Hands-on AI training, July–August 2026

Cut through the hype surrounding Artificial Intelligence and discover its real-world potential for your business in this introductory workshop. Facilitated by Steven Schain, Using AI to Improve Profits and Efficiencies in Your Small Business is designed to demystify AI, translating complex concepts into plain English and demonstrating why these tools are rapidly becoming indispensable for boosting efficiency and profitability. If you're curious about AI but unsure where to begin or how it can benefit your business, this 3-hour session provides a clear and accessible starting point, focusing specifically on the needs and perspectives of business owners across all industries. The class centers on practical application, featuring hands-on demonstrations of user-friendly generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Google AI Studio. You'll learn not just what these tools can do, but how to effectively communicate with them through powerful prompting techniques to generate marketing ideas, draft communications, streamline tasks, and much more. We'll explore key business use cases and ensure you leave with the foundational knowledge and confidence to start leveraging AI responsibly. The session includes dedicated time for Q&A, allowing you to get answers tailored to your specific interests and business challenges.

Registration for this session is handled through the shared NCSBC workshop calendar.

Boost your real estate game with AI tools for listings, emails, and social content in this live, hands-on workshop. You've opened Claude or ChatGPT, stared at the blank box, and wondered what to even type. The output came back generic, or wrong, or something you'd never put your name on. So you closed the tab and went back to writing it the slow way. This workshop changes that in one hands-on session. You'll work from a complete set of sample property walkthrough notes we hand you at the door, so there's no client data in the room and nothing to prep beforehand. Over three hours, you'll build a broker-review-ready listing, five client emails, and ten days of social content; every piece created by you, with an instructor right beside you the moment a prompt goes sideways. You'll also leave with the reusable workflow, so next week you can do it all again on your own property notes. This workshop takes one tool, Claude, and one real workflow all the way to finished work you can use that same day. Depth over breadth, focused work, on purpose. You'll learn to turn rough, scattered notes into clean facts the AI can work with, write prompts that produce listing copy in your voice instead of robotic filler, run a fast review pass that catches fair housing red flags and unverified claims, and spin the same property details into client emails and a week of social posts without starting over each time. By noon, you'll have real work saved on your laptop and the confidence to repeat it.

You've experimented with AI. Maybe you got excited after a demo. You set up ChatGPT accounts for your team. Some people are using it. Some aren't. You have no idea if it's helping your business or wasting time. Different departments are using different tools. Nobody knows what client data is safe to share with AI. You can't tell which employees are using it effectively and which ones are struggling. When your accountant asks if AI is improving your bottom line, you have no answer. This workshop solves those four problems. You'll see how businesses like yours tackled tool standardization, created data privacy policies that protect sensitive information, trained teams to use AI effectively, and proved ROI to leadership. Real scenarios from retail, professional services, real estate, and manufacturing — businesses facing the exact challenges you're dealing with. This is implementation strategy for business owners who need AI to work in their actual operations, with real employees, real clients, and real workflows. You'll walk through four complete business scenarios, each solving a specific roadblock, each giving you templates, policies, and frameworks you can take back to your business. No prior AI knowledge required — if you attended AI Essentials for Business, this builds on those foundations; if you missed it, you'll get what you need to implement successfully.

Registration for this session is handled through the shared NCSBC workshop calendar.

Walk into a vacant listing with your camera, and you already know what you're going to get: a flat, empty room that doesn't sell itself. So you call a stager, wait a week for furniture, and pay $300 to $600 a room for the privilege. Or you've heard AI can do this now. Upload a photo, describe a few pieces of furniture, and the empty living room looks lived in. That sounds great, until you wonder whether your MLS will flag it, or what happens if a buyer walks in and the room looks nothing like the photo. This hour answers both. You'll see exactly how ChatGPT's image tool and Google's Nano Banana 2 edit a real listing photo, keeping the actual room, walls, and windows, and adding only what you tell them to add. Then you'll learn the line that matters most: what Canopy MLS, the NC Real Estate Commission, and NAR's Code of Ethics actually require before that photo goes live, including the one fair housing mistake that trips up agents who don't know to avoid it. You'll walk out with the prompts, a disclosure label you can reuse, and a workflow for your next listing. This is for realtors who want a faster, more cost-effective way to make vacant or awkward listings show well online, without guessing at what their MLS will allow. One hour, live online — no laptop or setup needed, just show up and watch.