The free tools argument: why we never teach with anything that costs money

When people hear that we only use free tools in our training — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, NotebookLM, Canva, Gamma, Perplexity — the first reaction is usually one of two things. Either “that must mean the tools are basic” or “that must be a cost-cutting decision.”

Neither is true. The free tools are not the consolation prize. In many cases they are better than the enterprise alternatives for the kinds of tasks our participants are trying to accomplish. And the decision to use only free tools is not about cost. It is about what happens after the training ends.

The post-training barrier

Here is the problem we were trying to solve. Someone attends AI training. They learn to use a tool that is integrated into their company’s enterprise software suite — Microsoft Copilot, say, or a specific AI feature inside Salesforce or Adobe. The training is good. They leave with skills. Then they get back to their desk and their organisation does not have that tool, or their licence does not include that feature, or the IT department has not enabled it yet.

The practice stops immediately. The habit never forms. Six weeks later they could not replicate what they did in the training room if they tried.

We eliminated this problem by building every programme exclusively around tools that every participant can access the moment they leave the room, on any device, with no subscription, no approval process and no IT dependency. There is no friction between the training and the application.

Are free tools actually good enough?

For the tasks that matter most to professional productivity — writing, research, summarising, analysing, planning, communicating — the answer is yes, emphatically. Claude and ChatGPT are among the most capable AI systems in the world. They are not free because they are limited. They are free because the business model that funds them is built around other revenue streams.

NotebookLM is one of the most powerful knowledge management tools available to any professional, at any price point. Gamma produces professional presentations that would cost thousands to produce manually. Canva’s AI features are genuinely transformative for anyone who needs to produce visual content without a design background.

The caveat is that free tools have usage limits. Heavy users will eventually encounter those limits and may want to upgrade to a paid plan. But the skills, the habits and the workflows built on a free account transfer directly to a paid account. The upgrade is a choice, not a requirement.

The Microsoft Copilot exception

We make one deliberate exception. Our AI Enterprise Microsoft Copilot catalogue — designed for organisations that already run Microsoft 365 — does teach with Copilot, because for those organisations the tool is already available and the integration into Teams, Outlook, Word and Excel is genuinely valuable.

But that catalogue only makes sense for organisations where Copilot is already licensed and enabled. We would never use it in a public programme or with an organisation where we could not guarantee post-training access. The principle holds.

The habit formation argument

The reason this matters more than it might seem is habit formation. Behaviours that require friction do not become habits. Behaviours that are frictionless do. If using an AI tool requires logging into an enterprise system, navigating to the right feature, waiting for IT approval or paying for a subscription, most people will not do it routinely enough for the behaviour to stick.

If using an AI tool means opening a browser tab and typing, most people will do it. Daily. Until it becomes as natural as searching Google.

That is the outcome we are building toward. Not a participant who knows what AI can do. A professional whose daily work is permanently and visibly better because of it.