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

The same question comes up in nearly every sales meeting: “Do you do AI?” Saying no costs you contracts, and improvising a one-day “discover ChatGPT” workshop won't last three months against 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 or rebuilding your entire offering. It requires three decisions, made 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 pitfalls to handle before your next Qualiopi audit. The goal is simple: have a sellable AI offering 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 one-day course, 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 — the ones you already train on other topics. 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 their official record, their certifying body and their assessment methods on the France Compétences répertoire spécifique. One important point: to deliver a certification from the répertoire spécifique, you need to be authorized by the certifying body. That's not a formality to deal with at the end of the project — it's the first door to open.
3. Content production. This is where your launch timeline and your margin are decided. 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 that's useful for 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 to train their staff, not just an appetite for it.

Approach 1: Plug In a Ready-Made, Certifying AI Catalog

This is the fastest route: you get ready-made programs, fundable certifications and access to the tools, 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, 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 really 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're not juggling trial accounts that expire halfway through a session. Plus, the work produced in the Lab becomes activity evidence you can use in your audit file.

What you gain:

• A launch timeline of a few weeks, essentially the time it takes to get authorized and run your sales cycle.
• Zero instructional design to produce, zero filming, zero editing.
• Content that's maintained when tools change their interface or their model, which happens several times a year.
• A fundable offering, which means 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 offering for training providers. If you want the details on what a ready-to-sell catalog actually 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 coaching side.

The limitation, to be honest about it: 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 layer 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 it's the only one that gives you 100% original content on industry expertise nobody else covers.

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

• Design work. For in-person training, budget 3 to 5 days of design for 1 day of delivery. 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 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 competency framework, an assessment framework and a review process that takes several months.

There's one case where this approach holds up: 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 cash and in months of delay.

Approach 3: Go Through 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 runs €700 to €1,200 excl. VAT per day for in-company sessions, more for in-demand profiles. You front nothing, you produce nothing, you invoice with a markup.

What it gets you:

• A fast response 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 trainer is unavailable 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 national quality framework requirements, 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 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 back often enough to justify the production.

What a Qualiopi Auditor Will Look At In Your AI Offering

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 traces: logins, progress, submitted work. On an AI course, what the participant produces (an image, a video, an automation scenario) is clear, timestamped evidence. What the auditor expects in detail is covered 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 someone already self-sufficient aren't identical. An intake assessment plus differentiated tracks is enough — as long as it's written down and actually applied.
• Trainer competence. Have up-to-date evidence ready: certificates, work produced, training completed. “He's been using ChatGPT for two years” does not count as evidence.
• Monitoring. Indicators 23 to 25 of the framework cover legal and regulatory monitoring, changes in occupations, and pedagogical and technological innovations. AI is where you can genuinely shine here: document dated monitoring, with sources and the impact on your content. The national quality framework published by the French Ministry of Labor gives the exact wording of each indicator.

One more habit worth picking up: 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 generated content. Your clients' procurement teams and DPOs are asking now.

The Shortest Path to Getting Started 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 (industry 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.