The 2-Day Applied AI Workshop: Full Curriculum, Hour by Hour
What actually happens across the two days of our flagship AI workshop, hour by hour — from first-principles literacy to a working automation your team keeps.
Nano AI Team · AI Implementation · 11 min read · July 2, 2026
Why the agenda is the pitch
Every vendor promises a "hands-on AI workshop." Almost none will show you the actual minute-by-minute schedule before you sign, because most of it is slideware stretched across two days with a lunch break in the middle. We publish ours because we have nothing to hide in it: two full days, one real business problem per department, and a working automation in every participant's hands by the closing demo. If you are the sponsor who has to justify this line item to a CFO, the agenda below is the artifact you can forward as-is — it is the same one we hand clients on the scoping call.
This is the flagship 2-Day Applied AI Workshop from our corporate AI training service — up to 20 participants, delivered in Arabic, English, or bilingually, on-site in the GCC or remote. Everything below assumes a standard two-department cohort (for example customer service and finance, or HR and operations); the exercises and timing shift slightly per client based on the pre-workshop intake call, but the structure — literacy, then skills, then a real build, then a plan — stays fixed because it is the sequence that actually produces adoption.
Day 1 — Literacy, prompting, and finding your own use cases
Day 1 is deliberately not about tools yet. It builds the mental model first, then hands-on prompting skill, then turns the room loose on its own workflows — so that by 5pm, every participant has a personal shortlist of tasks they believe AI can take off their plate, and evidence from their own testing, not our claims.
9:00–10:15 — What large language models actually do
No slideware jargon. A working mental model of how a model predicts text, why it hallucinates, why it is confidently wrong sometimes, and where the current generation is genuinely strong (drafting, summarizing, extracting, classifying) versus weak (arithmetic, up-to-the-minute facts, anything requiring true reasoning under ambiguity). Live demo pulled from a production system the trainer runs, not a canned example.
10:15–10:30 — Break
Short break. Coffee, not a session — the agenda protects it because a tired room does not build anything by 5pm.
10:30–12:30 — Hands-on prompt engineering
Every participant on a laptop, working real examples from their own inbox or task list. Covers role-and-context framing, few-shot examples, breaking multi-step tasks into a chain of smaller prompts, and — specifically for Gulf and Egyptian teams — how to prompt for a target Arabic dialect and register instead of getting flat Modern Standard Arabic back. Participants leave with a personal prompt library, not just notes.
12:30–13:30 — Lunch
Full hour, deliberately not working lunch — the afternoon session needs a fresh room for open-ended discovery work.
13:30–15:30 — Department use-case mapping
The room splits into its two department tracks. Each group lists every recurring task in their week, scores each on effort-to-automate versus business impact using a simple 2x2, and picks one candidate task to actually build on day 2. This is where the sample workflows and data gathered on the pre-workshop intake call get put on the table.
15:30–15:45 — Break
Short break before the day's synthesis.
15:45–17:00 — Tool selection and build planning
For the one task each group picked, the trainer walks them through choosing the right tool for the job — a chat assistant, a no-code automation in n8n, a WhatsApp Business flow, or a simple retrieval system over internal documents — and each group leaves day 1 with a one-page build plan for tomorrow morning.
Day 2 — Building the real automation, then Q&A and the roadmap
Day 2 has no new theory. It is a build sprint on the task each group chose, followed by the two things every sponsor actually cares about: an open floor for the hard questions nobody asked in front of colleagues on day 1, and a document the sponsor can take to their own boss.
9:00–9:30 — Recap and build-group formation
Quick recap of each group's chosen task and build plan from yesterday afternoon, then final adjustments based on overnight thinking.
9:30–12:30 — Build sprint, part one
Each department builds its real automation in a sandboxed environment, on real (NDA-covered) or anonymized sample data — customer service drafts dialect-appropriate WhatsApp and email replies with escalation rules, finance extracts invoice line items into a spreadsheet and flags anomalies, HR screens CVs against role criteria and drafts Arabic offer letters, operations builds a Q&A assistant over internal policies, marketing generates bilingual campaign variants inside brand guardrails. Trainers circulate group to group rather than lecturing.
12:30–13:30 — Lunch
Groups often keep working informally through lunch at this point — that is a good sign, not a scheduling failure.
13:30–15:00 — Build sprint, part two
Finishing touches, edge-case testing (what happens with an angry customer message, a duplicate invoice, an incomplete CV), and rollout notes so the client's IT team can review and approve promotion to production after the workshop ends.
15:00–15:15 — Break
Last break of the workshop, before the two closing sessions.
15:15–16:15 — Participant demos and open Q&A
Each group demos its working automation to the room — this is usually the moment that convinces a skeptical department head more than anything a vendor could say. It is followed by genuinely open Q&A: job-security concerns, data-privacy questions, "what happens when the model is wrong," and specific what-ifs from each participant's own role. Nothing is off-limits and nothing is scripted.
16:15–17:00 — The ranked roadmap and survey
The trainers present the sponsor's actual deliverable: every workflow surfaced across both days, scored by effort and impact, so the next automation to fund is an evidence-based decision rather than a guess. The standard post-workshop survey runs in the room — it is what determines whether the satisfaction guarantee triggers a free half-day follow-up.
What happens in the 30 days after
The workshop does not end when the room empties. Recorded materials in Arabic or English go out within a few days so participants who missed a segment — or want to re-run an exercise back at their desk — are not stuck relying on memory. The ranked workflow shortlist is delivered as a document the sponsor can forward directly to leadership; most sponsors use it verbatim in their next planning cycle. And a 30-day follow-up call is built into every 2-Day Applied AI Workshop specifically to catch the failure mode that kills most training budgets: the automation that worked in the room on day 2 but quietly stalled once real edge cases showed up three weeks later.
If the average participant rating on the closing survey falls below 8/10, the follow-up half-day session is free — that guarantee is deliberately measured on day 2 itself, not left to a vague promise. Sponsors who already know which workflow they want to scale skip straight from the shortlist into our AI Readiness Sprint, which takes the top-ranked item and turns it into a scoped production build.
Where this fits and what it costs
The 2-Day Applied AI Workshop is the middle of our three corporate training formats: lighter than the multi-week AI Enablement Program, and considerably more hands-on than the one-day Executive AI Briefing built for board-level literacy and governance discussions. It runs $3,000-6,000 per day for up to 20 participants across two department tracks — remote delivery sits at the lower end of that band, and fully customized on-site delivery in the GCC with exercises built entirely on your own data sits at the upper end. The rate never drops below $3,000 a day regardless of format, and travel outside Saudi Arabia, the UAE, or Egypt is billed at cost.
Because pricing and scope are published rather than negotiated case by case, sponsors can bring this exact agenda to a budget conversation before ever getting on a call with us. If a two-day format is more than your first step needs, the one-day Executive Briefing is the lighter entry point; if a single cohort proves out and you need to roll this out company-wide, the AI Enablement Program extends the same day rate across 3-5 training days and multiple cohorts over 4-8 weeks.
Frequently asked questions
See the full agenda applied to your own departments
Book a 20-minute scoping call and we'll walk through how this exact two-day structure maps onto your teams, your data, and your language mix — then confirm dates and the day rate for your format.