Why AI courses don’t work, and why there’s no shortage of illusions around them

CEOs want to pay $500, send the team to a two‑hour webinar, and tick the box “we implemented AI.” It’s like buying a gym membership and being happy about your abs without ever making it to the locker room.

Ilya Martyn precisely described the problem that Viktor Savyuk’s post responds to: CEOs want to pay $500, send the team to a two‑hour webinar, and then consider that the company has implemented AI. It’s like buying a gym membership and deciding you’re already in shape.

AI implementation isn’t an educational task, it’s a management one. Companies buy software, but employees don’t use it. The reason is simple: people don’t apply new tools where they have no real experience.

A two‑hour webinar won’t give you that experience – it only creates the illusion that the problem is solved.

The real process looks different. First comes chaos: everything works worse than before. Then it turns out that the best employees become the main bottleneck, because AI levels the field: weaker employees improve by 43%, stronger ones by 17%. A $20‑per‑month tool makes a trainee almost as effective as an experienced specialist.

Three honest scenarios for a CEO. A CEO has three options:

hire new people with AI experience,
train the current team,
or force them “like, we’ll teach you to love the motherland.”

The third option leads to loss of loyalty and fake reports that “AI doesn’t work.”

When hiring, you need to ask: which AI version do you use, and why that one?

In the ’90s they asked, “Do you know MS Excel?”—now it’s time to ask about AI skills.

HR must understand the tools: ChatGPT, Claude.AI (including Code), Notebook LLM, generators like Krea.AI, Midjourney, Banana, Grok.

One of my new finds is the Comet browser with the built‑in Perplexity assistant: I gave it read access to all my clouds, and now it’s just pure happiness (remembers everything, knows everything—with a paid plan, of course).

The real cost of implementation?

It’s not a $500 course. It’s $20–200 per employee per month, plus additional services, plus a person who oversees the whole process. Plus layoffs—first the wrong people, then the ones who also needed to go.

Plus a year of patience.

There are no “normal” courses, because a real course is a reorganization with a budget, layoffs, and a year of work. You can teach with a course—but you’ll have to implement it by hand.