions, then agents, then one-to-one work for people who cannot sit in a room for a day. It is not a rule. A team that already knows the subject can start elsewhere.

The order does show what each course assumes. The agents course is aimed at people who already use an AI chat tool. The foundation course assumes nothing. The one-to-one course exists for the person who cannot attend any of the others.

Fixed outline, not fixed examples

The catalogue page makes the point that matters most for a buyer. Fixed outline does not mean fixed examples. Every one of the six is taught on the tools the organisation already has open and on its own material. The admin course adds that nothing is demonstrated on invented material.

That answers the natural objection to a published outline, which is that it will be generic. The structure is fixed so a team can read it in advance. The content the session runs on is theirs. The AI literacy page explains why relevance is where the largest gain comes from.

Published so it can be read first

The means-here line says a session’s outline is published so its content can be read before anyone is contacted. That is a real difference from bespoke work, where there is no standard shape to publish because the shape follows what a discovery conversation turns up.

It also lets a buyer judge fit without a sales call. A leader can read the HR course’s outline and see that it closes on CV screening and data protection. An office manager can read the admin course’s and see it works through repetitive tasks. The outline is the offer.

Core or Bespoke

The site’s review of the two formats states the difference. A core course is the fixed end of the catalogue. It suits a team that knows roughly what subject it needs covered and wants a proven session and not a discovery call first. Bespoke training starts from the opposite direction, scoped in a conversation and built from the organisation’s own documents, systems and vocabulary.

The review says the real decision is whether a team needs a proven session on a known subject, or needs its own processes worked through first. Where that is genuinely unclear, an audit is what settles it before either format gets booked. Both formats build governance content into the session and not in an add-on.

The Tools they are taught on

The catalogue page lists the tools. Across the catalogue the named ones are ChatGPT, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Mistral Le Chat, each with courses of their own. The ChatGPT and Copilot sessions compare those against Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and DeepSeek, so a team can tell which job belongs to which tool.

The page says which tool a session runs on is decided by the tools the organisation already has, and not by what the trainer would rather demonstrate. The foundation course compares the leading chatbots side by side and does not teach one of them, so a team leaves able to judge a tool instead of having memorised one interface.

Governance sits inside the Sessions

The Copilot course puts governance and staff guidelines in the session and not in an appendix. The agents course closes on what large language models still get wrong and on the rules for using public AI safely, which the catalogue page describes as the part most teams discover the hard way if nobody teaches it.

The HR course closes on data protection, with anonymisation done live and not described, and on where the regulation puts responsibility for a screening decision. The AI governance and data protection pages cover the subjects the sessions teach.

Who each one suits

The review’s advice on fit is short. Core courses suit a team that already knows the subject it needs, at any level from a first introduction to advanced agent work, without a scoping step first. The catalogue page lists the audiences: all staff for the foundation and Copilot courses, HR teams for the HR course, administrative and operations staff for the admin course, existing AI chat users for the agents course and senior people for the one-to-one course.

Bespoke work suits process-heavy organisations without a structured AI strategy yet, and the recommended entry is a leadership briefing first and then all-staff foundations. A core course can sit inside either path.

What it costs, in words

This page states no figure. The catalogue page says two of the six courses show a price. The two-session foundation course and Copilot Essentials are priced per group and not per person, in two bands by group size, and the figures are on the pricing page and on the course pages.

The other four are quoted after a call, because their shape depends on how many sessions a team needs. So a published outline does not always mean a published rate, and a buyer should expect to talk before booking one of the four.

Getting the most from a Session

The site’s article on briefing a team says people arrive at training with nothing to try it on, and that is a decision somebody made by not making it. The fix costs one meeting about a week before, run by the manager, and it takes an hour. It names the tasks in scope, asks each person to bring a real example and says what is not allowed near the tools.

The article says a core course arrives with its own examples if a team turns up empty-handed. The same briefing matters more for bespoke work. And the training article’s advice applies to both: measure retention over time and not completion alone, and treat the training as ongoing and not a single event.

A worked example

This is an illustration, not a real client. An office manager at a small firm wants the whole team to use AI more safely. The manager reads the foundation course’s outline, sees it covers prompting, the everyday jobs and the leading chatbots compared, and requests it directly. Nothing needs scoping first.

A week before, the manager runs the one-hour briefing and each person picks a task to bring. On the day the session runs on the tools the firm already has. Afterwards the HR lead reads the HR course’s outline and asks for it, and the firm’s most senior person asks about the one-to-one course. One published outline led to three requests, each for the course that fitted.

Mix-ups worth avoiding

Four confusions come up often enough to name. The first is treating a core course as generic because its outline is fixed, when the examples are the organisation’s own. The second is treating it as the only kind of training, when bespoke programmes have no fixed outline at all.

The third is assuming a discovery call is needed to book one. It is needed for an audit or a bespoke programme. The fourth is assuming every core course publishes a rate. Two do, and four are quoted after a call.

Where it goes wrong

The commonest failure is arriving with nothing to try the tool on. A second is choosing a core course when the team’s real need is its own processes worked through first, which is what bespoke work and an audit are for. A third is choosing a session on a tool the organisation does not use.

A fourth is treating the day as the whole of the training. The site’s advice is that it should be ongoing, and that retention is the figure to measure. A fifth is skipping the governance content because it looks dull. The sessions place it inside on purpose.

Where it appears on the site

The core AI courses page lists the six with their outlines. The training catalogue shows everything else. The review of core courses against bespoke training sets out how to choose.

For the alternative, see bespoke / in-house training. The way into an audit or a bespoke programme is a discovery call, and a core course can be requested without one.