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

The same question comes up in almost every sales meeting: “so, do you do AI?” Saying no costs you deals, and improvising a “discover ChatGPT” day won't hold up for three months in front of a client who has already tested the tool on their own. Good news: adding AI to your catalog doesn't require hiring a €60,000-a-year expert, nor rebuilding your whole offer. It takes three decisions, made in the right order: which audience you're targeting, which certification you attach to it, and who produces the content.

This guide gives you the order in which to make those decisions, the three possible methods with their real costs and timelines, a comparison table, and the risk 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 classroom day and gets compared on a single criterion: price. That same program tied to a certification registered with France Compétences becomes fundable — and you switch to a different league of competitors.

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, ideally the 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 currently directly relevant here: 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 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 what determines your launch timeline and your margin. Three options, detailed below.
4. The evidence. Attendance, individualization, assessment, ongoing 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 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.

Method 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 producing 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, 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 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 practical terms, 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 becomes activity evidence you can use in your compliance file.

What you gain:

• A launch timeline of a few weeks, the time it takes to get authorized 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, and therefore a sales pitch that doesn't rest on your price alone.

For the catalog, certifications, and multi-learner rollout side of things, look at the Skilzy offer for training providers; if you want the details 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, in all honesty: 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 base.

Method 2: produce your AI training in-house

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

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

• Design work. For in-person training, expect 3 to 5 days of design per 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 per month on the trainer's side, plus the 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 in three minutes.
• Certification. Building your own Répertoire Spécifique registration file is a project in its own right, with a competency framework, an assessment framework, and a review process that takes several months.

This method makes sense in one scenario: 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.

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

This is the most flexible solution for answering a one-off request, but the one that crushes your margin and your ability to scale.

A freelance AI trainer typically charges between €700 and €1,200 excl. VAT per day for in-company delivery, 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 yours. When you subcontract, you must 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 methods on the criteria that decide it

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

The pragmatic reading: start with method 1 so you have something to sell this quarter, add method 3 for the industry workshops your clients ask for, and only move to method 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, individualization, trainer competence, and monitoring of technological developments.

• Attendance and completion. In asynchronous delivery, a scanned sign-in sheet isn't enough. You need activity traces: logins, progress, submitted work. On an AI course, the trainee's output (an image, a video, an automation workflow) is readable, time-stamped evidence. What the auditor expects is covered in detail in the article on Qualiopi evidence for e-learning.
• Individualization. You have to show that the path for a complete beginner and the path for someone already self-sufficient 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, portfolio work, training completed. “He's been using ChatGPT for two years” does not count as evidence.
• Ongoing monitoring. Indicators 23 to 25 of the framework cover legal and regulatory monitoring, changes in occupations, and pedagogical and technological innovation. 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 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 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 it to a fundable certification, and produce no content that 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 place to start.