AI Courses in London: Why I Don't Run One (And What I Do Instead)

If you search "AI courses London" right now, you'll get a wall of results. LSE has a 10-week programme for £2,400. BrainStation runs a 3-day bootcamp. The government's AI Skills Boost offers free group sessions.

There are MSc programmes, weekend workshops, corporate training packages, and a dozen online platforms competing for your attention.

I run none of those things.

I run 90-minute 1:1 AI training sessions. One person. One screen share. Tailored to whatever you actually do for a living. And having watched the "AI courses" market closely, I think most people looking for a course don't actually need one.

Here's why.

The Problem with Most AI Courses

Most AI courses in London teach the median. They have to. When you put 20 people in a room — a lawyer, a marketer, a product manager, and a photographer — the trainer can't go deep on any of them. So they teach the basics: what ChatGPT is, how to write a prompt, maybe a demo with Nano Banana Pro.

You walk out knowing slightly more than you did. But nothing specific to your work.

The longer courses are worse. A 10-week AI course covers material that changes every three weeks. By week six, the tools they taught in week two have been updated, deprecated, or replaced entirely. Claude Code didn't exist a year ago. Now it's one of the most important tools I show people. Any syllabus written last quarter is already missing it.

And the cost. A short course in London runs £500–2,500. An MSc is £15,000+. For most people (freelancers, small business owners, professionals who just want to use AI properly) that's a lot of money for a curriculum that's already out of date.

What People Actually Want When They Search "AI Courses"

I've trained over 50 people in the past year. Almost nobody comes to me asking for a structured syllabus. They come with a version of the same question:

"I know AI can do more than what I'm doing with it. I just don't know what."

They've used ChatGPT a few times. Maybe asked it to write an email. Maybe tried and failed to get it to do something useful for their job. They don't need 10 weeks of theory. They need someone to sit down with them, look at their actual work, and show them what's possible. Right now, with the tools that exist today.

That's a training session. Not a course.

How 90 Minutes Replaces a 10-Week Course

In a 1:1 session, I don't teach a curriculum. I teach you.

In the first 30 minutes, I explain how these tools actually work. Not the marketing version, the real version. I call them Autocomplete Machines, because that's what they are. Once you understand the mechanism, everything else makes sense: why they hallucinate, why your prompts fail, why giving them good context matters.

Then we spend 60 minutes building. Your prompts. Your workflows. Your actual problems.

A copywriter gets prompts that preserve their voice. A lawyer sees legal research tools pulling case law in real time. A recent client was leaving insurance to start a storage business. In one session we used deep research to assess locations and competitors, then built a marketing landing page with V0 before the 90 minutes were up. That's not a hypothetical. That's a Tuesday.

You walk away with a recording, a transcript, working prompts, and a clear understanding of which tools solve your specific problems. Not someone else's problems. Yours.

👉 See exactly what happens in a session

The Real Difference

Here's what it comes down to.

An AI course teaches you about AI tools in general.

A training session teaches you to use AI tools on your actual work.

Courses are backwards-looking. They're built from a syllabus someone wrote months ago, taught to a room of strangers, and assessed with exercises that have nothing to do with your job. They're fine if you want a certificate. They're not great if you want to be useful on Monday morning.

A session is forwards-looking. It starts with what you do, uses the tools that exist right now, and produces outputs you can use the same day.

And there's a cost difference too. A short course in London: £500–2,500. A 90-minute session with me is a fraction of that. You'll learn more in that 90 minutes than in three days of group training, because every minute is about your work.

When a Course Is the Right Choice

I'm not going to pretend a 90-minute session replaces everything.

If you want a formal qualification — an MSc in AI, a certification for your CV — you need a course. If you're learning to code machine learning models from scratch, that's a different kind of education entirely. And if you work in a team that needs everyone trained to the same baseline, a group programme makes sense.

But if you're a professional who wants to use AI properly in your day-to-day work, and you want that to happen this week rather than in three months, a course is the slow, expensive, generic route.

"I actually started with some courses, but they all started at transformers and very technical details on Large Language Models. I like that Riz can cover business context as well as anything technical, which is much more practical for running a large team in a corporate setting."

— Matthew P, Compliance Director

What to Do Next

If you've been looking at AI courses in London and thinking "this is a lot of time and money for something that might be out of date by the time I finish" — you're right.

Book a 90-minute session instead. I'll show you what matters for your specific work, with the tools that exist today, and you'll be using them by tomorrow.

90 minutes. In London or over Zoom.

👉 Schedule a call

Not sure yet? Message me. I'll tell you honestly whether a session makes sense for you — or whether you'd be better off with a course.