In Silicon Valley they call this a “pivot”

Before Practical:AI

In Dec 2023 we founded a very different company, a SaaS startup in the video game industry.

Over the next 4 months we built:

  • A fully functional product consisting of the SaaS platform and our playable proof-of-concept videogame.
  • Logo, branding and website.
  • Sales collateral and GTM plan.
  • Training material and documentation.

With that in place we started speaking to Investors and Game Studios who loved it, however they were obsessed with the idea we had done all of it in just 4 months with a tiny team.

Pivot

We hadn’t realised that the benefits we were getting from AI, those huge productivity gains and real commercial value were far from commonplace. We spoke to countless startups and small companies and found:

  1. Most teams don’t have any experience with AI prior to ChatGPT, we were lucky to have over 20 years of experience dating back to the early days of machine learning.
  2. That background helped us separate the hype and noise from the valuable techniques, we managed to avoid the usual pitfalls of hallucinations and AI Slop.
  3. Tech companies are only focused on enterprise adoption, nobody was taking the idea of AI as an individual skill seriously. Imagine if the spreadsheet was just invented, you can’t just give everyone on your team Excel and forget to teach them about =SUM().

After speaking to those companies we quickly realised that talking to them about AI and teaching those same AI skills we’d learned was our new passion, hence the pivot.

Pivot

The Missing Middle

Missing Middle

Across all the workshops we’ve run the consistent feedback is that the current pace of change in AI has opened a gap between the traditional resources:

  • Higher education is looking after the long term adoption of AI with data science and technical skills.
  • The tech vendors are focusing on enterprise adoption, supporting developers with API documentation and executives with sales pitches and free courses.
  • Social media is offering breathless “One weird trick” and hype videos, often with advice that can’t be replicated (or shouldn’t be).

The gap is in taking AI seriously as a individual productivity tool, not as a silly toy or some existential terror.

This is the “missing middle” that Practical:AI focuses on, practical skills grounded in hands-on experience of using LLMs like ChatGPT in a workplace setting.

Our Approach

Level Set

Level Set

Get everyone on same page

The first step always needs to be creating a common understanding of AI as no further adoption can happen if half the team thinks AI is a toy and the other half thinks it’s a terror.

Practical:AI has made the Intro & Theory module of Foundations free so everyone in your team can benefit today.

Access here

Upskill

Upskill

Raise the bar

Once everyone is on the same level we focus on developing practical skills with prompt engineering for text models and composition techniques for image generation.

From that foundation we can then teach a suite of everyday use cases covering editorial techniques, expert advisor roles and content generation (that avoids AI Slop and hallucination).

Maintain

Maintain

AI is a moving target

With AI the biggest challenge is the pace of change which is why Practical:AI offers ongoing version updates to keep pace with the latest AI has to offer.

The Foundations workshop is updated weekly and all students get access to 3 months of Practical:AI User Group offering:

  • New use cases and prompt patterns.
  • Weekly office hour sessions where students can drop in with problems.
  • Access to exercises and recordings of the workshop modules.