Conversations with AI: A foundations course

Overview

Build the skills and confidence to work with AI responsibly. A hands-on, ethical foundations course designed for public impact and real-world application.

About this training

This half-day, beginner-friendly training helps you and your team build confidence with AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude.

Whether you’re exploring AI for the first time or want to sharpen your prompting skills, we’ll show you how to use generative AI more effectively, ethically and creatively in your day-to-day work. We cover more than just the basics, we go through structured examples to get you confident in prompt engineering, context engineering, model selection, and vibe-coding, while making time to share and reflect about the impact and ethics of adopting this technology in the workplace.

Through hands-on activities and demos, you’ll learn how AI tools reason, how to reduce hallucinations, and how to prototype useful outputs like a public-facing article in your tone of voice, to making a working interactive quiz app, in just minutes.

No coding skills required.

What you’ll takeaway

• Understand how language models work and how to reason with them effectively

• Use context engineering to shape clearer, more grounded and useful outputs

• Practise prompting techniques like vibe coding through real-time interactive exercises

• Build confidence using AI with practical tools, ethics and creative structure

• Connect with peers exploring human-centred, responsible ways to use AI

Benefits of Training with Portable

We use human-centred design and ethical co-design every day at Portable to overcome difficult challenges with practical solutions, created in collaboration with people who are seeking transformational change.

Using these practices, our team of designers, strategists and technologists have successfully delivered over 1000 projects across a range of impact areas including mental health, access to justice, government innovation, and more.

Not to mention:

• Run by industry experts

• Intimate workshop size

• Engaging hands-on training