Stop Paying for AI Twice: The Chatbot Workaround Your Learners Already Have

Here's something nobody tells you when you start building AI into your courses: every time a learner uses it, it costs you (or your company) real money.

Credits, tokens, API calls, whatever you want to call it, it all adds up. And the more your course gets used, the more it costs. That's a weird incentive for something we're supposed to want learners using more, not less. 💸

So I started asking a different question. What if I didn't build the AI into the course at all? What if I just pointed learners toward the AI they already have?

The Realization

My learners already have access to ChatGPT, Copilot, or our own internal AI tool. They use these tools every day at work. So instead of wiring up a custom chatbot that racks up a bill with every click, I built something much simpler: a page that hands learners five ready to copy prompts and tells them to paste them into whatever AI assistant they already use.

No API key. No per-use cost. No new tool to learn. Just prompts that work with what's already sitting in their browser.

Meet the Ask AI Learning Coach

It's a Code Block I drop into a lesson (or the end of a course) that gives learners five prompts:

• Summarize the lesson
• Explain it simply
• Give me a real world example
• Build a study guide
• Quiz me

They copy the one they want, paste it into whichever AI assistant they already use, and get a personalized response on the spot.

The trick that makes this actually work: I also give them a PDF of the lesson content to upload first. Without it, the AI is just guessing at what "this lesson" even means. With it, the response is grounded in what you actually taught. That one small step is the difference between a gimmick and something genuinely useful.

The Part I Didn't Expect

I built this to save money. What I didn't expect is that it also teaches something.

Every time a learner uses one of these prompts, they're practicing a real skill: how to hand an AI assistant some context and ask for exactly what they need. That's not a throwaway skill. That's the same skill they need for literally everything else AI touches at work right now.

So this one little Code Block ends up doing two jobs at once. It saves the training budget, and it quietly builds AI literacy on the side. I didn't plan for both of those to happen from the same idea, but I'll take it. 🙌

Built to Reuse, Not Rebuild

The whole thing is zero code to drop in and reuse. Swap in a new lesson PDF, keep the same HTML file, and it works in a Rise 360 Code Block or a Storyline 360 Web Object. Same five minutes of setup, every single course.

One Gotcha Worth Knowing

If you build this in Rise, here's one that got me. Rise 360's Code Block runs in a locked down sandbox that blocks file downloads triggered from inside it, even a PDF sitting in the same zip. It worked fine in Storyline's Web Object, just not in Rise, and it took a little digging to figure out why.

The fix ended up being simple. Instead of bundling the lesson PDF inside the Code Block, I drop it right below as its own Attachment Block (Rise has one built in, under Multimedia). Learners still grab the file, it just lives next to the block instead of inside it. Small change, but the kind of thing you only find out by testing both platforms yourself. Consider this your shortcut. 😄

I built this one with Claude, from the first draft of the page through working out the PDF grounding trick, the responsive layout, and the little details like equal size cards and a custom video wrapper for the intro.

I turned the whole thing into a microlearning course, so everything you need is in one place: the HTML file, a course/lesson template, and step by step instructions. Check it out! 😉

The Ask AI Learning Coach: Your New Favorite Code Block

What's your workaround for AI costs in your courses? I'd love to hear what other are doing.