There are now a lot of people selling AI training in India, and the quality range is wider than in almost any other corporate training category. The same brief can get you a genuinely useful day or a well designed tour of features your team could have found on YouTube.
The difficulty is that both look identical in a proposal. Both list the same tools. Both promise hands-on. Both show logos. Here is how to tell them apart before you commit budget.
The one test that separates trainers
Ask for an unscripted live build on the sales call.
Give them a real task from your business, something specific, and ask them to solve it in front of you right there. Not a case study. Not a recorded walkthrough. A live build, on a task they have not seen.
Trainers who work with these tools every day will do this happily, because it is what their day looks like anyway. Trainers who teach from a deck will redirect you to a recording, a sample curriculum or a reference call. That redirect is your answer.
I do this in every scoping call, and I take requests from the floor during sessions for the same reason. A pre-recorded demo quietly signals that the result is fragile. Building live in front of 300 people signals that it is repeatable, which is the belief a room needs before anyone will try it themselves.
The nine questions
1. What have you built with these tools in the last month?
You are looking for specifics: a workflow, an automation, a product, something shipped. Someone who only teaches AI tools rather than using them will answer in generalities about their curriculum.
2. Which sessions have you run recently, and for whom?
Named organisations, named dates, named formats. Vague claims about "Fortune 500 clients" without names usually means subcontracted delivery, where the person selling is not the person teaching.
3. Who is actually in the room on the day?
This is the single most common gap between what is sold and what is delivered in Indian corporate training. Confirm in writing that the person you evaluated is the person facilitating, and that any additional floor staff are named.
4. How will you customise for our functions?
The correct answer involves them asking you questions: what your teams actually do all day, which tools you already pay for, what your data rules are, what the last failed initiative was. A trainer who does not ask about your context cannot build for it, and your finance team will spend the afternoon watching marketing examples.
5. How much of the day do participants spend building?
Anything under half is a talk with exercises attached. The block where each person builds one working thing on their own real data is what survives the week. Ask them to show you the hour by hour agenda and count the construction time.
6. What does each person leave with?
The answer you want is a workflow they will use again within a week, not a slide deck, not a prompt library, not a certificate. Prompt libraries age badly. Workflows built on the participant's own real task do not.
7. What is your position on the data and policy conversation?
A competent trainer will insist on covering data rules before anyone touches a tool, and will want your legal or security position in advance. A trainer who has not thought about this is a risk, particularly in BFSI, healthcare and anything touching customer data.
8. What happens after the session?
Look for a concrete follow up: a reconvene date, a named workflow owner per team, a measurement plan. Without it you are buying a good day rather than a change in how people work.
9. What will you refuse to teach us?
The most revealing question on the list. Everything-is-possible answers signal a salesperson. Practitioners have strong opinions about what AI is currently bad at, and will tell you where not to spend your effort. That honesty is what you are paying for.
What things cost
Budget context, so you can tell an outlier from a fair quote. Public 2026 pricing guides from Indian corporate training vendors put the ranges at roughly:
| Format | Typical range | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| One day workshop, up to 100 people | INR 1.5 lakh to 4 lakh | On site in metros carries a travel premium |
| Per employee, blended programmes | INR 1,200 to 12,000 | Wide range, driven by customisation depth |
| Multi week role based programme | INR 8 lakh to 25 lakh | Usually includes implementation coaching |
| Conference keynote | Quoted per event | Varies most with audience size and profile |
Treat these as orientation rather than gospel. The variable that moves price most is how much of the content is built specifically for your teams, and that is also the variable that moves outcomes most.
Signals worth trusting, and signals worth ignoring
Trust these:
- Recent named client sessions you can verify, with photographs or coverage from the event.
- A live, unscripted build on your own task.
- Strong opinions about what not to use AI for.
- Questions about your context before any proposal arrives.
- Repeat bookings from the same client.
Ignore these:
- Tool vendor certifications on their own. The tools change faster than the certificates.
- Course catalogues listing 40 tools. Eight taught properly beats forty name-checked.
- Follower counts with no evidence of corporate delivery, and corporate delivery with no evidence of hands-on building. You want both.
- Testimonial walls with no organisation attached.
Individual practitioner or training company?
Both work, for different jobs.
A training company is the safer choice when you need many parallel sessions across cities, consistent materials, and procurement friendly process. The tradeoff is that the facilitator you get is often not the person you evaluated.
An individual practitioner is usually better for leadership sessions, flagship events and keynotes, where credibility in the room and the ability to handle unscripted questions matter more than process. The tradeoff is scheduling and scale.
A common pattern that works well: bring in a practitioner for the flagship session and the leadership track to create belief, then use a training company to run the long tail of role specific sessions across locations.
A note on context
For what it is worth, I run these sessions myself, which makes me an interested party in this question rather than a neutral one. The nine questions above are the ones I would want asked of me, and the pricing table reflects public market ranges rather than my own rate card.
Across 25+ companies and more than 10,000 people trained, including sessions for Coca-Cola in Guwahati, Lenovo Tech World in Mumbai, HP in Delhi, EPAM in Coimbatore and the Department of Economy and Tourism in Dubai, the pattern that predicts a session working is unglamorous: the trainer knew what the room does all day, and the room built something real before they left.
If you want to run those nine questions past a real scoping call, book one and use it as a test.