Departments outside computer science are now asking for AI sessions, and most of what they receive is either a sales pitch for a tool or a computer science lecture in disguise. A commerce or arts student needs neither. They need to know what these systems are, how to use them without embarrassing themselves, and where the risks are. Here is a one-hour plan that works for that audience.
0–10: what it is, in plain words
A language model predicts likely text. It does not look things up unless connected to a source, it can be confidently wrong, and it reflects what it was trained on. Say this in ten minutes with two live examples — one impressive, one wrong. The wrong one teaches more.
10–30: honest use for study and work
- Drafting and restructuring your own writing, not generating an assignment.
- Explaining a concept three ways until one clicks.
- Summarising a long document — then checking the summary against the document, live, in front of them.
- Preparing for an interview or viva with a model playing the examiner.
30–45: hands-on exercise
Everyone asks the same factual question about their own field and checks the answer against a textbook or a trusted site. Half the room will find an error. That fifteen minutes converts abstract warnings into a habit of verification.
45–55: privacy and integrity
- Do not paste personal data, other people's data or unpublished work into public tools.
- Know your college's policy on AI in assignments; when in doubt, disclose.
- Understand that free tools may train on what you type.
55–60: what next
One tool to try this week, one habit — verify before you use — and a contact for questions. Non-CS students are often the most thoughtful audience about AI's limits; the session should respect that.
I run this session for departments across disciplines, not only for computer applications; coordinators can arrange it through the invite page.
GenAI engineer and AI product builder with 2+ years shipping production-grade AI systems: RAG pipelines, fine-tuned LLMs, hybrid retrieval and multi-modal apps across vision, speech and OCR, architected end to end from ingestion to deployment. Leads engineering for SCULT INDIA's 14-member team, founded the 500+ member TechVerse Enclave community and has mentored 200+ students. Three hackathon first prizes: Changethon 2025 (IIT Roorkee), Product Genesis at Vividhotsava 2025 (CSJMU Kanpur) and BYTEBATTLE (MeetKats).
Open to GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks at colleges. Email pranjulrathour41@gmail.com.
