With every new advancement in technology come questions around ethics and security. In the age of AI, common ones include: who can access my data, can AI outputs be trusted, and who carries the responsibility when something goes wrong? This course helps answer those questions.
Introduction to AI Ethics and Security is a short online course from the Canadian AI Advancement Institute for learners who may already be using AI tools or are AI-curious. It is especially helpful for those looking to implement AI without creating problems for their employer, clients, or themselves, and it takes under five hours on average.
The course is delivered in two sections. Section one is AI ethics, running for approximately 2.5 hours and covering topics such as the four pillars of ethical AI: fairness, transparency, accountability, and outcomes, as well as various cases of unethical AI across sectors. Section two is AI security, running for approximately 2 hours, addressing topics such as data protection, privacy, and governance; the differences between cloud and local AI infrastructure; and how to recognize and reduce hallucinations in AI models.
The materials consist of a mix of chapter readings from the Introduction to AI Ethics and Security Manual, course videos, online discussions and assessments. The ethics section includes two discussions: one on the four ethical pillars and one on real examples of ethical and unethical AI applications; the security section includes one on uncovering hallucinations and artifacts in AI outputs. That is where sector-specific thinking happens: someone in health care and someone in construction read the same chapter and identify different problems.
For this course, each section closes with a quiz, and you need 70% or higher on each to pass. Readings and videos are completed at your own discretion; nothing is delivered live, and therefore, no sessions to miss.
AI arrived in Canadian workplaces faster than the rules and guidelines for using it. Statistics Canada reports that 19.2% of businesses used AI to produce goods or deliver services in the second quarter of 2026, triple the 6.1% recorded two years earlier. At the level of individual workers, the number is far higher: 35.9% of Canadian workers used generative AI tools at work in the year to March 2026.
Training has not kept pace. Among businesses using AI, Statistics Canada found that only 32.0% provided AI-related training for existing employees. The Future Skills Centre puts it more starkly for smaller organizations, reporting that fewer than one in ten small and medium-sized organizations have access to formal AI training, and nearly half of employees using AI receive none at all.
Meanwhile, the expectations are advancing by the day. Canada’s federal, provincial and territorial privacy regulators have published joint principles for responsible, trustworthy and privacy-protective generative AI technologies, setting out how existing privacy law applies to these tools. Knowing what those principles ask of you is becoming part of the job.
CAIAI has delivered AI education to a broad span of Canadian learners, and ethics and security come up everywhere. Below are just a few of the AI learning engagements we have facilitated:
These articles cover the same ground the course does, and give a fair preview of how it is taught.
Learners or employers are usually unaware of opportunities to pay for their learning. We have shared resources to help you identify available funding opportunities, including scholarships for individuals and grant programs for individuals and employers.
Apply for a scholarship through our Canadian AI scholarships page. In addition, visit our Canadian AI grant funding page to see what individuals or employers can apply for.
Tristan Taylor is the founder of the Canadian AI Advancement Institute and the International AI Advancement Institute, which he started to help people learn, adapt and succeed with AI, at home in Canada and internationally. He is based in Langley, British Columbia, and wrote CAIAI’s Introduction to Artificial Intelligence textbook. Tristan recorded a Season 1 expert insight interview with the Canadian AI Advancement Institute in May 2026.
Mariami Tkeshelashvili is the Director for Artificial Intelligence Security Policy at the Institute for Security and Technology in Washington, where she leads the AI Risk Reduction Initiative. She brings over a decade of experience in international security and global governance, and has published research on AI compliance failures and on how policymakers might see an AI loss-of-control incident coming. Mariami shared written expert insights with the Canadian AI Advancement Institute in September 2025, and we cite those insights across many of our courses, including Introduction to Artificial Intelligence.
Mark Hobbs is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Fundmetric, a Halifax company that builds machine learning and data infrastructure for fundraising in charities and universities. He started it in 2013 and has co-authored peer-reviewed research on predicting donor behaviour with neural networks. Mark shared written expert insights with the Canadian AI Advancement Institute in December 2024, and returned to record a Season 1 expert insight interview in July 2026.
Matthew da Mota is Research Director, Emerging Technology and National Security at the Canadian Shield Institute, where he works on Canadian economic sovereignty, focusing on AI, defence, and dual-use technology. He previously ran the Global AI Risks Initiative at the Centre for International Governance Innovation. Matthew shared written expert insights with the Canadian AI Advancement Institute in October 2025, and we cite them across many of our courses, including Introduction to Artificial Intelligence.
Patrick Tammer leads Strategy and Operations in Google‘s AI and infrastructure group and previously served as a senior investment director at Scale AI, Canada’s AI global innovation cluster, where he invested in more than a hundred companies and AI implementation projects. He edits the Harvard/MIT Journal of Business and Artificial Intelligence and shares insights on his own platforms and in various outlets. Patrick shared written expert insights with the Canadian AI Advancement Institute in September 2025, and returned to record a Season 1 expert insight interview.
Revan MacQueen is a machine learning engineer at RL Core Technologies in Edmonton, where he builds reinforcement learning agents that control industrial processes. He holds a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Alberta, where he studied under James R. Wright; his research on self-play in multiplayer games was published at NeurIPS, and he has taught machine learning foundations at the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute. Revan shared written expert insights with the Canadian AI Advancement Institute in September 2025, and returned to record a Season 1 expert insight interview.
Sireesha Chavali is a data engineer and AI safety advocate based in Edinburgh, Scotland, who works on data pipelines and conversational AI using Google BigQuery, Microsoft Azure, and Power Apps. She serves as Partnership Lead on the USA operations team at Women in AI, and teaches practical AI skills to professionals at MIT. Sireesha shared written expert insights with the Canadian AI Advancement Institute in September 2025, and we cite those insights in our Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course.
Daryl Hatton is a Vancouver entrepreneur and the CEO of ConnectionPoint, the collaborative funding company behind the FundRazr, Crowdfundr, and CoCoPay platforms. He helped take an enterprise software company to a NASDAQ listing in 1999, rebuilt it after the dot-com crash, and sold it in 2008, the same year he founded FundRazr. Daryl shared written expert insights with the Canadian AI Advancement Institute in January 2025, and those insights are cited in our Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course and in our course on AI ethics and security.
Derek Froese is the founder and President of Koala Technology Ltd., an IT consulting firm in Abbotsford, British Columbia, that has grown from IT support into digital adoption consulting, business automation, and AI. He works with clients across Canada, and much of his practice helps small and medium-sized businesses address their IT and automation needs. Derek shared written expert insights with the Canadian AI Advancement Institute in January 2025, and returned to record a Season 1 expert insight interview. In addition, Derek has supported the CAIAI in its ongoing engagements with UFV, including as a judge at the 2026 Community Ideation Jam (Changemaking with AI).
Frincy Clement is an award-winning AI leader and an advocate for women in technology. She leads Women in AI across North America, has around a decade of experience across telecommunications, IT, and consumer goods, and works in AI governance with Standards Council Canada. Frincy shared written expert insights with the Canadian AI Advancement Institute in January 2025, and those insights are cited across many of our courses, including our Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course.
You can enrol directly on our learning platform, or use the form below if you want to ask any additional questions.
Our mission is to help Canadians learn, adapt and succeed with AI. A course like this one is where that starts. The tools are already in Canadian workplaces, and whether they help or cause harm usually comes down to whether the person using them was ever taught where the limits are. We build our courses with industry experts and institutions so that what you learn holds up at work.
