The technical and conceptual foundations non-technical professionals need to be credible in the room — no prior AI or programming background required.
Who this is for
- Compliance, legal, risk, and audit professionals with no AI background
- Senior leaders and board members
- Regulators and public sector professionals
- Anyone who wants to understand AI without having to build it
What you will be able to do
- Explain, in plain English, how modern AI systems work
- Distinguish narrow AI, generative AI, foundation models, and agentic systems
- Reason about model performance, error types, and calibration
- Read a model card and technical specification critically
- Ask sharp questions of technical teams and vendors
Syllabus
Each module comprises a mix of structured reading, worked examples, and applied exercises. Every programme concludes with an integrated written assessment marked against the published rubric.
Module 1. What “AI” actually means
A short history. The distinction between symbolic AI, machine learning, and deep learning. What has and has not changed with the current wave.
Module 2. How a model learns
Training data, features, parameters, loss. Supervised, unsupervised, reinforcement learning. Without any maths, without any code.
Module 3. Foundation models and generative AI
What large language models actually do. Tokens, embeddings, attention. Prompting. Hallucination.
Module 4. Performance and error
Accuracy, precision, recall, calibration. Confusion matrices. Why aggregate metrics can mislead.
Module 5. Model cards, data sheets, and documentation
How to read what technical teams produce. What good documentation looks like.
Module 6. Agentic systems and the next wave
What agents are, what they can do, and where the current governance frontier lies.
Assessment
Brief
Explain, in a 1,500-word memo to a fictional executive audience, how a specific AI system works, what its performance characteristics are, and what governance implications follow. You may choose any real AI system for which sufficient public documentation exists.
Sample question
A vendor tells you their model is “95% accurate”. What follow-up questions do you need to ask before you can act on that number?
Assessments are marked by a named human examiner against the four-dimension rubric: regulatory accuracy (30%), applied judgement (30%), artefact quality (25%), communication (15%). Pass at 60, distinction at 75.
Prerequisites
None.
Certification
On successful completion (pass mark 60), you receive a SAAII Certified Practitioner (CP) — Foundations of AI for Non-Technical Professionals credential. The credential is CPD-accredited, verifiable at thesaaii.com/verify, and forms one component toward higher-tier credentials. See the certification ladder for how it stacks.
Ready to enrol?
Foundations of AI for Non-Technical Professionals runs continuously with rolling enrolment. Founding-cohort discount (25%) applies to the first 100 enrolments across the whole programme portfolio.
Cohort licensing available from £395/seat (10+). Public sector, education, and registered charity: 20% discount. Instalment plans available for programmes at £495 and above. See For organisations and the FAQ for detail.