About Howard Workshop Group
AI Training Grounded in How Communication Actually Works
Where This Started
Where This Started
My name is Eric Shay Howard. I wasn't an early adopter to AI. When ChatGPT launched in late 2022, I was finishing my MFA and teaching high school English, and like most teachers, my first real concern about AI was whether my students were using it to cheat.
It wasn't until I moved into college composition teaching that my thinking shifted. Working with university students on their writing—watching them draft, get feedback, revise, draft again—started to see that AI could actually fit naturally into that process rather than short-circuit it. The way good writing actually develops isn't linear: you generate ideas, you get feedback, you revise, you reconsider the whole thing. AI, used well, can support every one of those stages. Used poorly, or by someone who doesn't understand what the stages are, it just produces polished-sounding noise.
That's when I saw the larger opportunity. Most professionals weren't taught the writing process the way composition instructors teach it. They were taught to produce a finished product, not to think about drafting as a series of decisions. Hand those professionals an AI tool and tell them to get better results, and they'll get faster output, but not necessarily better communication. The gap isn't the technology. It's the foundation underneath it.
That's the problem Howard Workshop Group was built to solve.
Why I'm Positioned to Help
My background sits at an unusual intersection. My MFA trained me in the craft and process of writing: how ideas develop, how revision works, how voice and clarity are built deliberately, not accidentally. My MBA gave me the business acumen to understand what professional communication is actually for: persuading stakeholders, managing risk, driving decisions.
Before moving into academia full-time, I worked at a major law firm, where I saw up close how high-stakes professional communication both functions and breaks down. That experience shapes how I design training for professional services teams.
The combination—writing pedagogy, business strategy, and professional services experience—is what makes the HWG approach different from a standard AI tools workshop. Anyone can demo a chatbot. Fewer people can explain why a prompt works, what's missing from the output, and how to revise it into something a client or senior partner would actually trust.
What Howard Workshop Group Does
HWG provides AI integration workshops built with writing pedagogy at their core. Rather than training teams on tool features, we train teams on the thinking that makes those tools produce professional-quality results: understanding what you're trying to communicate, who you're communicating with, and what a finished work product actually requires.
The result is a team that gets better output from AI, produces it faster, and knows how to evaluate and revise what AI produces rather than just accepting it.
HWG works primarily with professional services firms: law, accounting, consulting, marketing, and other organizations where the quality of written communication is directly tied to client outcomes and reputation.
Still a Teacher at Heart
Adjunct teaching has been the constant thread through everything I've done. I love the classroom. The moment when something clicks for a student who thought they weren't a “writer”, or when a team realizes that their AI outputs weren't the problem; the prompts were. That's what I'm chasing in every workshop I run.
I'm based in Louisville, Kentucky, and I work with teams locally and remotely.
Let's Talk
I'd love to hear about the work your team is doing and talk through how better communication and AI integration might help you do even more for your clients.
Reach out through the Contact page and I'll get back to you promptly.
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