How do I run an AI workshop for non-technical business owners?
Short answer
Make it hands-on and paid. I'm designing mine around $100 for three hours of prompt exercises instead of a passive one-hour talk. Lead with mindset before tools, promote it through an audience that already trusts you, and treat the workshop as the top of the funnel for implementation work.
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.
What format should an AI 101 workshop use?
Hands-on, paid, and longer than a talk. I'm designing mine as a roughly $100, 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.
How do I fill the room?
Through an audience that already trusts you. My promotion channel for the next one is a co-owned newsletter with 6,000 to 7,000 subscribers in the right city, not my other brands.
I learned this one by failing. A year to eighteen months before my first AI 101 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.
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.
The curriculum is the part worth planning. Before setting a date for the next one, I planned to spend an hour with AI designing it.
What do I sell after the workshop?
Implementation. 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.
Training a company's staff is a different setup. See corporate AI training that sticks.
Answered by TJ Larkin. From a June 2025 solo podcast episode and partner calls in May and June 2026. The workshop conversion numbers are a friend's. Last updated .