The email was short. A man named Md Anowar Hossain, Craft Instructor and Registrar in-charge at Bangladesh Survey Institute in Cumilla, wanted to know if I could come train his teachers on AI, in a ZOOM call, or in person, with actual people who'd be looking at me instead of my video thumbnail.
I read it twice before I replied.
We ended up on two calls before anything was confirmed. He wasn't rushing into it, and honestly, neither was I. He wanted to know what his teachers would actually walk away being able to do, and I wanted to make sure I could give him a real answer instead of a sales pitch. By the second call, we both knew this was happening.
I've been making AI content for a long time now, never fully sure who's on the other end of it. This was the first time that work turned into someone inviting me somewhere, on a specific date, to teach specific people, for money :3
June 4th, I left Dhaka early. Comilla isn't far, but it's far enough that you feel the day stretch out ahead of you, one session in the morning, another waiting in the evening, and nothing to do in between but sit with it.
The first session was built around AI for study and research, and I didn't want to just wave at the idea of it. I walked them through six tools, one at a time, so nobody left the room thinking "AI" was one single thing.
Gemini: for the actual day-to-day research and study work, features like Gemini Gem, Canvas, Guided Learning, etc.
Perplexity: for anything that needed a real citation behind it instead of a guessing up as an answer
Gamma: for turning a rough idea into something presentable without wasting hours on design.
ChatGPT: used less like a search bar, more like someone to think out loud with
Claude: for the moments that needed real understanding of a topic, or a second opinion on strategy
NotebookLM: introduced briefly here, saved properly for after lunch
Somewhere in the middle of that session, a few teachers asked me something I hadn't planned for.
Could AI go through last semester's mark sheets and tell them which students had failed which subjects.I didn't have a slide for that. I just opened Gemini and Gamma right there, on their own data, and we worked through it together in front of everyone. They loved it.
The second session belonged entirely to NotebookLM, and I wanted to go past the interface tour most people stop at.
How to turn a lesson into a presentation, an audio podcast, or a video walkthrough
How to build a mind map out of something they'd normally just lecture through
How to generate MCQs straight out of the source material instead of writing them by hand at midnight
Why NotebookLM does something Gemini simply doesn't
What actually separates it from every other tool we'd already covered that morning
Near the end of the day, a few teachers mentioned the other sessions they'd sat through that week, the slide-heavy, theory-first kind where you sit down, listen, and go home.
Mine wasn't that, and they said so without me asking. Everyone in that room was doing the thing themselves, not watching me do it for them.
I don't think I fully understood what I was chasing until I was sitting on the trip back to Dhaka that night, tired in the specific way you only get after a day you've actually earned. I'd spent years putting things out there without knowing if any of it was landing. An email from a Registrar in-charge in Cumilla was the first proof that it was.
A collage of memories
If you're running a school, an institute, or a team, and you want your people actually using AI instead of sitting through a lecture about it, I'm around.
Hey, I'm Ahad Khaled. I'm the co-founder of RetainDTC, a Klaviyo email marketing agency based in the US, and I've spent the last five years in content marketing.
These days I also teach AI to non-technical people so they don't get left behind, and can use it as an actual advantage instead of a buzzword. Also, I'm building LearnUp, an EdTech platform helping students speak English with confidence, and I run a YouTube channel with 18,000+ subscribers.
More at ahadinsights.com