AI TRAINING
4-Week AI Sprint for SME Owner-Operators
Ship one real automation and one AI-assisted workflow in four focused weeks, no tech team needed.
What it covers
A structured four-week sprint designed for solo founders and micro-teams who need to move from curiosity to working AI in their business. Each week has a clear deliverable: an operations audit, a curated tool selection, and two build weeks where participants implement an automation and an AI-assisted workflow. Sessions combine short live group calls with self-paced build time, keeping total weekly commitment under six hours. Participants leave with two live outputs they can maintain themselves.
What you'll be able to do
- Complete a structured audit of your business operations and identify at least three automation candidates
- Select and justify an AI toolstack appropriate for a sub-10-person business and its budget
- Build and deploy one working automation that runs without manual intervention
- Create one AI-assisted workflow your team uses daily (e.g. customer reply drafts, report generation)
- Write effective prompts for your specific business context and iterate on them independently
Topics covered
- Rapid operations audit to identify automation-ready tasks
- Evaluating and selecting no-code/low-code AI tools on a tight budget
- Building a first automation (e.g. email triage, invoice parsing, lead routing)
- Designing an AI-assisted workflow (e.g. content drafting, customer reply templates)
- Prompt engineering basics for non-technical users
- Connecting tools with lightweight integration platforms (Make, Zapier)
- Measuring time saved and ROI on a small-team scale
- Maintaining and iterating on live automations without outside help
Delivery
Four weeks of blended delivery: one 90-minute live group call per week (remote, via video conferencing) plus three to four hours of guided self-paced build time. All sessions recorded for async catch-up. Participants work in a shared Slack or Discord space for peer support between calls. No in-person component required. Materials include a pre-built audit template, tool comparison matrix, and a prompt library starter pack. Hands-on build time represents roughly 70% of total programme hours.
What makes it work
- Committing a fixed weekly time block for build sessions so momentum is not lost between calls
- Choosing a real, recurring business pain point as the first automation target rather than a hypothetical one
- Sharing progress and blockers in the peer group channel to get fast feedback and stay accountable
- Documenting each automation in a simple one-page runbook so it can be handed off or recovered if something breaks
Common mistakes
- Trying to automate a process that is not yet stable or well-defined, resulting in automations that break immediately
- Choosing tools based on hype rather than fit, leading to switching costs and wasted setup time
- Skipping the audit week and jumping straight to building, so the wrong problems get solved first
- Setting expectations for full hands-off automation when a human-in-the-loop workflow is more appropriate at this scale
When NOT to take this
This programme is not the right fit for a founder who already has a part-time developer or ops hire on staff and needs a more technically deep implementation — they would get more value from a practitioner-level bootcamp focused on custom integrations or API-based tooling.
Providers to consider
Sources
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