How AI Is Changing Online Course Creation (And The Parts It Still Gets Wrong)

TL;DR (Quick Summary)

• AI has changed the production side of course creation the most: outlines, sales page drafts, transcripts, quizzes, workbooks, B-roll, and the admin around a launch. It has changed the teaching part barely at all.
• The best AI tools for coaches and educators right now are the general assistants (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini) plus a transcription tool. You don’t need a stack of course-specific AI apps, and most of them are wrappers on the same models anyway.
• AI runs about 50% of my business autonomously. In one tracked week it took 51 hours and 25 minutes of work down to 4 hours and 30 minutes of my actual time.
• AI does not have your expertise, your point of view, your real failures and learnings, or the judgment calls in your curriculum. It’s very good at everything wrapped around those.
• There’s always a human in the loop. I don’t publish a lesson, or ship a page that AI produced without reviewing and editing it first.
• Where students notice AI is voice. If your course suddenly sounds like a different person, they'll know it.

How are AI tools changing online course creation?

The honest answer is that AI has changed how fast the work around a course gets done, and it hasn’t changed the course itself much at all.

Here’s what that looks like in practice. Building out a full Thinkific course sales page used to take up to eight hours. Now it takes a fraction of that, because I’ve trained my AI on how I build, and I keep training it. The B-roll motion graphics for my marketing videos used to be made by me or by one of my team members. Now AI makes them. A price change used to mean hunting through a website, a sales page, an email footer and a course platform trying to remember where the number lived. It lived in 18 different places, and finding all 18 used to take me hours.

None of that is teaching. That’s all the tech around the teaching.

What hasn’t changed: what to put in module three, helping students when/where they get stuck, whether your framework actually works in practice, and why you’re the person to teach it. AI will happily generate a course outline on any topic in about nine seconds. It will be structurally fine and it will have no point of view, because it doesn’t have one.

So the change is lopsided. Production got dramatically faster. The expertise is still yours.

Can AI create an online course for me?

It can create a course. It can’t create your course.

There’s a version of this that works, and it’s the one where AI drafts and you use it as a collaborator - a thinking partner. You bring the outline, the client stories, the mistakes you watched people make for fifteen years, the order you teach things in and why. AI turns that into lesson scripts, a workbook, quiz questions, and the descriptions for every lesson. That’s a genuine collaboration and it saves a lot of hours.

It stops working the moment you type “create a course on nutrition coaching” and publish what comes back. That course already exists about four hundred times over, and it’s the same course every time. Get a student to enroll in that and it will be the last course of yours they ever enroll in.

The reality is that a course sells on trust, and trust comes from humanness. A student can tell the difference between a teacher who has walked hundreds of people through this and a teacher who knows very little about the topic and has no real-world experience. AI writes fluent, confident, general prose. General is the problem.

What are the best AI tools for coaches and educators?

Fewer than you’d think. Here's what I use:

• Google NotebookLM: Best for source-grounded research, letting educators and students upload specific documents to generate study guides and audio summaries.
• Canva: Best for visual content, offering thousands of templates paired with AI text-to-image and writing generators.
• ChatGPT or Claude: Best for brainstorming coaching frameworks, drafting marketing copy, and structuring client programs.
• Fathom: Best for session management, providing free AI-powered transcription and summaries for group sessions.
• Descript: Best for podcast and video creation, allowing coaches to edit audio and video simply by altering text transcripts.
• Claude Cowork: Best for running your business day to day.

That’s most of it. A lot of the course-specific AI products on the market are a friendlier interface sitting on top of the same underlying models you can already reach directly, with a subscription attached. Some are worth it if the interface saves you learning a new tool. Many aren’t.

If you’re a coach or an educator picking one place to start, start with a general assistant and a transcription tool. Add specialist tools when you're 'hiring' for a specific job, task or process - if required.

How much time does AI actually save a course creator?

I tracked it properly for one week rather than guessing.

Across that week, the work I had on my list would have taken 51 hours and 25 minutes the old way. It took 4 hours and 30 minutes of my time with the use of my trained AI agents. That’s 46 hours and 55 minutes back in five days.

Two things worth noting:

First, most of those tasks would never have been done at all. Lead generation, analytics, a video library that needed to be created, a properly configured ad account. Those sat on the someday list for years. The 46 hours isn’t 46 hours of work that used to get done and now doesn’t. It’s mostly work that used to get skipped.

Second, it took me 25 years of running a business to know which 46 hours were worth reclaiming. The AI didn’t decide what mattered. I did.

Will using AI make my course sound like AI?

Yes, if you let it write in its own voice instead of yours. And your students will know.

This is the fear I hear most from my clients and students, and honestly, it’s a reasonable fear. They’re not scared the technology won’t work. They’re scared it’ll sound nothing like them, scared they’ll look stupid asking it a basic question, and scared everyone else already gets it and they missed the memo.

The voice problem is solvable and it’s mechanical. AI has "tells", and once you know them you can’t stop seeing them. It groups everything in threes. It writes em dashes, which most people never type. It announces that a point is coming instead of just making the point. It reaches for a corporate word where a plain one would do, and it hedges before every opinion.

I keep a written voice guide built from transcripts of my own client calls, my own videos and my own emails, and a script that scans every draft against it before I publish. That sounds like overkill, but believe me you don't want to put your signature on content that doesn't sound like you, and doesn't share your opinions.

If it doesn’t sound like a sentence you’d say to a student or prospect, rewrite it. 

What should I never use AI for in my course business?

• Work that reaches a client or a student unreviewed. There should always be a human in the loop. Every every lesson, every quiz, every assignment, every page gets read and edited by a person before it's published.
• Your actual teaching. The frameworks, the sequencing, the stories, the judgment calls. That’s what people are paying for.
• Fake proof. Invented testimonials, invented case studies, invented numbers. AI will generate all three cheerfully and they will be very convincing - but trust is hard to gain and easy to lose.

Where should a course creator start with AI?

Pick one repetitive task in your business that does not require your expertise. Start with that one.

It could be turning a filmed lesson into a transcript, writing lesson descriptions, or repurposing one of your curriculum videos into social posts. Any of those, automated, saves you real time.

Do that one task with AI until it’s genuinely faster than doing it yourself, and you've trained it to do it like you would. Then pick the next one. What doesn’t work is trying to automate the whole business in a weekend, because you end up with eleven half-configured tools and no time saved.

Where to go next

If you want to work out which parts of your business are worth handing to AI first, try out the free AI Opportunity Scorecard.