Certify by AI New Zealand · Certificate course
Make AI
safe to say yes to.
Either nothing has been approved and everyone is waiting, or everyone has quietly got on with it and the risks are starting to show. Both land on the same desk. Yours.
$495 + GST per person, $295 a seat for five or more.
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Who this is for
The remit is bigger than the title.
You might have been given a title. You might have just been nodded at in a leadership meeting. Either way the job reaches a long way past whatever was said out loud.
You are deciding what the organisation is allowed to do, what it buys, how its people work, where its risk sits, and what it tells its clients when they ask. That is an operating model, not a tool rollout. Nobody trains for it, and whoever builds it shapes how the place works for years.
Operations, finance and people leaders.
GMs, practice leads, operations managers, finance and people directors, and the people who became the de facto AI person. You run things for a living. AI is now one of the things you run.
Organisations of 50 to 500 people.
New Zealand organisations big enough that scattered adoption is a real risk, where responsibility for AI has landed on a leader who now has to face a board.
People who have used ChatGPT or Copilot.
That is the whole prerequisite. No code, no prompt engineering curriculum, no model architecture. This course teaches judgement, which is the part nobody has written down for you.
Anyone who has to face a board.
Or an executive team, a partnership, a tender panel or an insurer. If someone can ask you to explain and defend how your organisation uses AI, this gets you ready for the question.
We built it around four fears.
Because they are the four we hear every week, from capable people who are doing this on top of a full job.
- Looking naive in front of the board
- Approving something that causes a privacy breach
- Spending money you cannot justify
- Being the person who slowed everything down, or the person who let it run wild
The job is not to be the AI expert. It is to be the person who makes good AI use happen safely, and can show their working.
Who it is not for.
If what you want is to get better at using the tools yourself, this is the wrong course: the Claude at Work or Microsoft Copilot course is the right one, and either pairs well with this in either order. If your staff need the basics before they are given access, that is AI at Work Foundations. And if you want model architecture, agent frameworks or prompt engineering, we do not teach any of them here.
Why this course exists
Widespread, and shallow.
Almost every New Zealand organisation has started. Almost none has finished. Individuals are getting real value from these tools and the organisation is getting almost none of it, while carrying all of the risk.
Source: 2026 NZ AI Roadshow Attendee Report.
Nobody wrote down who decides.
Your MD said "we need to be all over this" at a leadership meeting and meant it. Nothing was written down and nobody was given authority, so months later you are still asking permission for the things you were supposedly put in charge of.
It is already happening without you.
People are using AI at work today and not telling you. Your data is not leaking. It is being handed over, by good people, in the absence of anything better provisioned, and a better policy will not stop the concealment.
You cannot cost it or prove it.
Hours saved with no destination is not a benefit, and any chair worth having will say so. No baseline, no approval. And without a measured column sitting next to the estimated one, what you have is a slide deck.
How it works
You are not studying a case. You have the job.
From the first lesson you are the AI Lead at Calder Rowe, a New Zealand engineering, planning and environmental consultancy. They are not a technology company. Neither, probably, are you.
You answer to an independent Chair whose most-used sentence is "says who?", a Managing Director who will say yes to anything in a meeting, a Finance and Operations Director who holds the budget, and an IT Manager who has been carrying the risk alone.
The work compounds. The register you build in Section 4 is the register you cost in Section 6, and every piece is yours to defend in front of the Chair.
Bring your own organisation's numbers as you go: headcount, licence spend, and what IT can tell you is already in use.
On a Business account
Your own AI guidelines, in the assessment.
Add your company AI policy and guidelines. Your people see them in the course, the assessor weighs them alongside the published standard in the final assessment, and each certificate names the version that applied. Included with every Business and Corporate account.
- Shown to your people in the course
- Weighed by the assessor as an extra criterion, never deciding a result on their own
- Named on each certificate, by version
The curriculum
Seven sections, thirty eight lessons.
Every section ends in a quiz and a practical exercise. After each quiz you see which questions you have right, and you can try again as many times as you need. Each section opens once every quiz in the one before it is passed at 100 percent.
The Mandate.
The difference between the body that decides and the body that diffuses. Which of four maturity stages your organisation is in, and which of the four AI OS layers you have. Then a one-paragraph mandate with decision rights, budget, escalation list, reporting cadence and an end date, signed. And three questions to interrogate any statistic.
- The job is not what you think it is
- Where your organisation actually sits
- A mandate with teeth
- Says who?
The Honest Baseline.
Why prohibition produces less safety than provision. A three-part baseline: tool discovery, a five-question anonymous pulse and an honest governance inventory. Why a better policy will not stop concealment, the two questions that matter to ask vendors about your data, and how to tell a notifiable privacy breach from an IT ticket.
- Shadow AI is a provisioning failure
- Your before picture
- Why people hide it
- Three things to say out loud
- When it is a breach, not an IT ticket
The People.
The people-first argument, made as a commercial argument. What a generative AI tool does, in plain English, and why it is confidently wrong. The Four Gates in five seconds, the Delegation Grid for any task, and the Three Checkpoints where the human stays. Then the line between space to play and the bar for proposing, and your first three use cases.
- The case you have to make
- A shared mental model of how these tools work
- The Four Gates: what data do I share?
- The Delegation Grid: what can I hand over?
- The Three Checkpoints: where does the human stay?
- From understanding to real work
The Register.
Walk a real workflow and find where value leaks. A ten-field intake that kills about a third of submissions on purpose, and a register with eight status values. Adapted RICE with a risk multiplier, and what the score does not know. Now, Next, Later and Not doing, published. And how to tell a knowledge problem from an AI one.
- Use cases are the wrong unit
- The intake form and the register
- Scoring without pretending
- Five things the score will not catch
- Now, Next, Later, Not doing
- The Org Brain
The Guardrails.
Which existing New Zealand laws already bite on AI use. A risk tier assigned in under five minutes, and a tool assessed against six sections and seven critical items. An incident run from report to systemic change. One firm-wide answer for a client, tender panel or insurer. And who may build an agent, and who owns it in six months.
- The legal floor in New Zealand
- Tier the intake or strangle yourself
- Approving tools
- Guidelines first, policy second
- When it goes wrong
- The client conversation
- Who may build an agent
The Money.
A defensible twelve-month AI cost position that keeps actual, estimated and unknown apart. How to read a token-based invoice, four cost controls to set before a pilot, and the value measured and governance health sections of a quarterly board report.
- No baseline, no approval
- Where the money actually goes
- Tokens, in plain English
- Four controls that cost nothing
- The one page the board actually reads
Keeping It Alive.
An AI Champions Network chosen by nomination, including one person who is not convinced. Why recognition is a control, not a perk. A dashboard of six to eight numbers that separates leading from lagging. Then how to read a stall, and the recovery plan.
- Building the Network
- Recognition is the control, not the perk
- Measuring what actually changed
- It will stall
- Before the final assessment
The final assessment.
Your work, defended in front of a Chair who asks "says who?". The mandate, the register, the tier model, the cost position and the ninety day plan for Calder Rowe are each written by you.
Marked by an AI New Zealand assessor against a published standard you can read before you start. A person marks it, not a machine.
Stop asking permission for the thing you were put in charge of.
Start the courseWhat you leave with
More than a certificate.
Ten and a half hours to build the structure that fixes it. Clear authority to decide, an honest picture of what your people are already doing, guardrails that speed approvals up, a shortlist of the work worth doing, a budget you can defend, and a ninety day plan with names and dates on it.
A mandateOne paragraph with decision rights, budget, escalation list, reporting cadence and an end date, written to be signed.
A use case registerFed by a ten-field intake, scored with adapted RICE and a risk multiplier, and published as Now, Next, Later and Not doing.
A tier modelRisk tiers you can assign in under five minutes, and a way to approve tools without becoming the bottleneck.
A cost positionTwelve months, with actual, estimated and unknown on separate lines, and four cost controls set before any pilot.
A ninety day planWritten by you, and defended in front of a board chair who asks "says who?".
The certificateAI Leaders Course, issued by AI New Zealand on a human-marked final assessment.
Certified on assessed work, not attendance.
Complete every lesson, answer every quiz correctly and submit every practical exercise, then pass the final assessment, marked by an AI New Zealand assessor to a published standard. The certificate says you can do the work, not that you sat through it.
Before you start
For yourself, or for your organisation.
Individuals and small teams
Just you, or a small team.
$495 per person + GST
- Register and pay by card, then start straight away
- Five or more people pay $295 a seat
- No paid AI subscription and no software to buy
- Self-paced: about ten and a half hours, ideally across three or four weeks
Certificate issued by AI New Zealand after human assessment. Vendor-neutral: not affiliated with, or endorsed by, any AI vendor.
Organisations
Training a leadership team, a workforce or your members.
- Your own course page, under your name and branding, with white label options for larger accounts
- Your company AI policy and guidelines, shown in the course, weighed in the final assessment and named on each certificate
- $295 a seat from the first seat on a Business account
- Seats by invitation, one invoice, and a view of who has completed. Answers stay private to each person
Not sure which fits? Talk to us.
Good to know
Frequently asked questions.
Do I need to be technical?
No. There is no code in this course and no prompt engineering. If you have used ChatGPT or Copilot, that is the whole prerequisite, and if you can read a board paper and form a view, you can do all of it.
Do I need a paid AI tool?
No. There is no paid AI subscription and no software to buy. It is useful to bring your own organisation's numbers: headcount, licence spend, and what IT can tell you is already in use.
Is this the same as the Claude at Work or Microsoft Copilot courses?
No, and they solve different problems. Those two teach you to use a tool well. This one teaches you to lead the organisation's use of all of them, and it is deliberately vendor-neutral. Doing a tool course as well is a good idea, in either order. See the Claude at Work course and the Microsoft Copilot course.
How is it different from AI at Work Foundations?
AI at Work Foundations is for the person about to be handed the tools: the rules, the risks and what stays their job. This course is for the person accountable for AI across the organisation: the mandate, the register, the guardrails and the costs.
Is this an accredited qualification?
No. It is a certificate issued by AI New Zealand, resting on a final assessment marked by a person to a published standard. We are explicit about what that is and is not worth.
Who marks the final assessment?
An AI New Zealand assessor, against a published standard you can read before you start.
What if I get a quiz question wrong?
After each quiz you see which questions you have right. Try again as many times as you need. Each section opens once every quiz in the one before it is passed at 100 percent.
Do you offer group rates?
Yes. Five or more people pay $295 a seat plus GST. For six to 49 people, set up a Business account, which pays $295 from the first seat. From 50, apply for a Corporate account. Associations can offer it to their members.
Can I share my access with a colleague?
No. It is an individual enrolment. If several people need it, five or more pay $295 a seat, and a Business account pays that rate from the first seat.
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