Practical AI training for Reading and Thames Valley teams, delivered at your office or live online. Built around your real work, taught in plain English.
The Oxford AI School runs AI training for businesses across Reading and the Thames Valley, from our base in Oxfordshire, about 40 minutes up the road. Sessions are hands-on from the first ten minutes, taught in plain English, and built around the tools your team already has: ChatGPT, Claude, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini and Perplexity.
Reading has a strange relationship with AI. The M4 corridor is thick with technology companies, so the assumption is that everyone here already knows this stuff. In practice, the finance team, the operations manager and the sales floor of a Green Park software business are in exactly the same position as everyone else: paying for tools nobody has been shown how to use.
We work with software and IT services firms on the business side rather than the engineering side, with insurance and financial services teams, with recruiters, and with the professional firms that serve them across Reading, Wokingham, Bracknell and Maidenhead. Different work, same fix: show people the tool on their own tasks, and the excuses disappear. Most attendees save 10 or more hours per person every week once AI becomes part of how they work.
We deliver in person across Reading, Berkshire and the wider Thames Valley, and live online for teams working across several sites.
Every Reading session is hands-on and tailored to your work. This is the kind of thing your team walks out able to do.
Thames Valley businesses usually have the licences already. The gap is knowing which tool suits which job, so that is where we start.
The general-purpose workhorse. Projects, custom instructions, file analysis, and the habits that keep it honest.
The one we reach for on long documents, careful drafting and anything with a contract or a policy in it.
The path of least resistance for Microsoft 365 businesses. Copilot in Outlook, Word, Excel and Teams, with the security your IT team wants.
For Google Workspace teams, plus image and video generation for marketing and internal comms.
Research with citations. Ideal for market scans, competitor checks and anything you will have to defend in a meeting.
These are the skills that separate teams getting real value from AI from teams who tried it once and gave up.
Prompt engineering is a simple skill dressed up in a technical name. Give the tool a role, a task, the context it cannot guess, and the format you want back, and the quality jumps immediately. We teach that four-part structure, then practise it on the emails, reports and spreadsheets your team brought with them.
By the end of the day your Reading team has a small library of prompts that genuinely work, written down and shared, so the quality of the output stops depending on who happens to be doing the task.
Context management is where the real time is won or lost. It is deciding what to load into a conversation, what to keep out, when to start a fresh one, and how to keep the documents a tool works from up to date. Reading teams juggling several clients or product lines feel this immediately: once context is managed properly, you stop re-explaining your business every single morning.
Your staff are already using AI. The only question is whether they are doing it inside rules you have written down.
If you handle customer data, and in the Thames Valley you almost certainly do, then unwritten AI rules are a risk sitting on your register with nobody’s name against it. Staff are already using these tools. The only question is whether they are doing it inside rules you set or rules they invented.
The AI Policy Workshop is a full day for up to ten people at your Reading office or online. You leave with your own written AI acceptable use policy, your approved tools agreed, your data red line drawn and gatekeepers named, plus the training that makes staff able to follow it.
We also cover the governance side that boards and clients increasingly ask about: risk management, record-keeping, and how you would demonstrate that an AI-assisted decision was checked by a person. Our guides to AI governance, trustworthy AI and the NIST AI RMF and compliance, auditing and explainability set out the approach in full.
We tailor the session to your sector, because the work, the paperwork and the risks are not the same across the Thames Valley.
For software, telecoms and IT services businesses along the M4 where the commercial side has been left behind by the product side.
For brokers, insurers and finance teams across Reading and Basingstoke handling documents and customer data all day.
For agencies and practices in Reading, Wokingham and Maidenhead where output is proportional to hours worked.
Book a free 10-minute intro call. We will talk through what your team actually does all day, then build the session around it.