Quick Answer
Find one person you connect with, and take their class. Skip the hype bros and the doomsayers. Look for someone who uses AI on their own work every day. Look for someone who will let you start from where you are.
Who's answering: RJ Redden has been coaching people about technology since 1998 and working with AI since 2020, and she does not code. At NO BS AI™ she teaches creatives and entrepreneurs to create their own AI tools, in a classroom she calls the AI Goblin Mine. (The goblins get explained in a minute. They want you to know they're adorable.)
How do I learn AI without the hype?
The way to learn AI without the hype is to learn it on one real job from your own business. Preferably taught by someone who uses AI every day and gains nothing by scaring you.
Right now two crowds are shouting about AI. Both of them are excellent at shouting. The first crowd is selling a magic course with a countdown clock on it, and somehow the clock is always almost out.
The second crowd will tell you that using AI destroys artists, then tell you again, louder, in case you missed it. (I heard it the first time. I write stories.)
Both crowds want your attention. Neither one cares about your actual day to day projects.
So the real way in is smaller. Pick the one chore you resent a little, or the subscription you'd most like to cancel, and learn AI on that. One tool you created and actually use on Monday will teach you more than a year of videos about the future.
And for the creatives who half agree with the doom crowd: you decide what the AI takes off your desk, and where it never goes. That's the very first thing we set up.
Who teaches AI without the BS?
The people who teach AI without the BS create their own AI tools and use them on real work every day. Most importantly, they ask what you want to make before they say a single word about AI.
That last part is the tell. A teacher who skips past your work to get to their slides is teaching the slides. Choose someone who gets to know you and your needs first.
Want the whole field guide, red flags and all? I wrote it: Who teaches AI without the BS?
This is my page, so I'll answer for myself. I'm RJ Redden, and I don't code. In December 2025 a client looked at my screen, saw the dashboards and the workflows humming along, and asked how big my dev team was.
The team is me. The tools I run my studio on, from my events site to the tool that makes my newsletter images, I created by describing what I needed to an AI in plain English and sending it back when it got things wrong. Which it does, often, with enormous confidence.
Here are my receipts, with what each one costs me to run.
That's what I teach at NO BS AI™. We meet in the AI Goblin Mine, and the goblins are what I call the AI: eager, fast, and completely clueless about what you want until you tell them. The whole art is working with all that enthusiasm instead of wrestling it to the floor.
What's the best AI course for non-technical people?
The best AI course for non-technical people sends you home with something you created yourself, for your own business, without writing a line of code.
Plenty of courses will teach you about AI. Far fewer will stay with you while you use it on your own work, which is the only place the learning sticks.
Three questions sort them fast.
- Do you create something real in the first week? You should.
- Is there a human you can bring it to when it breaks? There had better be, because it will break.
- Do you keep what you created if you leave? Always, or keep walking.
And the step in is smaller than it looks. If you can describe a chore to a friend, you can describe it to an AI, and that is the whole skill. Got a chore and a sentence to describe it? Then you're technical enough.
What does practical AI training for small business owners look like?
Practical AI training for small business owners looks like your own admin getting smaller, one chore at a time.
Practical means the first thing you create comes straight off your actual desk: the follow-up email you rewrite from scratch every week, the image every newsletter needs, the welcome note for a new client that never quite sounds like you.
I call a tool like that a time machine, because it hands you back the hours that chores used to eat and drops you off closer to the work you came here to do.
One more practical thing: the tools you create run on one AI subscription (I use Claude, about twenty dollars a month), and that one subscription can stand in for a whole pile of other software.
What should an AI literacy course for entrepreneurs teach?
An AI literacy course for entrepreneurs should teach you what to hand the AI, what to keep for yourself, and how to catch it making things up with a perfectly straight face.
Call it AI literacy if you like the sound of a diploma. You learn all of it by using it. You learn none of it from a countdown clock.
Where do I start?
Start with a person: one teacher you trust, and one class where you create something real on your own work.
If you'd like that person to be me, the door is a free week inside the NO BS AI™ Guild, my monthly membership, where you create two real things in seven days.
Day one, you set your dials: fifteen minutes on your own, in whatever AI you already use, and you come out holding one page that tells it how you sound, what it may take off your desk, and where it never goes. Your AI's beige robot voice starts to go quiet immediately.
Day two, you create the little tool you've been meaning to make since forever (aim it at the subscription that hurts, if you like). No code, and it's yours to keep.
Every Thursday at 11am Central I'm live in the Mine Cart Run (it's a mine, so naturally there's a cart), and the first fifteen minutes are set-your-dials together, so whichever day you walk in, you're covered. Bring whatever you created and whatever broke. The broken ones make better stories.
Now the fine print, in large print. It's a free week on a paid membership. The Guild is the Thursday Mine Cart Run, the Replay Room and community, and First Draft Ninja™, my writing system, which opens on day eight when your membership starts. You pop a card in at checkout (the screen says Black Belt Bots, which is my studio), and on day eight it becomes $97 a month unless you cancel first. Cancelling is yours to do: a couple of clicks on your own cancel page, any time before day eight, and you're never charged a cent. The full rules live in the Terms. Anything you create that week leaves with you, whatever you decide.
Still weighing whether to rent your software or create your own? I compared the two, axis by axis, in Custom AI vs Off-the-Shelf SaaS: Which Should an Entrepreneur Choose?
There's no clock on this page, and there never will be. Come back the next time a renewal email makes you wince. The door stays open.