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 one-day “discover ChatGPT” session 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 or 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-out points 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 to make, 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 category.

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 get started, the ones you already train on other topics. You have your 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 their official record, their certifying body and their assessment methods on the France Compétences Répertoire Spécifique. Important point: to deliver a Répertoire Spécifique certification, you must be accredited by the certifying body. This isn't 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 don't transfer.

One last piece of context that's useful for your sales pitch: since 2 February 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 urge, to train their employees.

Approach 1: plug in a turnkey, 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 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 from within the platform, with credits included. In practice, you don't have to make every participant buy six subscriptions at €20 or €30 a month, or manage 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 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 rollout, the thing to look at is the Skilzy offer for training providers; if you want the details of what a ready-to-sell catalog contains, the article on the turnkey 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 inspections, for example), you'll need to add your own industry 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 an industry 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 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 image, video and automation program quickly pulls in four to six paid services, meaning €100 to €200 a month on the trainer side, on top of 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. 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.

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 solution for meeting a one-off request, but the one that squeezes your margin and your ability to scale the most.

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

What it gives you:

• A quick response to a tender or a request from a long-standing client.
• The credibility of a practitioner who works with these tools daily.
• Fine-tuned 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 yours. When subcontracting, 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 offer stops with them.

Many providers combine approaches: a shared asynchronous base 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, start-up cost and ability to scale, approach 1 wins in most cases; approach 2 is only justified for an industry 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 mode, a scanned attendance 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 scenario) is readable, dated 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 and differentiated tracks are enough, provided they're written down and actually applied.
• Trainer competence. Plan for up-to-date evidence: certificates, portfolio work, 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 occupations, and instructional and technological innovations. 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 the indicators.

One more habit worth building: state in black and white, 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 now ask.

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 (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.