Yes — give AI your student’s industry or niche and it will generate a targeted resource list in minutes, covering tools, books, communities, podcasts, and frameworks specific to their context.
Why Generic Resource Lists Fall Flat
Handing every student the same list of resources is like giving everyone in a cooking class the same grocery list, regardless of whether they are making Thai food or Italian. It technically works, but it misses the point. Students are far more likely to engage with resources that feel relevant to their specific situation — their industry, their audience, the kind of business they are building.
Personalised resource lists signal to students that you see them as individuals, not just seats in your course. That perception alone increases trust and engagement.
How to Use AI to Build Industry-Specific Lists
Start with a simple prompt in Claude or ChatGPT: “My student is a [job title or niche] who is building an online coaching business. Create a resource list of ten to fifteen highly relevant tools, books, podcasts, and communities they should explore. Focus on what is most useful for someone in their industry, not just general online business resources.”
The AI will produce a tailored list almost immediately. You can then ask it to add short annotations — one sentence explaining why each resource matters — which makes the list far more actionable than a bare link dump. If you want to go further, ask AI to organise the list by category: tools they need now, books for foundational thinking, and communities for ongoing learning. That structure makes the list easier to use and more impressive to receive.
What This Means for Educators
As a coach or consultant, you cannot be an expert in every niche your students come from. But AI can help you speak their language and surface resources you might not know exist. You do not need to research every industry yourself — you feed the AI the student’s context and let it do the legwork. Then you review, trim anything that feels off, and send it.
This is especially powerful in cohort courses where you have students from five or six different industries. Instead of one generic supplementary guide, you can provide a lightly customised version for each cluster of students in about fifteen minutes.
The Simple Rule
Collect each student’s niche during onboarding — a single form field is enough. Feed that information into AI at the start of each cohort and generate resource lists in bulk. This small personalisation effort pays outsized dividends in student satisfaction and the perception that your course is built specifically for people like them.