Here’s something I almost missed.
A couple of years into building AI education content at Asian Efficiency, I had a solid online course. Good content. Real workflows. Practical stuff people could use.
And it worked… for a certain kind of person.
But then I had dinner with a successful Austin investor. We got deep into AI — what’s possible right now, what most business owners don’t know yet, what implementing even a handful of the right tools could do for someone like him.
I started talking about the course. And he smiled and said:
“Have you ever considered doing this in person?”
I stopped.
The Question I Almost Missed
I knew immediately why he was asking.
People at his level don’t do online courses. They’re not blocking off an hour a week, watching videos, doing homework, checking in on a learning platform. Their time works differently. Their assistants have assistants.
But a full day? Eight hours of focused, customized, hands-on work tailored specifically to their business?
They’ll clear their calendar for that.
So I said yes. We set it up: me, him, and a few people he brought along. One full day workshop, 9am to 5pm, working through real AI tools and workflows in their actual context.
And something happened that the online course never quite produced.
What Changes When You’re In the Room
Working live is different.
Not because the content is better — most of the ideas were the same. But when someone asks a question in real time, you can go three layers deeper. When something clicks for one person, you can watch the others and see who’s still confused. When a live demo goes slightly sideways, you can debug it together right there.
That’s where the real learning lives.
I’ve come to think of it as the difference between watching a cooking show and actually making the dish. You can absorb a lot from a video. But there’s something about the heat of the pan, the way the oil moves, the smell — things you can only get by doing it.
The lightbulbs in that first workshop turned on differently than anything I’d seen from the online content. Not because I was smarter. Because the format was doing what online couldn’t.
The AI Fluency Levels Framework
Something else I noticed in those early workshops: people weren’t all starting from the same place.
I started using a simple framework I now call the AI Fluency Levels to set context at the start of every workshop:
- Level 1 — AI Assisted: Using chat tools for one-off tasks (prompting, drafting, researching)
- Level 2 — AI Workflows: Automating repeatable processes with tools like Lindy
- Level 3 — Building Agents: Designing systems that run in the background without you
Most successful founders and investors I work with start somewhere between Level 1 and Level 2. They’re using the tools but haven’t built anything that runs while they sleep.
The workshops are designed to get them to Level 2 — reliably, practically, without needing a technical background.
I could explain this in an online course. I could even test for it. But working through it live — watching someone actually set up their first Lindy workflow, seeing the moment they realize the agent can do what they were spending four hours on — that’s a different thing entirely.
Building It Out
I ran another workshop after that first one. Then another.
People started referring others. The format spread through Austin’s founder and investor community — not because I marketed it heavily, but because the results traveled by word of mouth. Someone would leave a workshop on a Friday and mention it to three people over the weekend.
Now I run them every six weeks. Last year we hit an 88 NPS.
I’ll be honest: I don’t think that number reflects how good the content is. I think it reflects the format. People leave a full day of hands-on work having actually built something — an email agent, a meeting prep workflow, a content system. That’s different from leaving an online module feeling like you learned something.
What I Keep Coming Back To
The investor who asked me that question had no idea he was changing my business trajectory. He was just being honest about how he operates.
But that’s the lesson I take from it. The people you want to work with — the ones whose problems are genuinely interesting, who can afford to invest in real solutions — will tell you what format they need if you listen.
I almost built an entire business around a format the wrong customers wouldn’t use.
Good thing he asked.
If you’re an Austin-based founder or investor who wants to actually implement AI in your work — not just understand it conceptually — I run a one-day workshop every six weeks. Get in touch if you want to know when the next one is.
