A live workshop, or an online course?
A self-paced AI course costs between nothing and about $500 and you take it whenever you like. A live workshop is $175 a seat, runs at a fixed time, and works on your restaurant rather than a generic one.
If you mainly want to understand what AI is, take the course. If you already know roughly what it is and the problem is that nothing has actually changed in your building, that is what the workshop is for.
Side by side
| Comparison | Self-paced course | This workshop |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $0 to about $500 | $175 a seat |
| When you do it | Whenever you like | A fixed four hours |
| Whose data you use | Generic examples | Your own tickets and invoices |
| Can you ask a question | No | Yes, that is the format |
| Who teaches it | Varies, often not restaurant people | An operator, 8 years in restaurant ops |
| What you leave with | Notes and a certificate | A working thing your team built |
| Does it fit your stack | Only if your stack is common | Built around whatever you run |
| If nobody finishes it | You paid anyway | Everyone was in the room |
When the course is the better buy
I would rather say this than have you find out after paying me. Take the course instead if any of these is true.
You are curious rather than committed, and $175 is a real amount of money to spend on curiosity. You want to learn it yourself before putting it in front of your team, which is a perfectly good instinct. Or your schedule genuinely cannot give up a four-hour block right now, in which case something you can do at 11pm beats something you keep postponing.
The National Restaurant Association publishes a free AI guide. There are free multi-part courses. Start there and lose nothing but an evening.
Module four, 11pm, nobody to ask.
When it is not
The pattern I see most often is someone who has already watched the videos. They understand the idea perfectly well. What stopped them was that their POS export was a mess, or the output was confidently wrong and they had no way to tell, or they got it working once and nobody else on the team could repeat it.
None of those are knowledge problems, so more content does not fix them. That is the gap a live session is actually for.
Not sure which you are?
Take the free check. Eight questions, no email, and it tells you where your hours are going and the two things I would fix first. If the answer is that you are not ready for either, it will say that too.
More on workshops
- AI workshops for restaurant teams
What the four hours are and who they are for.
- What an AI workshop costs
Every price, published in full. No quote form.
- What happens in the four hours
Hour by hour, and what your team leaves with.
- Remote and national
Why virtual is the default and when to fly me out.
- Workshop or AI consultant?
Including when you should hire the consultant.
- Upcoming dates
Public sessions and how many seats are left.
Questions people actually ask
- Is a course ever the better choice?
- Yes, genuinely. If you want to understand the basics before spending real money, a cheap or free course is the right first step and I would rather you took one than booked a workshop you were not ready for.
- So what does a workshop do that a course cannot?
- Two things. It runs on your own numbers rather than a made-up restaurant, and somebody is there when it does not work. Most people do not get stuck on the concept, they get stuck on the bit where their data is messy and the tutorial assumed it would not be.
- Why do so few people finish online courses?
- Because nothing is scheduled and nobody notices if you stop. That is not a knock on the courses, it is just what happens to self-paced anything during a busy service week.
- Could we do both?
- That is a sensible order, and cheap. Take a free course first to get the vocabulary, then bring the actual problem to a workshop.
- Does the workshop cover the same ground?
- Less ground, in more depth, on your operation. A course will teach you twelve things generally. Four hours will get one of them working in your building.
Still deciding?
Take the free check first. Eight questions, no email, and you get the two things I’d fix in your building before I ask you for anything.