AI for Absolute Beginners: Free Book + How We Train Teams From Zero to Confident
Most teams have two people using AI well and everyone else guessing. Here's the playbook we use to close that gap in one session — plus a free download of our book, AI for Absolute Beginners.
The AI Gap Inside Most Teams
Walk into almost any company right now and you'll find the same split: one or two people who use AI every day and have already restructured how they work, and everyone else quietly guessing. Not because the rest of the team can't — because nobody has actually shown them how, in the context of their own tools and their own job.
That gap is the whole reason we added AI Training for Teams as a dedicated Protiva service. And it's the reason we're giving away the book the training is built on.
Download the Book — Free
AI for Absolute Beginners is the plain-English guide we wrote for people who have never touched ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Copilot — and for teams who want a shared baseline before we run a workshop. No jargon. No hype. Just the mental model, the prompting patterns, and the day-to-day habits that make AI actually useful.
👉 Download AI for Absolute Beginners (PDF)
What's Inside
- The mental model. What an LLM actually is, in one page, without the physics lecture.
- Prompting patterns. The handful of structures that cover 80% of real work — briefs, drafting, extraction, review, decision support.
- Tool-by-tool basics. When to reach for ChatGPT vs. Claude vs. Gemini vs. Copilot, and where each one quietly wins.
- Guardrails. What to never paste, how to sanity-check outputs, and the small habits that keep AI from becoming a liability.
- Everyday plays. Meeting notes, email triage, research, first drafts, spreadsheets — with example prompts you can copy.
How We Turn the Book Into a Live Workshop
The book is the shared vocabulary. The workshop is where it becomes muscle memory. A typical Protiva AI training engagement looks like this:
- Pre-work (30 min). Team reads the relevant chapters and answers three questions about their current workflow.
- Live session (half-day, remote or on-site). Custom curriculum built around the client's roles and stack. Lots of hands-on — everyone brings a real task and leaves with it done in AI.
- Prompting playbook. A take-home doc with the exact prompts, tool choices, and guardrails tuned to your team.
- Recording + follow-up Q&A. So the people who missed it (or start next month) get the same baseline.
- Optional office hours. Monthly drop-in where the team brings whatever they're stuck on. This is where fluency actually compounds.
Who It's For
Ops teams drowning in repetitive knowledge work. Sales and CS teams that could be drafting 10x faster. Marketing teams still copy-pasting into a chat window without a system. Founders who want their whole company operating at the level of their best AI user, not their average one.
Want the Workshop Instead of Just the Book?
Grab the free PDF, share it with your team, and if the gap you feel is bigger than a book can close, book a 20-minute intro call. We'll scope a training tailored to your tools, your workflows, and the questions your team actually has.