FREE AI Literacy Crash Course and Workshops

I have been trying to find a way of lending my support to small business owners and entrepreneurs in regards to the developments in AI and LLMs (large language models) over the last 3 years. I finally landed on offering free courses and workshops locally and in person in order to gather like minded people and to enable me to share the knowledge I have built up using and developing AI systems.

Course and Workshops

Crystalisr cooperative have been very generous in lending me a coworking space and lesson room to teach in, without which I would not be able to put on free stuff. Canbury Works in Kingston-upon-Thames will be the venue for the foreseeable future, really close to the train station makes it easily accessible.

You can see more information and book tickets on the Shop Startup website

Dates starting 10th May

Weekday Evening Session: Every 2nd Tuesday of the month (18:00 AM – 20:00 PM)
Weekend Session: Every 2nd Saturday of the month (10:00 AM – 12:00 PM)
Weekday AI Workshops: Every 2nd and last Wednesday of the month (9:00 AM – 1:00 PM)

I will be taking contributions to continue to support the community.

Prompt Engineering

Mainly the key factor in getting a useful output from chatbots is good prompting. If you understand how the LLMs are working under the hood and have a simple formula to create clear prompts the benefits are overwhelming.

I have put together many lists of prompts, originally from doing some talks on AI for local businesses and continue to build up a library of prompts that I have found game changing in my own business. These I will be sharing in the courses and workshops until I can find a better place for them.

AI Platforms

Another factor in success in using LLMs is to take advantage of the various platforms that are available to you, many with free tiers or open source and freely available if you know where to look. Here are some of my gotos at the moment.

Tasks	Tools to use
Deep research	https://gemini.google.com/https://www.genspark.ai/https://grok.com/
Image manipulation	https://aistudio.google.com/https://playground.com/
Quick research/study	https://www.perplexity.ai/https://notebooklm.google.com/
Video generation	https://www.krea.ai/video https://app.klingai.com/
Video editing	https://www.capcut.com/
Image generation	https://app.leonardo.ai/https://ideogram.ai/https://www.midjourney.com/
Chat	https://chat.mistral.ai/https://chat.qwen.ai/https://chat.deepseek.com/https://chatgpt.com/https://claude.ai/https://huggingface.co/chat/
Uncensored chat	https://venice.ai/
Assistant creation	https://platform.openai.com/https://console.groq.com/playground https://huggingface.co/chat/assistants https://console.mistral.ai/build/agents/new
Agent creation with tools	https://cloud.dify.ai/https://app.tasking.ai/
Agentic systems	https://github.com/microsoft/autogen https://www.crewai.com/
Text to speech and conversational AI agents with easy embedded widget for website	https://elevenlabs.io/
Automations	https://www.make.com/https://www.activepieces.com/
Free usage chat	https://anythingllm.com/ +https://openrouter.ai/https://huggingface.co/spaces https://ollama.com/
Chatbots for websites	https://www.chatlab.com/https://www.voiceflow.com/https://www.tidio.com/https://botpress.com/
Chatbot arena	https://lmarena.ai/
AI coders	https://bolt.new/https://lovable.dev/

I hope these free workshops and course are able to bring my fellow small businessowners and entrepreneurs up to speed with the fast paced changing landscape of AI, and who knows, might even spawn other businesses to with the amount of networking I will be encouraging!!