Every team I visit has the same shape. Two people are getting genuinely good work out of AI, one of them at midnight on their own time. Everyone else has a ChatGPT tab they open twice a week, get a mediocre answer from, and quietly conclude the whole thing is overrated. Nobody can explain what the first group does differently, so it never spreads.
I fly out, spend a day or two with your team, and close that gap. Not with a deck about the future of work; with the tools you already pay for, on the work you actually do, until something runs.
Why most AI training doesn’t stick
Most of it stops at the demo. Someone shows a clever prompt, the room says “huh”, and on Monday everyone goes back to what they were doing. The gap isn’t enthusiasm, it’s that nobody gave them a working mental model, and nobody sat with them long enough to find out where their week goes.
So: half a day of how it works, half a day of listening, then a day of building. You keep what we build.
Before I get on a plane
Prep starts a couple of weeks out, and it isn’t a formality - it’s why day one has a useful afternoon. What I need:
- Who’s actually in the room, and what they do all day.
- Which AI tools you pay for now, and who has access.
- Two or three workflows you’d like automated. A rough description is plenty.
- The real constraints: what data can’t leave, what needs sign-off, what IT allows.
One call and some back and forth, then I build the material around your stack. If your team lives in TypeScript and Jira, that’s what the examples use.
Not all of it will turn out to be an AI problem, and I’ll say so when it isn’t. Some of it wants a small tool instead: a script, a CLI, a real integration with the system that never got a decent API. A model is slow and inconsistent at work that twenty deterministic lines do perfectly every time. The setups that hold up are a mix - the agent decides what to do, the tool does the part that has to be right. Building those is a lot of my other work.
An NDA goes in place first; I’ll sign yours, or send mine. By the end of prep I’ve seen your repos, your tickets and a fair amount of honest complaining about internal tooling, so it should be in writing before it starts.
Day one: how it actually works
Morning - what’s in the box. The model doesn’t know the answer. It holds a distribution over what comes next and samples from it, which is why the same prompt gives a different reply on a different day. That one fact explains most of what people find spooky, and a room that gets it stops either worshipping the model or writing it off. Then: context windows, why long sessions drift, and why an agent will cheerfully report a job finished when it quietly stubbed out the hard parts.
Midday - the tools you already pay for. Chat window versus agent, and when each is right. Claude Code and Codex for work that ships. And how to connect them to your repos, docs, tickets and CRM, so they answer from your context instead of guessing. Most teams run these tools blind to everything that makes their company specific.
Afternoon - I stop talking. I sit with people while they work and find out where the hours go. This decides whether day two is worth anything, and it’s the part most training skips.
Day two: build something that runs
The second day pays for the trip. We take two or three workflows from the afternoon and build them, with the people who’ll own them. Every useful agent comes down to four questions:
- What’s the job? One sentence, an outcome, not a capability.
- What can it touch? Which systems, read or write.
- What starts it? A schedule, an event, or a person.
- How do you find out what it did? The one everybody skips, and the first one an auditor asks about.
Write those down and you have something buildable. Skip the fourth and you have something you’ll switch off a month later, right after it does something surprising to production.
We also cover what data may go into a tool, what gets logged, and where a human signs off. In a regulated industry that half isn’t boring at all, and it’s where I spend most of my working life anyway.
Then a month of follow-up
Training decays. People go back to a full sprint and the old habit wins. So the days onsite come with the four weeks after: async questions, one review call, and I’ll build one of your agents out properly, so your team has a reference implementation to copy rather than a memory of me doing it on a projector.
That’s the whole offer. A day or two onsite, then a month of support. No subscription, nothing to renew.
Where I’ll come to
I’m based in Lisbon and I fly for this. Europe, the UK, the UAE and Southeast Asia: Berlin, Amsterdam, London, Zurich, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, wherever your team sits. I worked out of Malaysia for years and still have clients there, so Asia isn’t a holiday plan with a workshop attached.
For the long flights, two days makes a lot more sense than one. Travel and accommodation on top, at cost. Outside those regions, ask anyway and I’ll tell you whether it adds up.
Who this is for
Engineering teams and mixed product/ops groups, roughly 5 to 40 people. Non-engineers are fine; the coding-agent material gets swapped for tools they’d actually use. It works best when someone in the room is already a bit obsessed, because they’re who keeps it alive after I leave.
It’s a bad fit for three things, and I’d rather say so up front: individuals (a good blog post and a free weekend gets you most of the way), certificates (I don’t issue one), and AI strategy decks (I’ll build you something that runs and leave the slide to someone else).
Where I come from
Fourteen years shipping software, currently Senior Identity Engineer at TWIN (IOTA Foundation). I’m not teaching this from a course I took last quarter. I run multiple agents every working day and I’ve built the tooling around them: TKU for tracking token spend across tools, Guix containers for keeping an agent out of my home directory, plugins as installable domain experts. I’ve also cleaned up after them, hardcoded keys and bypassable auth and all, and written the honest version of what these tools can and can’t do.
The resume has the longer version. If you need a build rather than training, that’s work with me.
What it costs
I price on the problem, not by the day. Tell me the size of the room, where it is, and what you want working by the end, and I’ll quote a fixed number before anyone commits. Travel and accommodation on top, at cost.
If a workshop isn’t what you need, I’ll say so before you spend anything. That happens reasonably often: sometimes the real blocker is that nobody has access to the tools, and that’s a procurement conversation, not a training one.
Get in touch
Tell me about your team and I’ll come back with an honest answer on whether the trip is worth it.
There’s also a readiness check below if you want a second opinion first. It’s optional and it takes two minutes; nothing leaves your browser unless you send the form.
Is your team ready for this? Optional, two minutes
Questions I get
Do you run it remotely? I’d rather not. Half of day one is sitting next to people while they work, and that doesn’t survive a video call. Ask if travel is genuinely impossible, but expect me to talk you out of it.
What do you need from us beforehand? Who’s in the room, which tools you already pay for, and two or three workflows worth automating. One call a couple of weeks out, so the material is built around your stack. An NDA goes in place before that starts.
One day or two? Two, if the goal is agents your team keeps using. One works if you just want the room levelled up. I’ll tell you which I think you need after we talk.
Do we need to be engineers? No. Roughly half the teams I work with are mixed, and the material shifts accordingly. The part about how the model works and where it fails, everyone needs.
Which tools do you teach? The ones you already pay for, mostly Claude and ChatGPT, plus Claude Code or Codex where people write software. I don’t take referral fees from any of them.
Can our data stay in the EU? Yes, and we’ll cover how. Model choice, provider, and what leaves your network are part of the guardrails session, not an afterthought.
Something breaks after you leave. Then what? That’s what the follow-up month is for. After it, you can get in touch like anyone else.