Training Providers: How to Add AI to Your Offering, and Where to Start

The same question comes up in almost every sales meeting you take: "Do you do AI?" Saying no costs you contracts, and improvising a one-day "discover ChatGPT" workshop won't survive three months in front of a client who has already played with 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 offering. 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 side-by-side comparison, and the risk areas to handle before your next Qualiopi audit. The goal is simple: have a sellable AI offering within a few weeks, not a year from now.

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. That same program tied to a certification registered with France Compétences becomes fundable, and suddenly you're playing against a different set of competitors.

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 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 one's official record, its awarding 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 awarding 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. Evidence. Attendance, personalization, assessment, professional 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 staff. So your clients now have a regulatory reason, not just an appetite, to train their employees.

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

This is the fastest route: you get programs that are already produced, fundable certifications and access to the tools, without hiring anyone or shooting a single video.

That's exactly what Skilzy does — a French e-learning platform built 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 actually 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, that means you don't have to make every participant buy six subscriptions at €20 or €30 a month, and you don't have to juggle 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, just long enough to get accredited and line up your sales process.
• Zero instructional design to produce, zero filming, zero editing.
• Content that stays current when tools change their interface or their underlying model, which happens several times a year.
• A fundable offering, so your sales pitch doesn't rest on price alone.

For the catalog, certifications and multi-learner rollout, look at the Skilzy offering for training organizations. If you want the detail 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 how to organize the support side.

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

Approach 2: build your AI training in-house

This is the slowest and most expensive route, but the only one that gives you content that's 100% yours on a specialty nobody else covers.

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

• Instructional design. For in-person delivery, budget 3 to 5 days of design per day of training. For scripted e-learning, the usual market range is 20 to 40 hours of production per hour of finished content.
• Tool subscriptions. A serious program covering images, video and automation quickly pulls in four to six paid services, or €100 to €200 a month on the trainer's side — plus the separate question of access for participants.
• 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. 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 scenario: you have rare sector expertise, an in-house trainer already comfortable with the tools, and enough session volume to amortize the production. Otherwise you pay twice — in cash and in months of delay.

Approach 3: work with a freelance trainer or a partner organization

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 on-site corporate delivery, more for profiles in high demand. You front nothing, you produce nothing, you invoice with a markup.

What it gives you:

• A fast answer to an RFP 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 thinner margin on every session, with no economies of scale.
• Scheduling dependency: your best instructor is booked exactly when your client can free up their teams.
• Responsibility that stays yours. When you subcontract, you have to make sure your provider meets the requirements of the national quality framework, and document that check.
• No asset: the day the trainer stops, your offering stops with them.

Plenty of providers combine approaches: a shared asynchronous foundation for the fundamentals, plus an instructor for a high-value half-day domain 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 pays off in a specialized niche.

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

What a Qualiopi auditor will look at in your AI offering

The four checkpoints are remote attendance, personalization, instructor competence, and monitoring of technological change.

• Attendance and completion. In asynchronous delivery, a scanned sign-in sheet isn't enough. You need activity trails: logins, progress, submitted work. On an AI course, the participant's output (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.
• Personalization. You have to show that the path for a complete beginner and the path for an already-independent user aren't identical. An entry-level assessment plus differentiated tracks is enough, as long as it's written down and actually applied.
• Instructor competence. Keep evidence current: certificates, work produced, training completed. "He's been using ChatGPT for two years" is not evidence.
• Professional monitoring. Indicators 23 to 25 of the framework cover legal and regulatory monitoring, changes in the professions, and educational 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 French Ministry of Labour gives the exact wording of each indicator.

One more habit worth building: state 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 generated content. Your clients' procurement teams and data protection officers are asking now.

The shortest path to launching this quarter

Adding AI to your offering 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 — domain 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.