We Skipped the Capstone Wrap. Built AI Agents Instead.

Today was the last day of a four-month cohort.

122 days. The SMU Academy GenAI for Digital Marketing programme I’ve been teaching since 7 January.

The plan was to wrap with capstone reflections.

We skipped it.

Instead, we spent the day on Claude Cowork: setting up AI agents, building automations, working with live artifacts.

I demoed a live SEO dashboard. My own PostHog data, pulled into Claude Cowork through MCP, rendered as a live artifact that updates as the data does. The kind of thing that would have taken a weekend wiring up a BI tool a few years ago.

Half an hour later, one of the students had built something different. An automation that audits any website and suggests SEO improvements. From scratch. 30 minutes.

That’s the part I kept thinking about on the train home. Not the lesson plan. The 30 minutes.

What four months looks like

A lot of them walked in cautious about AI. Some had never touched a generative tool before January.

By this afternoon, they’d made album art, songs, websites, AI-generated images, social media graphics, videos. And those little games we built together on the last day.

Then on top of all that, working AI agents.

This is what AI literacy looks like in practice. It is not “I read a prompt engineering article.” It is sitting down, setting up an agent, and pointing it at a real problem you have.

Here’s the part I keep thinking about

A 4-month course is not for everyone. A paid workshop is not for everyone. Both come with a price tag and a schedule and a commitment most people won’t make.

But AI literacy and awareness? I think that should be for everyone.

That’s why I started AI Power Users. Free meetups in Singapore, for the curious, for people who haven’t started yet, for anyone who wants a couple of hours of hands-on experience in a safe space.

No pitch. No upsell. No feeling stupid for asking the basic question.

The format is simple. We pick a tool or a workflow, we use it together, you leave more confident than you came in. The meetups are numbered (01, 02, 03 and so on) so anyone can join from any point.

A four-month course will go deep. A paid workshop will get you building fast. A free meetup will get you started. They serve different people at different stages, and Singapore needs all three.

Thank you

Big thanks to SMU Academy and Tribe Academy for the support across all four months. Teaching this cohort has been one of the most rewarding things I’ve done this year.

If you’ve been on the fence about AI but haven’t found a low-stakes way to start, the WhatsApp group is open: join AI Power Users here.

Come along. Bring the question you’ve been too embarrassed to ask. We’ll figure it out together.