Use AI on the work you already have.

Northwind is a practical AI academy for people with a day job. No machine learning, no maths, no jargon — you start from a task you actually do. Begin with the free foundations week and you finish it with three prompts you keep and a reliable sense for when the answer is wrong.

Start free Ask which course fits

4
Courses — the first one free: 5 days
To finish the foundations week: One
Training a day, watchable in a coffee break: Coach-read
Every exercise you submit

The free foundations week, day by day

1
What these tools actually are
A plain description of the machine you are about to rely on, and the three things it is not: not a database, not a calculator, not a colleague who remembers.
2
Give it enough context
The single biggest fix. Most bad answers are not a bad model — they are a question with the one thing the answer depended on left out.
3
Check an answer you cannot verify
Fluent is not the same as correct. Three checks that take a minute each and catch most of what would otherwise have embarrassed you.
4
What never to paste in
The rule that keeps this from becoming an incident at work, plus the redaction habit that lets you use the tool on real material anyway.
5
Your three keeper prompts
Three prompts you reuse beat thirty you read once. You leave with yours written down, tested on your own work, and ready on Monday.

How a Northwind course works

It starts from a task, not a definition

The first training asks which recurring job you would most like back, and the rest of the course is aimed at it. Nobody has to sit through a history of neural networks.

Short enough to finish

A training is a video you can watch in a coffee break plus one exercise. Courses are a handful of trainings, not forty hours you will abandon in week two.

Exercises run on your own work

You bring the actual report, the actual inbox, the actual messy export. Practising on a tidy sample dataset teaches you nothing about the Monday you have.

Start where it costs you nothing

Most people who could get real use out of these tools never do, and it is almost never because they are not clever enough. It is that the first honest attempt produced something mediocre, there was nobody to say why, and doing it by hand was quicker — so the tab stayed open, doing nothing.

So the first thing we give you is not a feature tour. It is five days of short trainings on your own real work, with a coach reading what you write. Free, no card, and if the honest answer at the end is that AI does not help much with your particular task, you will know that too.

Start the free course

The catalogue

Four courses. The foundations week is free and enrols you straight away; the other three are a single payment, from $149, and each one has a page that shows you the trainings and the exercises before it asks for a card.

Course

AI Foundations for Professionals

Five short trainings, one a day, on the part of AI nobody teaches the person who actually has to use it. What these tools are and are not. How to give one enough context to be useful the first time. How to check an answer you cannot verify yourself. What never to paste into a tool your company has not approved. You finish the week with three prompts you keep.

Gratis

Course

Prompting That Works

Most prompts fail for the same reason, and it is not the wording. This is a two-week course on the four parts of a prompt that does the job — role, context, task and format — the three moves that get you from a mediocre first answer to a usable third one, and a capstone that leaves you with five templates for the work you repeat every week. Every exercise runs on your own real work, and a coach reads what you submit.

$149Buy now

Course

Automate Your Week

Find the recurring work in your week that is genuinely worth handing over, build three automations that hold up on real work, and finish with one task running end to end — with the time it gives back measured rather than guessed.

$249Buy now

Course

AI for Analysts

The advanced course, for people whose job is already numbers. You will use a language model on real analytical work — framing the question, summarising free text, categorising thousands of rows, drafting the write-up — and you will learn the verification pass that has to happen before any of it leaves your desk. Nine trainings and one capstone, run on a dataset from your own work.

$399Buy now

Questions people actually ask

I'm not technical at all. Is this going to be over my head?

No. Northwind is built for the person in the middle — not the engineer who wants to build a model, and not the executive who wants a slide about disruption. There is no code, no maths and no machine learning background assumed anywhere. If you can write an email and use a spreadsheet, you have everything the foundations course needs.

Do I need a paid assistant account or particular software?

Not for the free course. It works with whichever assistant you already have access to, including the free tiers, and one training is specifically about using the tool your employer has actually approved. The paid courses name the tools they use up front on their own page, so you can check before you buy rather than after.

What does it cost?

The foundations course is free and stays free — no card, no trial that quietly converts. The three paid courses are a single payment between $149 and $399 depending on how much ground they cover, with no subscription and no upsell inside the course. Each course page states its own price before you start checkout.

How much time does this take?

The free course is five short trainings, one a day, and each one is a video plus a single exercise on your own work — call it twenty minutes a day for a week. The paid courses are longer but built the same way, and trainings release on your clock rather than all at once, so you can go at the pace your actual week allows.

Is there a person behind this, or just videos?

Both. Every exercise you submit is read by a coach and answered — that is deliberately the expensive part of how this is run. You can also book a free twenty-minute call before you buy anything, describe the task you would like back, and get a straight answer about which course covers it.

Bring one task you'd like back

Five days from now you could have three prompts you actually keep instead of an intention. Start with the free foundations week — no card, no call required.

Start free