Training providers: adding AI to your offer, where to start

The same question comes up in almost every sales meeting: “do you do AI?” Saying no costs you contracts, and improvising a “ChatGPT discovery” day won't survive three months in front of a client who has already tried the tool on their own. Good news: adding AI to your catalog doesn't require hiring an expert at €60,000 a year, and it doesn't require rebuilding your offer. It requires three decisions, taken in the right order: which audience you're targeting, which certification you attach, and who produces the content.

This guide gives you the order in which to make those decisions, the three possible approaches with their real costs and timelines, a comparison table, and the watch-outs to handle before your next Qualiopi audit. The goal is simple: have a sellable AI offer in a few weeks, not in a year.

Where to start: the four decisions, in order

Start with certification and funding, not with content. An AI module with no certification attached sells like any other training day and gets compared on a single criterion: price. The same program tied to a certification registered with France Compétences becomes fundable, and you move into a different competitive bracket.

The four decisions, in this order:

1. The audience and the use case. An executive assistant, a salesperson and a communications manager don't need the same skills. Pick two profiles maximum to start with — the ones you already train on other subjects. You have the prospect list, you know their constraints, you'll sell faster.
2. The certification. Two certifications are directly relevant here today: RS7439 (AI-assisted content marketing) and RS6792 (AI and sales), both registered in the répertoire spécifique and therefore fundable. You can check each record, its certifying body and its assessment methods on the France Compétences répertoire spécifique. Important point: to deliver a répertoire spécifique certification, you must be accredited by the certifying body. That's not a formality to handle at the end of the project — it's the first door to open.
3. Content production. This is what determines your launch timeline and your margin. Three options, detailed below.
4. The evidence. Attendance, individualization, assessment, market monitoring. On a remote AI course, this is the topic that derails audits, because in-person habits don't transfer.

One last piece of context worth adding to your sales pitch: since February 2, 2025, the European AI Act has required organizations deploying AI systems to ensure a sufficient level of AI literacy among their teams. So your clients now have a regulatory reason — not just an appetite — to train their staff.

Approach 1: plug in a ready-made, certifying AI catalog

This is the fastest route: you get ready-made programs, fundable certifications and tool access, without hiring anyone or producing a single video.

That's exactly what Skilzy does — a French e-learning platform designed to learn and use AI. The catalog includes more than 15 programs: creating images, producing videos (UGC, ads, faceless channels, avatars, voiceovers), generating music, automating tasks with n8n, writing good prompts, coding with AI. The two state-recognized certifications mentioned above, RS7439 and RS6792, are attached to the setup.

The difference that matters for a training provider is the built-in AI Lab: learners use the real tools straight from the platform, with credits included. In practice, you don't have to make every participant buy six subscriptions at €20 or €30 a month, and you're not juggling trial accounts that expire halfway through the session. And the work produced in the Lab creates an activity trail you can use in your evidence file.

What you gain:

• A launch timeline of a few weeks — the time it takes to get accredited and run your sales cycle.
• Zero instructional design to produce, zero filming, zero editing.
• Maintained content when tools change their interface or their model, which happens several times a year.
• A fundable offer, so a sales pitch that doesn't rest on your price alone.

For the catalog, certifications and multi-learner deployment side, the thing to look at is the Skilzy offer for training providers; if you want the detail of what a ready-to-sell catalog contains, the article on the ready-made AI training catalog gets concrete, and the one on how to offer AI training without hiring a trainer covers how to organize the support side.

The limitation, to be honest: you don't control the instructional roadmap. If your core business is a very specific niche (AI applied to property surveys, say), you'll need to add your own sector modules on top of the base.

Approach 2: build your AI training in-house

This is the longest and most expensive approach, but the only one that gives you content that's 100% yours on sector expertise nobody else covers.

The ballpark figures, so you can decide with your eyes open:

• Instructional design. In person, budget 3 to 5 days of design for 1 day of training. For scripted e-learning, the usual market range is 20 to 40 hours of production for 1 hour of finished content.
• Tool subscriptions. A serious image, video and automation program quickly pulls in four to six paid services, meaning €100 to €200 a month on the trainer side — plus the question of participant access.
• Maintenance. Interfaces and models change every quarter. A module filmed six months ago often shows screens that no longer exist, and a participant who can't find the button checks out within three minutes.
• Certification. Putting together your own registration file for the répertoire spécifique is a project in its own right, with a competency framework, an assessment framework and a review process that takes several months.

This approach makes sense in one case: you have rare sector expertise, an in-house trainer who is already comfortable with the tools, and enough session volume to amortize the production. Otherwise you pay twice — in money and in months of delay.

Approach 3: go through a freelance trainer or a partner provider

This is the most flexible way to answer a one-off request, but the one that squeezes your margin and your ability to scale the hardest.

A freelance AI trainer typically runs between €700 and €1,200 per day excl. VAT for in-company work, more for highly sought-after profiles. You front nothing, you produce nothing, you invoice with a margin.

What it gives you:

• A fast answer to a tender or a request from a long-standing client.
• The credibility of a practitioner who works with these tools every day.
• Fine-grained adaptation to the client's context.

What it costs you:

• A reduced margin on every session, with no economies of scale.
• Scheduling dependency: your best trainer is unavailable exactly when your client can free up their teams.
• Responsibility that stays with you. With subcontracting, you have to make sure your provider meets the national quality framework's requirements — and document that check.
• No asset: the day the trainer stops, your offer stops with them.

Plenty of providers combine approaches: a shared asynchronous base for the fundamentals, plus a trainer for a high-value half-day sector workshop.

Comparing the three approaches on the criteria that decide it

On timeline, start-up cost and ability to scale, approach 1 wins in most cases; approach 2 is only justified for a sector niche.

The pragmatic read: start with approach 1 so you have something to sell this quarter, add approach 3 for the sector workshops your clients ask for, and only move to approach 2 when a need comes up often enough to justify producing it.

What the Qualiopi auditor will look at in your AI offer

The four checkpoints are remote attendance, individualization, trainer competence, and monitoring of technological change.

• Attendance and completion. In asynchronous delivery, a scanned attendance sheet isn't enough. You need activity trails: logins, progress, submitted work. On an AI course, what the participant produces (an image, a video, an automation workflow) is legible, time-stamped evidence. What the auditor expects is covered in detail in the article on Qualiopi evidence for e-learning.
• Individualization. You need to show that the path for a complete beginner and the path for an already-independent user are not identical. An entry assessment and differentiated tracks are enough — as long as it's written down and actually applied.
• Trainer competence. Plan for up-to-date evidence: certificates, work produced, training completed. “They've been using ChatGPT for two years” is not evidence.
• Monitoring. Indicators 23 to 25 of the framework cover legal and regulatory monitoring, changes in occupations, and pedagogical and technological innovation. On AI, this is where you can genuinely shine: document dated monitoring, with sources and the impact on your content. The national quality framework published by the Ministry of Labor gives the exact wording of the indicators.

One more habit worth picking up: state in black and white, in your program and your terms, which tools are used, which data learners are not allowed to enter into them, and how you handle the question of generated content. Your clients' procurement teams and DPOs are now asking.

The shortest path to launching this quarter

Adding AI to your offer comes down to three moves: pick an audience you already know, attach a fundable certification, and produce no content you can get ready to sell. The rest — sector workshops, in-house modules, upskilling your trainers — gets built afterwards, on top of a catalog that's already running.

If you'd rather get yourself up to speed first, the guide to learning AI as a beginner is a good starting point.