I started my first AI workshop in Austin almost as an afterthought.
I'd been helping people in my network get started with AI — informal conversations, a few demos, the occasional coaching session. But I kept running into the same thing: most people I knew were smart, motivated, and genuinely interested, but they weren't taking online courses. They were too busy. They'd start something, life would interrupt, they'd fall behind and stop.
So I put together a one-day in-person workshop. Sent a few texts. Posted on Instagram once. Whatever happened, happened.
It sold out in four days.
I wrote it off as a novelty. These were people who knew me, who already trusted me, who happened to be curious at the same time. I ran a second one a month later. Same thing — sold out in days.
That was interesting, but not the part that surprised me.
The Detail That Changed How I Think About This
A lot of people who attended the first workshop came back to the second one.
I didn't expect that. My assumption was that once someone got the fundamentals — how these tools work, what they're actually capable of, how to start using them — they'd be off. They didn't need a second round of the same basics.
But they weren't coming back for the basics.
I started asking. The answer I heard most often was some version of this: “I wanted to see what's changed.”
Why AI Moves Differently Than Other Skills
The thing about AI right now is that the pace of change is high enough to disqualify even reasonably recent knowledge.
The tools that were genuinely impressive six months ago have been replaced or significantly upgraded. The workflows that felt cutting-edge last quarter are already being superseded by approaches that are cheaper, faster, or more reliable. The mental models people built up in 2023 about what AI can and can't do are often meaningfully wrong in 2025.
For most skills, once you have the fundamentals, the fundamentals stay. What you learned about writing or negotiation or financial modeling doesn't expire. You might refine and deepen your knowledge, but the foundation holds.
AI doesn't work that way right now. The fundamentals keep shifting under you.
That means someone who took a workshop six months ago and has been using AI actively isn't necessarily set. They might be using approaches that have been surpassed. They might be missing tools that would change how they work. They came back because they needed a curated update, not a refresher.
What the Workshop Actually Became
Once I understood this, I realized what I was actually providing.
It wasn't a fundamentals course. It was a recurring curation service.
“Here's what's worth paying attention to right now.” That was the real value proposition — not the foundational education, but the ongoing signal filtering. In a space where there are ten new tools and frameworks announced every week, the job of figuring out what's actually worth learning versus what's noise is significant work. The workshop was doing that work for them.
That's a different thing than a one-time course. It's more like a subscription to clarity, delivered in person a few times a year.
What This Says About the Demand
I was initially thinking about AI workshops as a product for beginners — people who don't use AI yet and need a starting point.
The repeat attendance told me there's a different market: people who are already using AI and want to stay current without doing the research themselves. These aren't beginners. They're practitioners who are busy enough that ongoing curation is more valuable to them than more hours of self-directed learning.
Both markets exist. But the second one is the one I hadn't fully recognized.
When customers come back to something a second time, it's not because they forgot what they learned. It's because the underlying problem keeps recurring. For AI professionals right now, the recurring problem is: things keep changing faster than any individual can track alone.
That's the demand signal I missed when I was thinking about who these workshops were for.
The first-time attendees tell you there's curiosity about AI. The second-time attendees tell you there's a need for ongoing navigation of it. Those are different problems. And the second one, it turns out, is actually the bigger one.
On learning AI without getting overwhelmed: I cover what's actually working right now — tools, workflows, and frameworks worth building on — in the Two Hour Workday program. If you want the curated version rather than the fire hose, that's the place.
