$25,000 a day.
That’s what AI trainers on Wall Street are charging right now.
$25,000 a day.
That’s what AI trainers on Wall Street are charging right now.
Saw it on Bloomberg last week. Sounds crazy until you run the numbers.
Twenty to thirty bankers in the room. That’s roughly $1,000 a head. For an investment bank, that’s two hours of one analyst’s time. If the team comes out 10-20% more productive, it pays for itself before end of quarter.
The mass replacement story isn’t playing out the way people expected. What’s actually happening: a new line item showed up on the P&L. And with it, real demand for people who can explain AI to other people - clearly, practically, in a way that makes them want to actually use it.
It brought back one of my first big projects.
SAP CRM rollout for a large pharma company. I went in thinking the hard part was the configuration.
I was wrong.
The technical work ended up being maybe half the job. The other half was harder: flying to dozens of countries, building training for teams with completely different skill levels, figuring out how to get people engaged who had no real reason to care, and somehow making them want to use something that just made their jobs more complicated at first.
We ran experiment after experiment. KPIs or recognition? Mandatory rollout or voluntary adoption?
The answer was always the same: find the people inside the company who already believed in the technology before anyone asked them to.
In the SAP world we called them power users. Anthropic calls them ambassadors - I joined that program. Cursor runs hackathons for the same reason.
The name changes. The pattern doesn’t.
Those people got up at internal events, showed their results, shared what clicked, and ended up being the real reason their colleagues got on board. They moved the needle more than any top-down mandate ever did.
Same thing is happening now in Agentforce deployments.
The technical setup takes weeks. Getting two hundred people to actually open the tool every day takes months. The rollouts that stick aren’t the ones with the cleanest architecture. They’re the ones where someone inside the client org got genuinely excited, showed their team what was possible, and made everyone else feel like they were falling behind.
One person who actually believes in the tool moves faster than six months of mandatory training.
The firms that get this are hiring for it deliberately - not waiting for champions to show up, but finding them early and building around them. That’s a different kind of implementation work. And it gets paid differently.
Last month, at Techflow in Miami, I caught a Claude Code talk aimed at beginners.
The presenter did something genuinely hard: made the tools make sense to a completely mixed room, in a way that made people want to try it right then. Not just understand it - try it.
That skill is rarer than it looks.
Twenty years. The technology has changed completely.
People haven’t.
Companies keep buying new tools expecting results overnight. But between the purchase and the actual payoff, the same thing always gets in the way: changing how people work.
The AI trainer, AI coach, and AI transformation market is just getting started.
It’s the clearest money that will be made on AI - right after data centers and hardware.
For AI companies, the race that matters most right now is who helps thousands of people actually change the way they work.