Training Providers: Adding AI to Your Offer, Where to Start

The same question comes up in almost every sales meeting: „do you offer AI training?" Saying no costs you contracts, and improvising a one-day „discover ChatGPT" workshop won't hold up for 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 a €60,000-a-year expert, and it doesn't require rebuilding your offer either. What it does require is three decisions made in the right order: who 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 standard training day and gets compared on one criterion only: price. The same program tied to a certification registered with France Compétences becomes fundable, and suddenly you're competing in a different league.

The four decisions, in this order:

1. Audience and use case. An executive assistant, a salesperson and a communications manager don't need the same skills. Pick two profiles maximum to start with, ideally ones you already train on other topics. You have the prospect base, 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 one's official record, its certifying body and its assessment methods on the France Compétences répertoire spécifique. Important point: to deliver a certification from the répertoire spécifique, you must be authorized 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, personalization, assessment, industry monitoring. On a remote AI course, this is the topic that derails audits, because in-person habits simply 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 Turnkey, Certifying AI Catalog

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

That's exactly what Skilzy does — a French e-learning platform built to learn and actually use AI. The catalog includes more than 15 programs: creating images, producing videos (UGC, ads, faceless channels, avatars, voice-overs), 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 program.

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

What you gain:

• A launch timeline of a few weeks — just the time needed for authorization and your sales prep.
• Zero instructional design to produce, no filming, no editing.
• Maintained content when tools change their interface or model, which happens several times a year.
• A fundable offer, and therefore a sales pitch that doesn't rest on your price alone.

For the catalog, certifications and multi-learner deployment side of things, take a look at the Skilzy offer for training providers; if you want the details of what a ready-to-sell catalog actually contains, the article on the turnkey AI training catalog gets specific, and the one on how to offer AI training without hiring a trainer covers the support side of the setup.

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

Approach 2: Build Your AI Training In-House

This is the longest and most expensive approach, but the only one that gives you 100% proprietary content on an area of expertise nobody else covers.

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

• Instructional design. For in-person training, count 3 to 5 days of design per 1 day of delivery. For scripted e-learning, the usual market range is 20 to 40 hours of production per 1 hour of finished content.
• Tool subscriptions. A serious image, video and automation program quickly pulls in four to six paid services, or €100 to €200 a month on the trainer's side, plus the separate question of trainee access.
• Maintenance. Interfaces and models change every quarter. A module filmed six months ago often shows screens that no longer exist, and a trainee who can't find the button checks out within three minutes.
• Certification. Building your own registration file for the répertoire spécifique is a project in its own right, with a skills 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's 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: Work With a Freelance Trainer or Partner Provider

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

A freelance AI trainer typically charges between €700 and €1,200 excl. VAT per day for in-house corporate sessions, more for highly sought-after profiles. You front nothing, you produce nothing, you invoice with a markup.

What it gets 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-tuned adaptation to the client's context.

What it costs you:

• A thinner 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. When you subcontract, you have to make sure your provider meets the national quality framework 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 foundation for the fundamentals, plus a trainer for a high-value half-day industry workshop.

Comparing the Three Approaches on the Criteria That Decide It

On timeline, startup cost and ability to scale, Approach 1 wins in most cases; Approach 2 only makes sense for a specialized niche.

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

What the Qualiopi Auditor Will Look At in Your AI Offer

The four checkpoints are remote attendance, personalization, trainer competence, and monitoring of technological developments.

• Attendance and completion. In asynchronous formats, a scanned sign-in sheet isn't enough. You need activity records: logins, progress, submitted work. On an AI course, what the trainee produces (an image, a video, an automation scenario) is clear, time-stamped evidence. The details of what the auditor expects are covered in the article on Qualiopi evidence for e-learning.
• Personalization. You need to show that the path for a complete beginner and the path for an already independent user aren't identical. An entry-level 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 samples, training completed. „He's been using ChatGPT for two years" does not count as evidence.
• Industry monitoring. Indicators 23 to 25 of the framework cover legal and regulatory monitoring, changes in the professions, and pedagogical and technological innovation. With 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 French Ministry of Labour gives the exact wording of the indicators.

One more habit worth building: spell out in writing, in your program and your terms, which tools are used, what 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 asking now.

The Shortest Path to Getting Started 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. Everything else (industry workshops, in-house modules, upskilling your trainers) gets built afterward, 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.