Short course
AI
In three years, generative artificial intelligence has moved from the laboratory to the workstation. Writing a memo, summarising a fifty-page report, translating a document, producing a visual for a publication, transcribing an interview, sorting hundreds of open-ended answers: all tasks that used to take hours and can now be done in minutes.
- Duration
- 5 sessions, 18 hours
- Format
- In person or online
- Credential
- Certificate of attendance
Tuition89,000 XOF
By the end of the programme, you will be able to
- Understand what a generative model is, what it can do and what must never be entrusted to it
- Write precise, structured prompts that produce usable results first time
- Use the main assistants and choose the right one for each task
- Have your own documents analysed, summarised and compared by artificial intelligence
- Systematically check a result and detect invented information
- Generate professional images and visuals for your publications and reports
- Produce audio and video: transcription, text-to-speech, subtitling, assisted editing
- Build a complete automation with n8n, from trigger to final action
- Connect forms, spreadsheets, email, social media and artificial intelligence models
- Design a chatbot connected to your own documents
- Assess the real cost of a solution and choose between free and paid tools
- Apply the rules of data protection and responsible use of these tools
Who it is for
Target audience
The course is for anyone whose work involves producing content, processing information or handling repetitive tasks: communication officers, project officers, monitoring and evaluation officers, teachers, journalists, consultants, entrepreneurs, community managers, administrative staff, final-year students.
It is of particular interest to small organisations: automation allows a team of three to handle a workload that would otherwise require six, without recruiting and without buying management software.
Prerequisites
Three requirements:
- Be able to use a computer in daily life, browse the internet and manage your email
- Have a personal laptop and an active email address, preferably Gmail for connecting to services
- Be willing to create a few free accounts on the platforms used during the course
No programming skills are required. n8n is used visually, by connecting blocks to one another, without writing code. Prior use of Excel or Google Sheets is a real advantage, as most of the automations built in class work with tables.
Detailed program
5 sessions · 18 h of teaching
- What a language model really is and why it predicts rather than knows
- The difference between artificial intelligence, machine learning and generative AI
- Why a model sometimes confidently makes things up, and how to recognise an invented answer
- Overview of assistants: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Mistral, and their respective strengths
- What is free, what is paid, and what a paid version really changes
- Creating your accounts and getting to grips with the interfaces
- The art of the prompt: role, context, task, expected format, constraints, examples
- The six phrasing mistakes that produce unusable answers
- Asking for a precise format: table, list, email, briefing note, detailed outline
- Iterating on an answer rather than starting again
- System prompts and custom instructions, so you never have to repeat yourself
- Creating a custom assistant dedicated to a recurring task
- Working in French and handling translations into English
- Systematic checking: cross-checking sources, demanding references, never publishing without reviewing
- Data protection: what must never be pasted into an online assistant
- Guided exercise: build a personal library of ten reusable prompts
- Writing and rewriting: internal memo, difficult email, terms of reference, call for applications
- Adapting the same content to three different audiences by changing a single line of the prompt
- Summarising a fifty-page document and extracting the decisions to be made
- Having your own files analysed: PDF, Word, Excel, presentations
- Comparing two documents and highlighting substantive differences
- Extracting structured data from unstructured text, and getting it as a table
- Processing hundreds of open-ended survey answers: coding, thematic grouping, representative quotes
- Translating while keeping the register and professional terminology
- Correcting, rephrasing, shortening, lengthening, changing tone
- Building a report outline, a workshop plan, an agenda
- Generating ideas: titles, hooks, communication angles, interview questions
- Preparing a desk review and checking its references one by one
- Having your own work reviewed and getting a reasoned critique
- The limits to know: calculations, precise figures, recent news, local African sources
- Honest use: what can be published as is, what must be reworked, what must be disclosed
- Guided exercise: produce a complete activity report from raw notes
- How an image generator works and what to tell it to get a usable result
- Overview of tools: Midjourney, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, Leonardo, Ideogram, and their respective uses
- The structure of a visual prompt: subject, action, setting, style, framing, lighting, format
- Generating visuals of African contexts without falling into clichés
- Text in images, long impossible, and the tools that now get it right
- Retouching, extending, cutting out or changing an element of an existing image
- Improving the resolution of an old or poor-quality photograph
- Creating a consistent visual identity for a series of publications
- Assisted layout tools: Canva and its generative features
- Producing an infographic, a training poster, a business card, a social media visual
- The question of rights: who owns a generated image, what can be published, what must be credited
- Automatic transcription of an interview or meeting, and correcting it
- Text-to-speech: giving a voice to a text, in French and in local languages where possible
- Automatic subtitling and translating subtitles
- Assisted video generation and editing, and the real state of these tools today
- Ethical issues: misleading content, images of people, consent, mandatory disclosures
- Guided exercise: produce the full visual kit for a communication campaign
- What an automation is and why it changes more than a chat assistant
- Identifying tasks that can be automated: repetitive, triggered by an event, with stable rules
- Overview of platforms: n8n, Make, Zapier, Power Automate, and why n8n is used here
- n8n in practice: free cloud version, local installation, and what each allows
- The interface: canvas, nodes, connections, step-by-step execution
- Triggers: manual, scheduled, receipt of an email, form submission, external call
- Action nodes and how data flows from one node to the next
- Reading and manipulating data between nodes: fields, expressions, transformations
- Conditions and branches: handling data differently depending on what is received
- Loops and processing a list of items
- Connecting Google Sheets: reading, writing, updating a row
- Connecting Gmail and Google Drive: sending, sorting, archiving, saving an attachment
- Connecting Google Forms and triggering a workflow with every new response
- Plugging an artificial intelligence model into an automation and having it process each item
- Connecting WhatsApp, Telegram and social media
- Handling errors, planning for failure, being alerted when a workflow breaks
- Testing, activating, monitoring and documenting an automation
- Guided exercise: build three complete workflows: a form that feeds a spreadsheet and notifies the team, automatic processing of incoming mail, and a scheduled social media post
- What an agent is: a system that decides for itself which steps to take to reach a goal
- The difference between a fixed automation and an agent, and when each is preferable
- Giving tools to an agent: web search, reading files, sending messages, writing to a database
- Building a chatbot connected to your own documents
- The principle of retrieval-augmented generation: having a model answer from your documents rather than from its memory
- Preparing a document base: splitting, indexing, updating
- A concrete case: the assistant that answers questions about an organisation's internal procedures
- Connecting an agent to WhatsApp to answer common requests
- Assessing an agent's quality and correcting its drift
- The real cost: understanding usage-based billing and estimating your monthly spend
- Choosing between a free solution, a paid solution and local hosting
- Data protection in an automated workflow: what leaves the organisation and where it goes
- Documenting an automation so that a colleague can take it over
- Group project: the group designs and launches the complete workflow for a real case, from data collection form to published report and team notification
- Each participant leaves with their own automations activated on their accounts
- The trainer moves between workstations throughout the session
- Final summary: the method for identifying, designing and deploying a new automation in your department
Assessment and certification
There is no final assessment. A training attestation is given to each participant at the end of the fifth session, issued by Waaldé Impact and signed by the trainer, stating the course title, the 18-hour duration, the dates and the modules followed.
Upcoming sessions
Next dates being prepared
Leave your email: we will let you know as soon as registration opens.
Frequently asked questions
89,000 XOF per participant. Training for a team or an organisation is quoted on request.
5 sessions, 18 hours.
Yes: you can attend onsite or online, as you prefer.
Three requirements: be able to use a computer in daily life, browse the internet and manage your email ; have a personal laptop and an active email address, preferably Gmail for connecting to services ; be willing to create a few free accounts on the platforms used during the course ; no programming skills are required. n8n is used visually, by connecting blocks to one another, without writing code. Prior use of Excel or Google Sheets is a real advantage, as most of the automations built in class work with tables.
A certificate of attendance is issued at the end of the course.
Fill in the online enrolment request: no payment is taken on the site. The firm reviews your application, then contacts you to confirm your place and the payment terms. No session is scheduled yet: leave your email on this page to be told when registration opens.
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