Self-paced core
Nine modules plus a capstone.
Short videos, written material, and practical exercises. Work through the curriculum at your own pace. Plan on about 60 minutes a week.
Seodang AI
Every AI skill that matters in one place.AI is advancing fast, don’t get left behind.
Nine modules. Learn the skills that separate people using AI as a toy from people using it as leverage.
The stakes
Here is what has quietly happened in the last eighteen months.
A strategy consultant who used to spend two days producing a market analysis now produces it in two hours. A marketing director drafts ten variations of a campaign in the time it used to take to draft one. A junior developer ships features that used to require a senior. Most of their colleagues have no idea they are doing this.
01
The gap shows up fastest on mid-complexity work.
Professionals who have built a habit of reaching for AI first finish comparable work measurably faster than colleagues who haven't. It is not a subtle effect, and it shows up first on the kind of mid-complexity work most knowledge workers spend their day on.
02
The leverage is in the habit, not the tool.
The people pulling ahead are not using more impressive AI. They have made AI their first move on most tasks, not their last resort. That is a working habit, and it compounds weekly.
03
Hiring managers are starting to screen for it.
They are not asking for certificates. They are asking candidates to describe, concretely, what they have automated and what they have built. That kind of evidence is starting to separate people.
04
The catch-up is short, if you commit.
For a motivated professional, the on-ramp is not long. The cost of waiting another year is not another year of parity; it is another year of distance between you and the colleagues who started earlier.
This course is for the people who would rather be in the first cohort.
What Seodang AI is
An academy, not a bootcamp.
Seodang AI is an academy. The word is deliberate. A seodang was a village school in Korea — patient, classical, foundational. The format matters here: this is a course built to be studied, not swiped through.
It is not a bootcamp promising to make you an AI engineer in ten days. It is not a YouTube channel stitching together prompt tricks. It is not a tool directory with affiliate links. The professionals getting real value out of AI right now are not the ones collecting tools. They are the ones who have built a working habit of thinking with one.
Most of what you find searching “how to use AI” is either outdated within a quarter, sold to you by someone whose real business is something else, or both. Seodang AI is the thing that sits underneath those quick tips: the foundation they assume you already have.
The curriculum
Nine progressive modules, plus a capstone.
The sequence is deliberate. The early modules build the mental model. The middle modules apply it across the places most knowledge work actually happens. The final ones are about staying ahead once you are ahead.
The Wake-Up Call
Why AI is different from past tech hype. The productivity gap already opening between AI-fluent workers and everyone else.
The AI Landscape, Demystified
A clear map of Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and specialized tools. What each is actually good at.
Prompting as a Core Skill
The highest-leverage skill in the AI era. From basics to advanced techniques.
AI for Thinking and Decision-Making
Using AI as a thinking partner, not a toy. Where most users never go.
AI for Professional Output
Writing, analysis, research, documents, spreadsheets, slides. Collapsing multi-hour work into minutes.
AI for Creative Work
Writing, design ideation, branding, image, audio, video.
AI for Business and Entrepreneurship
Automating workflows, internal tools, market research, side projects.
Building Personal AI Systems
Custom instructions, projects, memory, agents. The real leverage.
Staying Ahead
How to keep up without drowning. Signal vs. hype. Evaluating new tools in 10 minutes.
Capstone — The Personal AI Audit
Apply the whole course to your own job, business, or life. A 30-day action plan you leave with.
Honest targeting
Who this is for — and who it is not for.
Mismatched students waste their own time and ours. Before you read the curriculum, read these lists.
This is for you if
- Your work is knowledge work — strategy, marketing, operations, research, design, engineering — and you suspect you are falling behind on AI.
- You have tried ChatGPT or Claude once or twice, decided it was a gimmick, and moved on.
- You want to keep the job you have, or move faster in the one you want next.
- You prefer a structured course to a month of scrolling through tutorials.
- You can spend 30 to 60 minutes a week on practice rather than on more opinions about AI.
This is not for you if
- You build AI systems for a living. Go ship something.
- You are looking for a certificate to put on LinkedIn. We do not issue them.
- You want a prompt library to copy and paste. That is not what fluency looks like.
- You are hoping for doom content. We are blunt about the stakes, but this is not a panic room.
How it works
A patient format, structured around habit.
The course is designed for busy professionals. Short weekly inputs, compounded over a season, beat sprint-and-forget cohorts.
Live cohort call
One hour a week with the founder.
Bring your own workflow; leave with a specific thing to try. Attend live or watch the recording — the archive is searchable.
Private community
A place to ask the dumb questions.
See what your peers are building, swap prompts that actually worked, and get feedback on your output. No Discord firehose; a small, quiet room.
Capstone project
A 30-day Personal AI Audit.
At the end, you apply the whole course to your own job or business and ship a written plan. You leave with something useful, not a certificate.
A note from the founder
I built this for the professional who stayed skeptical.
I built Seodang AI for a specific person: the smart, busy professional who has watched the AI conversation from a distance and decided it was mostly hype. I used to be that person.
For the first two years of the current wave, I treated AI the way I treated crypto — a thing generating a lot of noise from people who sounded like they were selling something. I was busy. I had work to do. The promise that a chatbot would change how I worked sounded like another overclaim.
What changed was watching a peer quietly ship twice as much in the same week. Same job, same tenure, same pressure. They were not smarter. They had just built a habit of asking an AI first, thinking second, and editing third. Within a month, their output was at a level I could not match without working weekends.
Seodang AI is the course I wish had existed then. A patient academy, not a bootcamp. A curriculum built for the professional who has been skeptical, not the enthusiast who already believes. If you have been telling yourself you will figure this out later, you picked the right moment to stop.
— Ryan Bae
Founder, Seodang AI
I'm Ryan Bae, an Economics student at the University of Michigan who has been actively exploring artificial intelligence and digital tools. I'm passionate about making complex technologies simple and helping others apply AI in practical, everyday situations.
Questions
Frequently asked.
Direct answers. If your question is not here, email us.
No. Prompting is one module out of ten. It is foundational, and we teach it properly, but the real leverage is in what comes after: using AI as a thinking partner, building personal systems that compound, and knowing which 20% of tasks to apply it to first. A prompting-only course teaches you to be 1.5× faster at email. This course teaches you to rebuild how you work.
Pricing will be confirmed before enrollment opens. The course is priced as a serious educational product, not a $29 info-product and not a five-figure consulting package. If you are on the waitlist, you will see the number first.
Plan on 30 to 60 minutes a week for the self-paced material, plus one live call a week if you want to attend. The full curriculum can be completed in 10 to 12 weeks at that pace. The capstone is a 30-day project at the end.
A working laptop, an hour a week, and a willingness to try things. No coding required for the core curriculum. No specific paid subscription required to start; we explain which tools are worth paying for and when. If you already build AI systems for a living, this course is not for you.
The syllabus is built around the parts of AI work that do not change on a six-month cycle: how to think with a capable model, how to build systems around it, how to evaluate new tools quickly. Specific tool examples will be refreshed as the landscape shifts. The reasoning will not.
A seodang (서당) is a traditional Korean village school — where reading, writing, and classical learning were taught to local children. The name is a quiet reference to that tradition: patient, foundational, serious. We are not cosplaying Korean culture; we are borrowing a word that means the thing we are building.
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One email when something real is ready. No marketing drip, no sharing your address.