How to vet an external AI instructor before putting them in front of a class_

What are you really looking for in an AI instructor?

Someone who can take the tool into the work your participants actually do: the quote the sales team sends, the minutes nobody wants to write, the report that goes out to a client on Friday. Tool coverage is easy to claim and easy to learn. Moving between a tool and somebody else’s job is the part that takes practice.

The strongest signal is recent work inside companies. An instructor who is running projects brings examples from this month and can answer the questions that come after the demo. An instructor who only teaches will, within a year, be teaching last year’s course, and on this subject a year is long.

The second thing to look for is how they handle a mixed room. A session on Copilot puts people who live in the tool next to people who open a spreadsheet twice a week. Ask what they do about that gap. A real answer describes a mechanism, such as pairing, or two tracks in the exercises, or starting from a document everyone recognises.

The third is what they promise. Anyone who tells you half a day will make a team self-sufficient is selling a demo. People become self-sufficient after they have tried the thing on their own work, with someone to go back to.

How do you read an instructor’s CV?

Four lines carry the information. The rest is decoration.

▸ Hours delivered, not courses run. Twelve editions of the same two-hour course is twenty-four hours in the room, and it is a different job from carrying a long programme.

▸ Types of audience: managers, back office, engineers, mixed rooms, plenaries. Someone who has only done conference stages moves differently in a room of twelve, and the reverse is just as true.

▸ What participants keep at the end, described concretely: saved prompts, a workspace, a draft usage policy, a plan for the first weeks.

▸ Numbers with their basis. «97% average end-of-course satisfaction» means something once you know across how many editions and from which surveys. I put the basis next to the number, and when a provider asks where it comes from I explain it.

You already know the words that say nothing: expert, guru, thought leader, 360-degree. They are noise rather than a red flag. The red flag is a CV that never says what happens in the room.

What should a 30-minute demo class show?

Ask for a real piece of the course on your topic, not a presentation about the instructor. Thirty minutes is enough, and it works best with three or four of your own people in the call, including one sceptic.

Then watch four things. How many questions they put to the group in the first five minutes. Whether the example comes from your client’s industry or from the generic course deck. How they handle a blunt objection, the «we can’t put our documents into an external system» kind. And what is on the table when the thirty minutes are over.

The last one carries the most weight. If you finish holding a prompt that works on your own document, you have seen how they work. If you finish holding an overview, you have seen how they present themselves.

A demo class can be paid, and often should be. Preparing one on your topic is half a day of work, and paying for it changes what you get.

Is vendor certification required?

It depends on what you are selling. For courses that go on the catalogue with the vendor’s code, the vendor programme requires a certified trainer. That is a condition of the catalogue, and it is worth confirming with the vendor before you promise a date to a client.

Everywhere else, a certification tells you the instructor passed an exam on a product. That is information, and the exam does not measure how someone holds a mixed room for four hours.

Here is how I put it, and it is in my profile too: on vendor-coded courses you need someone with that certification; on the rest of the catalogue I deliver with my own material, built on the processes of the company in front of me. Providers tell me that formula is useful, because it says straight away where they can place me and where they can’t.

If an instructor is vague on this point, they have not thought about where their own scope ends.

Sources: Microsoft Learn, Microsoft Certified Trainer: training partners must deliver official Microsoft courseware with certified trainers ↗ (read on 11/10/2026)

Who produces the material, and who keeps it?

There are three arrangements, and they change the result more than people expect.

▸ The provider’s material: the instructor delivers your deck. You get consistency between editions and you carry the quality of that deck.

▸ The instructor’s material: they bring their own, updated from the projects they run. You get currency, and you need to agree upfront who keeps the files.

▸ Material built on the client’s content: the instructor takes real documents, anonymises them and builds the exercises on those. It takes the most preparation and it is the one participants still use a month later.

Two questions settle most of it, and both belong before the quote: what do participants receive at the end, and who keeps the files once the course is over. Put the answer to the second one in writing, even two lines in the purchase order. It is the thing that causes arguments six months later.

Co-teaching, shadowing, dual teach: when do they help?

Large providers rarely put a new instructor alone in front of an important client. On the first assignment there is someone else in the room: a second instructor, a tutor, a coordinator who watches and takes notes.

If you are a smaller provider, the version you can copy is one person of yours in the room for the first half day. They don’t need to say anything. They need to see how the session opens and how the group reacts to the first exercise.

Full co-teaching, two instructors alternating, pays off in two situations: a large room where two people are needed to support the exercises, and a course that spans two distant subjects, such as the AI part and a system of yours.

After the first course, run the review with the surveys and a twenty-minute call to the client’s contact. The survey tells you whether people enjoyed it. The call tells you whether anything started to change the week after.