Most AI training now describes itself in the same words: practical, hands-on, applied, built for leaders. The descriptions have converged, so they no longer help you choose. The questions below do, because the answers still differ enormously between providers.
None of them are trick questions. A provider who has thought about their format will answer each one in a sentence.
1. What will I personally have running at the end?
The single most useful question, and the one that separates formats faster than any other. Answers range from “notes and a framework” through “a demo you watched someone build” to “a workflow of your own, running”. All three are legitimate products. Only you know which one you are paying for, so make them say which it is.
If the answer is a list of things you will “understand” or “be able to”, that is a knowledge product, not a build one.
2. Whose work do I build against - mine, or a case study?
A prepared case study is easier to run and much easier to get right. It is also the point at which most training stops transferring, because the hard part of applying AI is the mess in your own work, not the tidy version in the exercise.
Ask whether you bring a real task, and what happens to it during the day. If you do bring one, ask what makes a good one, and take the answer seriously - it usually determines how much you get out of the day.
3. How many people are in the room, and who is helping them?
Cohort size decides what the format can actually be. Above roughly thirty people, a day cannot be facilitated in any meaningful sense; it becomes a lecture with exercises, however it is billed. Ask for the cap, not the typical number, and ask how many people are circulating to help.
4. What is the ratio of talking to building?
Ask for it in minutes. A day described as hands-on can still be five hours of presentation with a workshop after lunch. A straight answer sounds like a running order: this long building, this long between builds, longest block of anyone talking is this.
5. What happens when I get stuck?
Everyone gets stuck, usually on something dull - a login, a permission, a tool that behaves differently on their machine. Whether that costs you ten minutes or the afternoon is a property of the format, not of you. Ask who walks the room.
6. What do I need to bring or set up beforehand?
Two things worth knowing early: whether you need a paid AI subscription, and whether any setup is expected before you arrive. Neither is unreasonable. Both are annoying to discover the night before.
7. Who else will be in the room?
Peer level matters more in a small room than the syllabus does. A day of founders and directors working on their own operations is a different experience from a mixed room of engineers and analysts, even with identical content. Ask who the day is designed for, and who actually came last time.
8. What does the day deliberately not cover?
The most revealing question on this list. Any honest one-day format has a scope decision behind it, and the provider should be able to name what they left out and why. A day that claims to cover the landscape, the tooling, the governance and a build is describing four days.
9. What if I book and then cannot make the date?
Diaries move. Ask whether a place transfers to a later cohort, and whether that costs anything. It is a small question that tells you how the provider treats the people who have already paid.
Using the checklist
You do not need perfect answers to all nine. You need answers that are consistent with each other: a room capped small enough for the help promised, a build ratio consistent with the result claimed, a scope narrow enough to be delivered in the time. Most mismatches show up when you put two answers side by side.
For the record, here are ours. The Oxford Agentic Bootcamp is one day in Oxford, capped at a small room, built around build cycles rather than talks, with no block longer than twenty-five minutes of anyone talking at you. You bring one real task from your own work and a laptop, and you leave with a working agentic workflow running against that task, plus the pattern behind it. No coding is required. A paid AI plan helps but is not essential. The day is not recorded, because the value is in the room. If you cannot make the date, your place transfers to a future cohort at no charge.
What it deliberately does not cover: the AI landscape, model comparisons, and governance policy. One pattern, applied properly to one real task, is what fits in a day.