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Case study

The AI Upgrade

Founded an AI education company for communications, creative, journalism, and sales professionals. Taught more than 500 students. December 2022 to 2026.

Role
Founder. Product, curriculum, instruction, and the client relationship.
Period
December 2022 to 2026

What it was

I founded The AI Upgrade in December 2022, later co-founding it with Kris Krüg: a company with a faculty, three product lines, five hands-on course tracks, capstone certifications, corporate clients, and a content operation. It ran until 2026.

The thesis, in the words we published at the time:

Upgrade and amplify your professional expertise with AI. theupgrade.ai

And the founding rationale:

We recognized early on that embracing an AI mindset isn’t just about adopting the latest tools; it’s about transforming how we approach our careers, our industries, and our futures while preserving what makes us human. theupgrade.ai

That is marketing copy and it reads like it. I quote it because of when it was written. We were making that argument in 2022, well before it was the consensus position it is now.

What I built

  • Six-week certification courses with capstones
  • 1:1 and group coaching
  • Team trainings for organizations

Five course tracks ran across those lines:

  • AI Upgrade for Creative Pros
  • AI Upgrade for PR & Communications Pros
  • AI Upgrade for Journalists
  • AI Upgrade for Sales
  • The Future of Tech Transfer: Leveraging AI (with AUTM)

Every track was built around doing rather than watching: live builds, weekly working sessions, and a six-week certification arc that ended in a capstone. A capstone forces a participant to ship something, and someone who has shipped something has learned a different thing than someone who has attended.

The faculty

I taught alongside people who ran their own practices in the domains they taught.

The outcome

More than 500 professionals came through the programs, from organizations including Apple, Salesforce, Walmart, AMD, Adobe, Amazon, Accenture, PayPal, and many more.

The proof of that is not my description of it. It is 80+ unedited testimonials from 70+ people at nearly 40 named organizations, collected through a third-party review tool and reproduced in full, including the four-star ones.

The two I would point at first are both capstone outcomes, because they show the program produced builders rather than attendees.

By the end of the program, I created a Daily Scanner/Radio, a tool that uses AI to write and read short daily news updates. I built it with NotebookLM and Lovable.dev, turning news summaries into both text and audio for readers. Victor Oluwole, Head and Editor, Business Insider Africa

For my capstone, I built a personal AI assistant to support my daily work. The coaching sessions and capstone milestones kept me focused and helped turn scattered ideas into a working tool. Gokhan Basaran, Innovation Advisor, Innovation Science and Economic Development Canada

Why it wound down

I was pulled toward building full time. Teaching people to use AI and building AI products are different jobs, and I wanted my weeks in the second one.

The coaching did not stop, it got deliberate: a smaller practice now, mostly for executives, where the teaching sharpens the product work instead of competing with it.