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What you'll get out of thisGet the shape of what you're about to learn so the rest of the course makes sense.
Welcome
You're about to take the AI Business Baseline, the entry tier of Aegis Academy.
The whole course takes about three hours, broken into seven short lessons. You can read them straight through, or come back when you have ten minutes. There is no video. There is no test you can fail. At the end, you'll do one thing differently at work, and your manager will sign off on it.
What you'll learn
Seven lessons, in order. Each one ends with a short exercise and a knowledge check.
| # | Lesson | Time | What you walk away with |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0.1 | What AI is (and is not) | 25 min | A clear, plain-English picture of what AI actually does. |
| 0.2 | What AI is good for | 25 min | Three specific ways you can use AI in your job this week. |
| 0.3 | What AI should not touch | 30 min | The five categories of information that never go into a public AI tool. |
| 0.4 | How to ask AI for useful work | 30 min | A simple four-part pattern that turns "AI is useless" into "this saved me an hour." |
| 0.5 | How to review AI output | 25 min | The three failure modes that cause most AI mistakes, and how to spot them. |
| 0.6 | Your first safe AI use case | 30 min | One use case, written down, signed by your manager. The course's only deliverable. |
| 0.7 | One last thing | 15 min | Ten quick questions that help your company plan what comes next. |
What this course is not
It does not teach you to build AI systems. It does not teach you to write code with AI. It does not pick a tool for you (ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, Gemini, your company's enterprise version). It does not lecture you on AI ethics in the abstract.
What it does is meet you where you actually are: someone with a job to do who keeps hearing about AI and wants to know what to do on Monday morning.
How to take it
Self-paced: read straight through, or one lesson at a time. Most lessons are 25 to 30 minutes. Every lesson works on its own if you only have ten minutes today.
In a workshop: your company is running the four-hour or six-hour version of this course with a facilitator. The lessons here are your reference. The workshop replaces the self-paced reading.
When you get to Lesson 0.6, you'll fill out a one-page worksheet naming the first AI task you'll try at work. Your manager signs it. That's how you finish.
Ready? Start with Lesson 0.1.