Eleven questions before you buy any AI training
These are the questions asked in a first meeting. They are published because anybody who can answer all eleven does not need help, and anybody who cannot has just found the thing worth fixing.
- How many people have a licence, and how many opened it last month? Not registered — opened.
- Who told them it had arrived, and what did that message say?
- What is the first useful thing somebody in your busiest role could do with it, in under ten minutes?
- Has anybody written down what staff are allowed to put in it?
- If somebody pasted a customer's details into it this morning, would you know?
- Who signed off the tool, and what did they actually sign off — the software, or the way it is used?
- What did the last training you bought change? Name the behaviour, not the attendance.
- Which team is quietly using something you did not buy, because the thing you bought is harder?
- When something it wrote goes out with a mistake in it, whose name is on the letter?
- What would you measure in six weeks to know this worked?
- If the answer to question ten is 'usage', what will you do when usage goes up and nothing else does?
Three patterns come up more than any others.
Nobody was told what it was for. An email went round announcing a licence. Announcements are not training and an announcement is what most people got.
There are no rules, so people made their own. Usually cautious ones, which is why usage is low. Occasionally not, which is a different problem and a worse one.
Nobody agreed what success looks like. So the only available measure is usage, and usage going up is not the same as work getting better.
Checked by a person · not auto-published
Published 8 August 2026 · Free · Nothing is sold on this page