There's a version of AI education that looks impressive on a LinkedIn post: flying to a conference, buying a front-row seat, walking away with a tote bag and some slides you'll never open again.
And then there's what's actually teaching me the most right now.
Every other month or so, I host a dinner in Austin. Four or five people max. Everyone at the table is a real user of AI tools… not a thought leader, not a speaker, just someone who's been quietly building automations into their business and has actual results to talk about.
No agenda. No presentations. Just dinner and real conversation.
I call it an AI dinner, for lack of a better name. And honestly, the conversations I've had in these four-hour dinners have been more useful than most of what I've learned from formal content this year.
Why Small Groups Change Everything
The size is not arbitrary.
When I look at events that create real connection… the ones where people actually leave with useful information and new relationships… they're almost always intimate. Fifty-person conference rooms don't work for learning. People cluster with who they already know, nod along to a speaker, and leave having made maybe one new contact.
Put five people around a dinner table and something different happens. Everyone talks to everyone. You can actually follow up on what someone said ten minutes ago. You go deep instead of wide.
The Arena Hall team and I were talking about this a few months back. They were trying to figure out why their larger community events felt siloed despite good programming. My suggestion: smaller formats. A whiteboard session with five people working on something together creates more connection than a fifty-person talk ever will. Do that enough times and the community starts to actually weave together.
Same principle applies here.
The One Rule: Real Users Only
This is the thing that makes the format work.
The invite criterion is simple. You have to be using AI in your own business, not just talking about it. No one's there to pitch. No one's there to build their personal brand. You show up because you have something real to share and you want to learn what's actually working for other people.
Last dinner I hosted included a structural engineer who'd built a monitoring agent tracking 20 YouTube investment channels and surfacing summaries every morning in Slack. A real estate consultant who automated his proposal writing workflow and cut it from about three hours down to maybe twenty minutes. A clinic owner who'd started using AI to prep patient intake briefings before appointments. A finance guy running a small fund.
Very different industries. Completely different use cases.
But the level of the conversation… the specificity of it… you don't get that anywhere else. These are people who built something last week and want to talk about what broke and what worked.
Why This Format Beats Everything Else Right Now
AI is moving fast enough that there's a real gap between what's being written about and what's actually working in the field.
Articles and courses have a publication lag. By the time something gets turned into a “framework” or a course curriculum, the tool has shipped three updates and the workflow looks different. The people who know what's working right now are practitioners, not commentators.
And they're not usually on stage at a conference. They're just building.
The dinner format gets you direct access to that. You're sitting across from someone who, last Tuesday, figured out a way to automate their onboarding process that saved them six hours a week. That information is six to twelve months ahead of where it'll show up in any article.
How to Run One
Steal this format entirely:
- Keep the list small. Four or five people is ideal. Six is fine. Eight starts to feel like a panel. The intimacy matters.
- Invite actual users. The bar isn't technical sophistication — it's real usage. You want the salon owner who's been using AI to draft client follow-ups, not the consultant who talks about AI strategy.
- No agenda. No presentations. No slides. Just dinner. The conversation will find its own shape.
- Mix the industries. The most interesting conversations happen when a real estate person and a healthcare person realize they're solving the same problem in completely different ways.
- Host it yourself. Doesn't need to be fancy. Good restaurant, comfortable space, a table that lets people actually hear each other.
I've found every other month to be about the right cadence. Frequent enough to stay in the loop. Far enough apart that people actually have new stuff to report on.
The Bigger Point
If you're trying to stay current on AI… and you want real, specific, actionable information rather than think-piece hot takes… the answer isn't more content.
It's more conversations.
Find four people in your city who are actually building. Buy dinner. Ask what they've been working on.
You'll learn more in that one evening than in a month of webinars.
Thanh Pham is an AI educator and consultant based in Austin, TX. He runs AI workshops for entrepreneurs and hosts regular AI practitioner dinners.
