Practical AI for General Management
General managers, managing directors, COOs, and divisional or regional directors who run a business unit with P&L responsibility — typically 50 to 500-plus people across multiple functions. You make the investment calls, lead adoption of new ways of working, report to a board or group executive, and are expected to have a view on AI without being a technologist. If you sit between the front line and the board and need to make smart AI decisions for your part of the business, lead your team through the change, and govern the risks, this course is for you.
Assess your organisation's AI readiness across four dimensions — Operations, Data, People, and Governance — and place it honestly on the path from scattered use to embedded operations.
Evaluate and prioritise competing AI investments with the SCALE scorecard and present a defensible business case your board or executive committee will act on.
Use AI as a daily leadership tool by applying the PRISM prompting framework to board papers, business cases, communications, and vendor evaluation — saving several hours a week on recurring tasks.
Use AI as a structured strategic thinking partner on the decisions that sit on your desk alone, applying the Leader's Strategic Toolkit — Pre-Mortem, Devil's Advocate, Steel-Man, Stakeholder Scan, and Board Devil's Advocate.
Lead AI adoption across your business functions with a phased plan for piloting, scaling, and measuring — and address the fear, scepticism, and overwhelm that stall most programmes.
Govern AI responsibly with proportionate policies, clear accountability, and the GUARD safety checklist scaled to your organisation's size and risk profile.
Demonstrate return to your board with metrics that connect AI activity to business outcomes, reviewed across a 30-, 90-, and 180-day timeline.
Leave with a personalised 90-day AI leadership action plan — dated milestones, a scored initiative shortlist, and specific, measurable week-one commitments.
Module by module, in the order they are assigned.
AI has moved from isolated experiments into business leadership, where P&L owners must read adoption honestly and decide where value, risk, and ownership sit. You finish with a practical way to place your organisation, shortlist relevant application categories, and judge when AI output needs review.
Personal AI mastery is the leader’s proving ground: it builds credibility, calibration, and empathy before adoption reaches the organisation. By the end, you can use PRISM for recurring leadership tasks, distinguish operational from strategic AI, and pressure-test decisions with the Leader's Strategic Toolkit.
AI proposals only earn funding when return, comparison, risk, and oversight are made explicit for board scrutiny. You use SCALE, TRUST, a seven-section decision paper, and function-level oversight rules to choose pilots and defend investment decisions.
Leading AI adoption means treating value as a people-and-governance challenge, not a tool rollout, because leaders must win trust while preventing data and compliance failures. By the end, you can tailor change messages, reframe resistance with the Augmentation Ladder, and gate AI use through proportionate governance.
Agents, workflows, and ROI measurement turn AI from individual chat use into governed business capability, where leaders must choose what to delegate and prove value to the board. You distinguish chat, agents, and workflows, shortlist suitable processes, and build a 30/90/180 measurement frame.
This module turns prior AI strategy work into a dated 90-day leadership plan, because business leaders need execution structure rather than more intent. By the end, you assess readiness, calibrate the plan, select the first initiative, and commit to measurable week-one actions.
The course closes with a timed final exam with a pass mark and a limited number of attempts. A pass issues a PDF certificate with its own serial, in the name of the Straits Institute for Applied AI. Cohort progress, at-risk learners and a CSV export are in the admin console throughout.
No. It is written for business leaders, not technologists — no coding, no models, no jargon. AI+ Everyone (T1-01) is recommended but not required; the frameworks it introduces — PRISM, TRUST, the AI Opportunity Matrix, and the Augmentation Ladder — are recapped by name in plain leadership language, so you can follow every module without it.
Yes — that is the exact question the course is built around. You will learn to assess where AI fits your business, score and prioritise initiatives with the SCALE scorecard, and walk into a board meeting with a defensible recommendation rather than a vendor's slide deck.
Six 60-minute modules, around 12 to 16 hours including the practice. Every module ends with a Monday-morning artifact — a readiness snapshot, a personal PRISM prompt library, a SCALE-scored business case, a governance draft, an automation shortlist — and the course finishes with a personalised 90-day action plan you can start on Monday.
Data safety is a core theme, not an afterthought. Module 4 teaches the GUARD safety checklist and a four-tier data classification — Public, Internal, Confidential, Prohibited — plus the four lines AI must never cross, so you can put proportionate governance in place before any tool is deployed across the organisation.
Module 4 treats adoption as change management — 70% people and process, only 10% algorithm. You will use the Augmentation Ladder to reframe AI as changing tasks, not jobs, and learn to answer the three resistance patterns — fear, scepticism, and overwhelm — with tailored communication for each audience, from the board to the front line.
You will filter vendor claims with the TRUST framework — Traceable, Relevant, Unbiased, Specific, Timely — and score any initiative against the five SCALE dimensions before committing budget, so the decision rests on evidence rather than the loudest demo.
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Course libraries are assigned per user, team or department, and the reporting comes back to whoever has to answer for the programme. Tell us who needs it and we will show you the console.
