DIY AI School — Workshops
Practical AI skills.When you actually need them.
Quick, focused workshops for non-tech business owners. Each one teaches a specific skill — the prompt, the agent, the setup, the workflow — that you'll apply to a real problem in your business the same day. Then you go back to running your shop. We don't expect you to attend every workshop. Show up for the ones that solve a thing on your list.
No bootcamp. No multi-week curriculum. No personality transplant. Just the working knowledge for the specific problem you came to solve.
Format
Live, recorded, taught by builders.
Workshops are live sessions, not lecture videos. You show up, the instructor teaches, you ask questions in real time, and the last thirty minutes are dedicated to working through your actual situation with the room.
Live, monthly.
One workshop a month, scheduled in advance, hosted in our virtual space. Each one runs ninety minutes — sixty minutes of teaching, thirty minutes of working through your specific situation with peers in the room.
Recorded for replay.
Every workshop is recorded and posted to the DIY AI School replay library. Members can pull up any past session on demand. Useful when a topic that didn't matter to you in March is suddenly the thing eating your week in October.
Taught by builders.
No outsourced facilitators. No CEU-mill instructors reading off slides. Workshops are taught by people who've actually done the work and shipped the thing — Carso engineers, vetted operators from the community, founders who built and sold what they're teaching.
Workshop topics
What gets on the calendar.
Topics that move a small business forward — not abstract AI philosophy, not researcher talks, not enterprise theater. Member votes drive the schedule. Here's the rotating bench.
Branding for AI products.
How to name, position, and visually anchor an AI product when you didn't go to design school and can't afford a brand agency. The shortcuts that work, the tells that make a product look fake-AI, the cheap moves that make a product look real.
Marketing on a bootstrapped budget.
What actually moves the needle when you have no ad spend, no sales team, and no SDRs. Distribution channels that cost zero dollars and convert. Content that doesn't sound like LinkedIn theater. Outreach that gets opened by real buyers.
Agent tooling and deployments.
Claude Agent SDK, MCP servers, the production stack we ship for clients. How to scope an agent project so it doesn't sprawl. How to deploy without a DevOps team. Where the rough edges still live in late 2026 and how to work around them.
RAG for small startups.
Retrieval-augmented generation when you can't afford an enterprise vector database license. Self-hosted setups that cost tens of dollars a month, not thousands. The shortcuts that turn a weekend project into a working product.
Open-source replacements for SaaS.
How to swap Salesforce for SuiteCRM, HubSpot for EspoCRM, Samsara for OpenELD. What you actually own afterward, what breaks, what's better, and how Carso makes the swap survivable for businesses that can't afford the SaaS bill.
Go-to-market for solo operators.
Pricing, positioning, lead gen, and sales workflows when there's no sales team — only you. The tactics that scale a one-person business to its first ten customers. The mistakes that keep solo founders stuck at zero.
Launch Lab — coming soon
A walk-around campus for working alongside peers.
Launch Lab is the live virtual campus we're building on a dedicated subdomain — a walk-around space where DIY AI School members and other small business owners drop in, work alongside each other, and bump into help when they're stuck. Built on Work Adventure for the room layer and Carso's human-agent virtual office stack for the AI layer.
Workshops happen here too once it's live.
How to attend
Workshops are part of DIY AI School.
Live attendance, replay library, and member Q&A are bundled into the DIY AI School membership. The free preview tier includes one recorded workshop a quarter so you can see how they run before you commit.
Get on the workshop list.
We email scheduled workshops a couple of weeks ahead, with the topic, the instructor, and the live link. No spam, no pitch. Unsubscribe whenever.