Course outline
Level 1 in detail: what the curriculum covers
Each module connects useful AI capability to affordable implementation, customer and employee trust, data protection, truthful claims, qualified professional review, human approvals, auditability, escalation, and owner accountability.
Modern Artificial Intelligence for Small Business Owners
What the things sold to you as "AI" actually are, and why the difference decides how you check them. This module separates rules, machine learning and generative AI, opens up how a language model builds an answer, explains what changes when a product can retrieve, call tools or act, and gives a vendor-neutral field guide to the tool categories an owner meets.
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Three Kinds of AI Behind One Label
35 min
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How a Language Model Produces an Answer
40 min
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Retrieval, Tools and Agents Inside the Products You Buy
40 min
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A Field Guide to Small Business AI Tools
35 min
What AI Gets Wrong, and How an Owner Notices
Fluent writing and correct writing are different things. This module covers the failures an owner actually meets — invented sources and invented rules, stale prices, arithmetic that does not add up, wording that changes the answer, instructions hidden inside a forwarded email — and the discipline of doubt that catches them on a busy day.
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Confident and Wrong: The Failures You Will Meet
40 min
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The Jagged Frontier, Long Documents and Wording
40 min
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Instructions Hidden in What You Forward
35 min
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Automation Bias and the Discipline of Doubt
40 min
Reading the Evidence About AI and Small Business
Before you repeat a number about AI, find out what it measured, of whom, over what period and by whom. This module works through two credible surveys that report very different adoption figures and are both right, shows who neither of them asked, and sets out what the productivity evidence actually consists of.
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Five Questions to Ask of Any AI Number
35 min
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Two Surveys, Two Numbers, Both Right
40 min
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Who the Surveys Never Asked
35 min
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What the Productivity Evidence Is Made Of
40 min
The Size Gate: Which Rules Reach a Business This Small
Some duties switch on at a headcount, a revenue figure or a record count. Others reach a two-person shop exactly as they reach a national chain. This module teaches the difference, works through the employment, privacy and data-security thresholds that are verified for this course, and builds the two-column list an owner keeps for their own size, states and trade.
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Headcount Gates in Federal Employment Law
40 min
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Privacy and Security Gates: Revenue, Records and a Size Definition
40 min
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Duties That Reach Every Business However Small
40 min
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Building Your Own Two-Column Duty List
40 min
Checking Whether a Rule Is Still Current
A confident answer about business regulation is usually a two-year-old answer. This module works through four real corrections — a narrowed reporting duty, a vacated amendment, a set-aside order beside an intact rule, and an executive order that preempts nothing — and turns each into the checking routine that would have caught it.
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Worked Correction: A Reporting Duty That Narrowed
40 min
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A Vacated Amendment and an Order That Was Set Aside
40 min
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Federal Policy That Directs Without Preempting
40 min
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The Owner's Quarterly Currency-Check Routine
35 min
Where a Licensed Profession Takes Over
This is the line the course will not cross. A single state agency licenses dozens of ordinary trades, and where your work sits inside a licensed profession, that profession's own board sets the rules — not general business regulation and certainly not an assistant. This module maps the licensing landscape and teaches you to write the referral into your procedures.
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How Broadly a Single State Agency Licenses Ordinary Trades
35 min
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Federal, State and Local Licences and the Official Directories
35 min
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The Questions That Must Leave Your Desk
40 min
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Writing the Referral Into Your Procedure
35 min
Customer and Employee Data Before a Tool Sees It
Before any tool sees a customer or employee record, an owner has to know what class of information it is. This module sorts what a small business holds into seven classes, separates the duties that switch on at a size threshold from the ones that reach a one-person business, and builds a repeatable decision for whether a record may go into a given system.
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Classifying What the Business Already Holds
40 min
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Card Data, Health Information and Biometrics: Three Classes That Behave Differently
40 min
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What a Tool's Terms Say About Your Data
40 min
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Deciding Whether This Record May Go In
40 min
Prompting for the Work an Owner Actually Does
A structured way to ask for the jobs that actually fill an owner's week: a quote, a customer reply, a supplier email, a summary of a long document. This module builds a six-part request, explains why prices and rules are supplied rather than recalled, sets the rule for what may be pasted in, and ends with six worked patterns.
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The Six-Part Request
40 min
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Supplying the Facts Instead of Asking for Recall
40 min
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What You Paste In, and What Comes Back
40 min
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Six Patterns for Everyday Owner Work
45 min
Drafting Customer-Facing Work Without First Mistakes
How to draft what customers read — notices, policies, web pages, letters — from a verified fact file, catch the invented facts and guarantees a draft adds, understand what Copyright Office registration practice says about AI-generated material, and keep the owner's voice and approval in front of every send.
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Drafting From a Verified Fact File
40 min
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Catching Invented Facts, Guarantees and Smoothed-Over Gaps
40 min
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What Copyright Registration Practice Says About AI Material
45 min
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Keeping the Owner's Voice and the Approval Step
35 min
Truthful Claims, Reviews and Endorsements
The advertising duties that reach a business however small. This module covers substantiation for what you claim, including claims about your own use of AI, the binding rule on consumer reviews and testimonials, the endorsement guidance that interprets rather than binds, environmental marketing claims, and subscription practice as it actually stands today.
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Substantiation: Holding the Evidence Before the Claim Goes Out
40 min
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What the Consumer Reviews Rule Actually Bans
40 min
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Endorsements, Testimonials and Material Connections
35 min
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Environmental Claims and Subscription Practice as They Stand Today
40 min
Money, Records and What AI Must Not Decide
Where AI helps around the books and where it must stop: sorting and drafting rather than deciding, the business structures the IRS recognises, the federal ownership report that now reaches only foreign-formed entities, the records every employer keeps, and a loan pack assembled without letting a tool take a position.
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What AI May Touch Around the Books, and Where It Stops
40 min
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Entity Structure and the Federal Reporting Duty That Narrowed
40 min
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Payroll and Employment Records When the Tool Is the Record
45 min
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Assembling a Loan Application Pack Without Letting AI Decide
40 min
The Verified Harm Runs the Other Way: AI Business-Opportunity Fraud
The officially recorded harm in this programme is not a small business hurt by its own AI use. It is owners and would-be owners targeted by people selling AI-powered money-making schemes and AI products that could not do what was claimed, and by fraud that uses generative AI to impersonate. This module teaches how to recognise and deflate the pitch.
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What the AI Business-Opportunity Schemes Promised
40 min
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When the AI Product Could Not Do What Was Claimed
40 min
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Generative AI in Impersonation and Payment Fraud
40 min
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Questions That Deflate an AI Sales Pitch
35 min
Turning a Good Result Into a Repeatable Workflow
One good answer in a chat window is luck. This module turns it into a process you can hand to someone else: the trigger, the inputs and their data class, the AI step, the check, the approval and the record. It shows how to design so a wrong output cannot become a wrong action, and how to keep the check alive at the end of a long day.
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From a Lucky Chat to a Written Workflow
35 min
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Designing So a Wrong Output Cannot Become a Wrong Action
40 min
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Keeping the Check Alive at Five O'Clock
40 min
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Three Worked Workflows: Enquiry, Quote and Weekly Report
45 min
Agents, Everyday Security and Choosing a Vendor
What changes when software acts instead of suggesting, and how a business with no IT department keeps up. This module rates permissions from read-only to paying, sets out the short list of security controls a very small business can actually maintain, and shows how to read a vendor's data, retention, deletion and exit terms — and notice when they change.
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What Changes When Software Acts Instead of Suggesting
40 min
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Rating What a Tool Is Allowed to Touch
35 min
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The Security Controls a Very Small Business Can Actually Keep
35 min
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Reading a Vendor's Data Terms, and Noticing When They Change
40 min
Practical Small Business AI Lab
Four hands-on labs on fictional businesses. Find the planted errors in an AI-drafted quote and email; catch an invented rule, a stale requirement and an instruction hidden in a forwarded message; sort a mixed pile of business data and design a safe workflow for it; then test an AI sales pitch and a vendor's terms and write a first AI use policy.
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Lab One: Planted Errors in a Drafted Quote and Email
40 min
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Lab Two: Invented Rules, Stale Rules and Hidden Instructions
45 min
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Lab Three: Sorting a Mixed Pile of Business Data
45 min
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Lab Four: A Sales Pitch, Vendor Terms and a First AI Policy
45 min
Capstone: The Owner's AI Adoption Plan
The capstone module. Choose one low-risk problem worth solving, name the tool, the data class and the check, and decide who does what and by when. Measure your own baseline before you start, write down what would tell you to continue or stop, and hold a ninety-day review against your own before-and-after numbers, never against a borrowed gain.
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Choosing One Low-Risk Problem Worth Solving
40 min
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Naming the Tool, the Data, the Check and the People
40 min
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Your Own Baseline, and the Signals to Continue or Stop
45 min
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The Ninety-Day Review and the Finished Plan
45 min