Workforce · 4 min read
Most AI 101 curricula start with “Look at all these amazing demos!” That’s marketing, not education. Here’s what an honest AI 101 actually covers.
Module 1: What AI actually is
Pattern recognition software trained on huge amounts of data. That’s the headline. Then the details: what training data is, where it comes from, why some training data is problematic. The difference between traditional software (rules you wrote) and AI (patterns it learned). Why this distinction matters.
If your AI 101 doesn’t cover this clearly enough that a 12-year-old could repeat it back, the curriculum has skipped the most important part.
Module 2: How it fails
Hallucinations, bias, the way AI sounds confident when it’s wrong. Real examples with the actual model output, not just descriptions. Practice spotting failures. Discussion about why these failures happen, not just that they happen.
An AI 101 that skips this is selling tools, not teaching technology.
Module 3: What it costs
Environmental impact. Water and electricity use of large models. Labor cost: who’s affected when AI takes over tasks, who’s being displaced, who’s being created by this technology and under what conditions. Accuracy cost: where AI makes mistakes that humans wouldn’t.
Most curricula skip this because it complicates the sales pitch. Real education names the costs along with the benefits.
Module 4: The ecosystem
There’s more than ChatGPT. There’s more than Claude. There’s more than the big commercial models. Open-source models. Local models. Specialized tools for specific industries. A curriculum that only covers two or three commercial products has trained your team into vendor lock-in.
Cover the landscape. Show that there are choices.
Module 5: Hands-on, with structure
Now the practice. How to write a clear prompt. How to evaluate output. How to know when to trust it and when to double-check. Real examples from your industry. Time to ask questions and get them answered.
Hands-on without the first four modules is the standard broken curriculum. Hands-on after the first four modules is education.
If a vendor’s AI 101 skips most of this
They’re not teaching AI. They’re selling demos. Find someone who actually wants your team to understand the technology they’re being asked to use.
This is roughly the structure of our own AI 101 sessions. Get in touch if you want to talk about running one for your team.