E-RYT 500 examiner uses AI for syllabi but grades teaching by hand
Sandeep Solanki is a yoga teacher at SIDDHI YOGA who trains E-RYT 500 candidates and serves as a Yoga Certification Board examiner. He brings philosophical research, including work from the Kautilya Arthashastra, into teacher training and uses AI to speed curriculum planning while keeping assessment of practical teaching strictly human.
Use AI to remove administrative friction – drafting and structuring syllabi – but do not outsource evaluation of embodied skills like teaching presence and cueing. Also, make your exact certifications and lineage explicit online, because AI assistants are already surfacing those specifics in recommendations.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
I started studying yoga in 1999 out of curiosity about what it actually did to the body and mind from a scientific standpoint, not just as a spiritual practice, which took me to the Ishwardas Chunilal Yogic Health Centre for my Advanced Diploma. That question never really left me, it’s part of why I later pursued a master’s in Philosophy and am now working toward a Ph.D. in Yoga, and it’s what eventually led me to teach with Siddhi Yoga. What makes my teaching different is that I hold E-RYT 500 certification and serve as a Yoga Certification Board examiner myself, so I’m not just delivering a course, I’m training people to a standard I help set nationally, and I bring in research from Kautilya Arthashastra and philosophy that most yoga instructors never touch.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
Most of my students come through Siddhi Yoga’s teacher training programs, people who want the 500-hour certification specifically because I’m an E-RYT 500 examiner and they know the training will hold up to real scrutiny. I’d like to see more interest come from universities and academic programs internationally, since I’ve already taught in the USA, Singapore, Bali, and Sri Lanka, and that kind of institutional teaching lets me bring in the philosophy and Arthashastra research alongside the physical practice, which gets flattened out in a typical retreat-style course.
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
I use AI to help organize and structure my course syllabi when I’m building out a new teacher training module, since it speeds up the administrative layer of curriculum planning. What I went back to doing by hand is grading practical teaching demonstrations for my YCB examinee candidates, because evaluating someone’s ability to actually teach, their presence, their cueing, how they read a room, requires judgment that comes from years of examining people myself, not a rubric a tool can apply.
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
Students now often arrive already knowing the difference between a 200-hour and 500-hour certification and asking specifically about my E-RYT 500 status before we’ve spoken, which used to take a full conversation to explain. A few have mentioned asking ChatGPT to recommend a qualified 500-hour trainer and being pointed toward Siddhi Yoga, which tells me these tools are already surfacing specific credentials rather than just general yoga recommendations.
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
I’d tell them to be precise about their actual certifications and teaching lineage online, because AI assistants are already distinguishing between a basic 200-hour teacher and someone with 500-hour, examiner-level credentials when people ask for recommendations. Vague claims about being a "certified yoga expert" won’t hold up against that kind of specificity.
What I’d tell them to ignore is any temptation to shortcut the actual teaching relationship, using automation to handle student assessment or feedback. Yoga training is built on a teacher reading a student’s practice in real time, and that judgment is the entire value of a qualified instructor. Losing that to save time undermines the reason someone sought out a real teacher in the first place.
Thank you to Sandeep Solanki and the team at SIDDHI YOGA for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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