Run workshops and training remotely

The problem

A workshop in a room has a wall, sticky notes and a facilitator who can see when people are lost. Move it to a video call and all three disappear. Everyone stares at a grid of faces, two people talk, the rest go quiet, and whatever was decided exists only in the memory of whoever was paying attention.

Training has a related failure. The same explanation gets delivered live, repeatedly, to different people, because there is no version anyone can watch later. When someone does record the call, the recording is an hour of unedited video with no structure, which nobody watches, so it is filed and forgotten.

What AI can actually do here

Three different problems, three different fixes, and the mistake is trying to solve all of them with the video call.

For collaborative sessions, a shared whiteboard restores the wall. Participants add sticky notes at the same time, so the quiet half of the group contributes in writing rather than waiting for a gap in the conversation. The artefact persists afterwards and can be linked to, which is more than the physical version offered. AI generation can produce a starting diagram or cluster the notes afterwards, which saves the facilitator time.

For explanation that does not need discussion, async video removes the session entirely. A recorded walkthrough with a transcript, chapters and an automatic summary can be watched at double speed by the people who need it, rather than performed live to a calendar full of interruptions.

For sessions worth keeping as content, recording each participant locally rather than capturing the compressed call produces something publishable, with text-based editing to cut it down and short clips pulled out automatically.

What none of this fixes is facilitation. A badly run remote workshop with better tools is a badly run remote workshop.

How the tools differ

Miro is the wall: 3 editable boards free with unlimited members, Starter at $8 per member per month billed yearly with 25 AI credits each, Business at $20 with AI workflows and agents. Use it for anything where arranging things in space beats a list.

Loom is the async explanation: free for 25 videos with 5-minute recordings, Business at $18 per user per month billed annually for unlimited length, and Business + AI at $24 adding auto summaries, chapters, tasks and edit by transcript.

Riverside is for sessions you will publish: local high-quality recording per participant, free for 2 hours as a one-off with a watermark, Pro at $29 per month or $24 billed annually with 15 hours of track downloads, text-based editing and Magic Clips.

Most teams need the first two and only some need the third.

When you don't need a tool

If your session is four people making one decision, have the call and write the decision down. A whiteboard adds ceremony to something that needed a conversation.

If you are training one person, do it live and record it with whatever you already have. Producing polished training material is worth it at the point you have explained the same thing three times.

And if participation is the problem rather than the medium, tools will not fix it. Sending the question in advance, calling on people by name and keeping the group under about eight does more for a remote workshop than any software.