Prologue: Into AI
Prologue: Into AI is a short, structured program for professionals who know they need to get moving with AI — and haven't yet. Three 1:1 sessions with a real person. Homework that uses your actual work. A project you choose and complete. By the end, you will have shifted from "I should figure this out" to "I am actively figuring this out."
If that sounds like where you are, keep reading.
Maybe you read something about AI recently that made the ground shift a little. Maybe a colleague mentioned what they've been doing with it and it made you think you should be using it more. Maybe you've been meaning to figure this out for a while, and "a while" has quietly become "kind of urgent."
You are smart and capable. You have tried a few things. But not enough to say you really understand what these tools can do — or what they could do for you specifically.
If this sounds like you (or someone you know), and you think some 1:1 attention could get things moving, keep reading.
What This Is
Prologue: Into AI is a short, structured experience designed to get a capable person using AI tools regularly in practical and meaningful ways. Participants choose the balance of personal vs professional and fun vs serious. The goal is to increase fluency with some tools, and the best way to do that is to put them to relevant use.
In live sessions we will work together to identify and set up projects that solve a real problem or meet a real opportunity for you. The homework continues the work you started in the session — not busywork, but real conversations with your AI tool about your actual work. My goal is that somewhere in this process something clicks, curiosity takes over, and the learning accelerates.
When you are finished, you will have a shifted perspective on what works for you. You will have produced some concrete things. And you will have used tools enough to join the conversation and keep going on your own.
What makes this different from all the other courses I have seen?
Asynchronous courses are good for people who learn well independently and stay motivated without external structure. A lot of capable people don't work that way.
With live courses there is the schedule problem. You have to commit to a fixed cadence that may not fit your life. The volume can be intense. The pacing is set for the group, not for you. If you miss a session, you fall behind. This program is bite-sized and flexible by design — three self-scheduled sessions with manageable homework that directly ties to your work.
A real person is expecting you to show up.
Accountability is not just motivational, it is structural. When someone is waiting for you with a prepared session, you do the homework, or you reschedule the meeting.
We are not trying to get through a predetermined curriculum.
The first session is entirely about you: your work, your context, your specific version of "I haven't gotten started yet." Everything that follows is built around what came up in that conversation.
You co-author your goals.
You won't achieve "mastery" of a tool you're not sure how you want to use. Instead, you will pick a real project from your own work, try it, and learn from what happens. The goal isn't completion of a course. It's a shift in what you believe you can do.
About You
You are an experienced professional. You know how to learn new things. You are not intimidated by new tools in general. But AI has felt different somehow — lots of noise, really fast changes, and hard to figure out where and how to actually begin.
You may use ChatGPT occasionally and feel vaguely underwhelmed, or vaguely overwhelmed, or both. You may have colleagues who seem enthusiastic about something you haven't been able to get traction on. Maybe recently you read something like this or heard something like this that made you feel like the window for being "early" is closing faster than you thought.
Whether or not you think AI will make dramatic changes in the workforce in the next few years, you won't be worse off by learning to use these tools. Especially if you can find ways to build skills that yield nearly immediate returns. You won't become an AI expert in 3 weeks, but you will get started so that you stay in the conversation.
What You Will Get Out of It
By the time you finish this program, you will:
- Have built context and familiarity with a model (Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini) and engaged with it around your own behavior with regard to AI
- Have completed at least one AI project that was genuinely yours — not a demo or a tutorial
- Be able to talk about what AI can and can't do for you, from experience rather than anxiety
- Have replaced "I don't know how to do this" with a set of moves you actually use to get unstuck — instead of closing the tab and doing it the old way
- Have a simple plan for what comes next
More to read below, but if you are ready to go — the intro form is here.
Introduce yourself here. →How It Works
There are four things that I intend will happen for people who go through this program, in roughly this order.
Orientation. You will learn some of the tools that matter, how to access them, and how to start a conversation with them that actually goes somewhere. You will stop saying whatever disclaimer you've been using to opt out of the AI conversation, and replace it with the confidence to ask questions that bring you into it. You will get some basic setup in place that makes using tools easy in your day to day.
Calibration. You will identify something real and relevant in your own work that AI can help you with, and you will make an actual attempt at doing it. Not a demo or a tutorial — your thing. You will learn something about what works and what doesn't, and you will have a much better sense of what you can reasonably expect from these tools. This part will likely take a few reps, but they will be fast. You will get better at understanding what an "AI shaped project" looks like for you.
Revelation. At some point — and I can't tell you exactly when — something will click. You will realize that the barrier of "I don't know how to do this" has fundamentally changed. That the learning curve on almost anything just got dramatically shorter. That the bounds of what is practical and possible are both being pushed. This one I can't manufacture for you, but I can tell you it tends to happen, and we will try to put you in the conditions where it's likely to.
Consideration. I think that the revelatory part, for most people, will lead in some important directions. You can and should be thinking about this stuff. Not least because your job might depend on it. Not least because your kids or other kids you care about will be using it. But also because if we lack an informed dialogue about AI among regular people, I don't think we will make very good decisions. Over the last year I have become super excited for some of the accelerations that are happening right now and what they could mean. And it has made me more and more anxious about other accelerations and how unprepared we are as individuals, groups, and our human society as a whole. I think that to be credible in advocating for speed limits and guardrails, you should know something about what driving is. Ok, I am stepping back off my soapbox.
Program Flow
It starts with a short intake form so I can understand where you are, what you do, and what you want to get out of this.
The first session is about you — your work, your context, and your current relationship with these tools. We will also spend time on something most programs skip: what is actually keeping you from getting going. Lack of time. Skepticism. Intimidation. Procrastination. These are real and different, and they don't all have the same answer. The first homework is a structured conversation with your AI tool about your own relationship with AI, a setup exercise to configure the tool for how you work, and the beginning of a project search. Plan for about 60 to 90 minutes. Within 24 hours of each session, you will also receive a Zoom AI summary of what we discussed — with a prompt to take it back into your tool while the session is still fresh.
The second session is about identifying a project that is relevant to you. We look at what surfaced in your homework, answer your real questions, and commit to an AI project that is specific to your work and actually doable. Not a hypothetical. We will look at a few examples together, then you go try yours. The second homework is an execution guide — structured support for actually doing the project, getting unstuck when you stall, and packaging what you made and what you learned to share before Session 3.
The third session is about what comes next. We debrief what you built, extract what you actually learned, and build a forward plan: habits you want to make automatic, places in your existing workflow where AI should now just be the default, a project queue of what to try next, and at least one way to keep learning as this stuff keeps changing.
To recap:
- Three 1:1 sessions over Zoom. 60 minutes each.
- A homework assignment after each session. Realistically 1-2 hours each, depending on what you choose to work on.
- You self-schedule all sessions via Calendly, ideally completing all three within 3 weeks.
Prologue: Open Studio
Open Studio is an experiment. For Spring 2026 participants, there is no additional cost.
Sessions are 30 minutes, drop-in, and pre-scheduled. I open with five minutes — a prompt, a challenge, something I tried this week that worked or didn't. Then you work. Chat is open if you want to ask something, but mostly you are just in the room with other people who are also doing the thing.
Think of it like a community ceramics class. Everyone is working on their own project. Nobody is grading you. You leave with something imperfect that you actually made.
The value is the dedicated time, the low-stakes energy of a room full of people who showed up to try something, and the habit of just showing up. You do not have to come every time.
About Your Guide
I'm Brandon Malmberg. I'm an organizational consultant with about two decades of experience working in and with mission-driven organizations on strategy, leadership, and people stuff. I have no technical background — I didn't study computer science and have never worked at a tech company.
I am relentlessly curious, unusually good at helping people get unstuck, and genuinely excited about what I have been learning to do with AI tools. I built this program because I kept having the same conversation with smart, capable people who hadn't gotten started yet — and I realized that what they needed wasn't a course. It was a conversation with someone who knew how to ask good questions and help them find their own path forward. That is what I have done professionally for a long time, and it turns out it applies here too.
I think I can help. Not because I know everything about AI, but because I have lots of experience with people, learning, and change. You can learn more about my background here.
Frequently Asked Questions
The current program fee is $750. The fee is likely to increase as demand and experience inform the value of the program. If you are on the fence, sooner is better.
As with the flagship Prologue program, accessibility matters to me. If this speaks to you but the fee is a genuine barrier given your current circumstances, fill out the form below and drop me an email.
After you complete the intake form, you will receive a Calendly link to book your first session. Sessions are 60 minutes each. You schedule at your own pace. Open Studio sessions are pre-scheduled — nothing to coordinate other than a "yes, no, maybe" reply to a calendar invite. You just show up.
Not to start. You don't need a current subscription to any specific platform when we have Session 1. We will talk through the tradeoffs across different options so you can make practical near-term decisions about where to put your time and money. In Spring 2026, I think paying $20/month will get you a meaningfully different outcome. That decision landscape is also likely to change quickly, and part of what you will get out of this program is a better sense of how to evaluate those decisions as they evolve.
If you treat AI mostly as a search tool — even if you do it all the time — this program is probably right for you.
A few more honest questions to ask yourself: Have you completed an AI-assisted project in your own work? Not a demo, not a tutorial, but something that was actually yours? Do you use these tools with enough regularity that it's already a real habit rather than an intention? Do you have a working list of AI projects you plan to take on to automate processes, create things, and plan your work life?
If you answered yes to all three, you may have already done the work this program is designed to help you do. If you hesitated on any of them, you're probably going to get enough value to justify the cost.
When in doubt, fill out the form. We'll figure it out together.
You may have already bookmarked one. How's that going?
This program is for people who will benefit from talking to a person to get going. The difference isn't the content. It's the conversation and the self-imposed pressure prompt (you schedule the meeting, not me).
I expect that lots of folks who do this will eventually invest in something else to upskill and learn more. I plan to. That is why this program is called Prologue and not Chapter 4.
Yes and no. Prologue: Into AI uses the same format: intake form, 1:1 sessions, guided homework, community. But it is a standalone program with a different focus. The flagship Prologue is designed for leaders navigating career transitions. This program is designed for anyone who needs to get moving with AI tools, regardless of where they are in their career.
That said, we are at a moment where career transitions and AI transitions are becoming rapidly and deeply intertwined. The leaders who are navigating what's next for themselves professionally are doing so in a world where AI fluency is increasingly part of the conversation — about roles, about relevance, about what skills matter. This program will not solve that for you. But it will make sure you are in the conversation, and reduce the chance that the pace of change leaves you behind before you had a chance to catch up.
You do not need to have done the flagship program to participate. And if you have — or if you are thinking about it — the two programs have a way of reinforcing each other. At some point there may be a hybrid offering, but not just yet.
Can't I Just Figure This Out Myself?
Sure. Have you yet?
This program is primarily intended to create space and structure for things you could do independently. But isn't it more effective — and more fun — to do them with someone who will ask you good questions, help you find your thing, and be there when you get stuck?
Ready to Get Started?
Tell me a little about where you are. The form takes under 20 minutes and it is the first step.
Program fees are due after your first session. If it isn't the right fit for either of us, we part ways then — no fees, no hard feelings.
The best time to start was a while ago. The second best time is now.