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For individuals

Beyond the Basics

Two half-day sessions for professionals who've started using AI and want to go deeper.

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Who this is for

  • Participants who've completed AI Foundations or have equivalent practical experience
  • Professionals using AI daily who want to move beyond simple prompts
  • Teams ready to chain AI into multi-step workflows, not just single tasks
  • All sessions are in-house and bespoke - no open enrolment cohorts

What you'll learn

  • Multi-step prompting and AI workflow design
  • Practical use of AI for analysis, synthesis, and structured output
  • A clear sense of where current models break, and how to design around it
  • Personal templates for the parts of your work AI does well
  • Light-touch governance you can apply to your own outputs
  • Clarity on which next-tier tools (or features) actually pay back for your role

Format

  • Two half-day sessions, typically a week or two apart
  • Online or in-person delivery
  • In-house and bespoke - scoped to participants' actual workflows

Agenda outline

[Pending: Alastair to send current programme outline.]

  1. Day 1 - Block 1

    Where the basics stop being enough

    Diagnosing the limits of one-shot prompting and recognising when the work needs a different shape.

  2. Day 1 - Block 2

    Multi-step prompting and AI workflows, applied

    Building chained workflows for analysis, synthesis, and structured output.

  3. Day 1 - Block 3

    Building one workflow you'll use this week

    Each participant ships one usable workflow before the day ends.

  4. Between days

    Applied practice on your own work

    Participants put the workflow into real use and bring back what worked, what broke.

  5. Day 2 - Block 1

    Review and refinement

    Working through the breakage from real use - prompt structure, governance, edge cases.

  6. Day 2 - Block 2

    Frontier tools and what's coming next

    Calibrated, not hyped. What to invest attention in, what to ignore.

  7. Day 2 - Block 3

    A personal AI playbook

    Each participant leaves with a documented set of AI workflows they trust.

Common questions

Do I need to have done AI Foundations first?

No, but you should have practical experience using AI tools daily. Beyond the Basics assumes you've already moved past the basics - if you haven't, AI Foundations is the right starting point.

Will this teach me to build agents or use APIs?

The workshop covers chained workflows in current consumer tools. We'll touch on what agents and APIs make possible, but the focus stays on what you can apply this week without writing code.

How is this different from AI Foundations?

AI Foundations is half a day for people getting started. Beyond the Basics is two half-days for people who've started, hit limits, and want to design more sophisticated workflows.

Can the two days be on the same week?

We recommend a gap of at least a week between Day 1 and Day 2 - the applied practice between days is the part that makes the workflows stick.

About the trainer

Alastair McDermott

Founder, HumanSpark

Alastair McDermott works with frontier AI tools daily across consulting, training, and his own product development. He brings that hands-on practice into the workshop room - participants leave with working approaches they can use the same day.

He's the author of the Human-First AI Series.

Last updated: April 2026

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