Most teams now have people using AI daily and nobody who can say what good use looks like. AI literacy training replaces that patchwork with a shared standard, built around what your people actually do.
AI literacy training in Canada tends to be sold as tool training: here is the software, here are the buttons. We approach it the other way round. Literacy is the judgement that sits behind the tool, so our programs start with what your people already know, establish what they need to know for the work they do, and then build the training around that gap. The result is a team that can pick a tool, use it well, and recognize when its output should not be trusted.
AI literacy is the ability to use and implement AI tools ethically, safely and effectively, and to know where the limits are. In practice, that means understanding what a model is doing well enough to judge its output, knowing which information should never go into a cloud-based tool, being able to write a prompt that gets a usable answer, and understanding what your organization is accountable for when an AI-assisted decision goes wrong. Building on this foundation is understanding when a custom model could be invaluable to your organization’s operations. AI literacy doesn’t always require a technical skill set, and the people who need it most are usually not technical.
With our partners, every AI initiative typically begins with an initial needs assessment, because the same training doesn’t always work for everyone; at a granular level, employees often have differing skill levels, teams have different skill sets, and industries have different requirements and needs. To address this, we review learner demographics, education level, and industry focus, on the principle that the education must cover key topics and connect with the learners’ discipline.
From this initial assessment, we produce a custom AI literacy strategy. This deliverable outlines the assessment results, our skills training recommendations, the internal and external programs and training opportunities available to you, the training we recommend, and the ongoing support that comes with it.
Delivery then follows the strategy and can take the form of in-person or virtual workshops, e-learning through our online learning platform, and, where nothing off the shelf fits, custom AI course development that turns the strategy’s recommendations into learning built specifically for your domain, organization, or role.
CAIAI has run AI literacy programs for non-profits, chambers of commerce, national industry associations, universities, and businesses in construction, property maintenance and tourism. Group sizes have ranged from a single owner-operator to roughly fifty staff drawn from every department of a community services organization, and formats from a 90-minute online session to a multi-stage partnership running across two years. Sessions cover AI ethics, AI security, shadow AI use, prompt engineering, workflow development and tool customization, weighted to whatever the assessment says the group needs.
What changes is usually visible in how work gets done rather than in a score. A zoo’s senior leadership team finished their two sessions with two custom AI workflows built for their own operations. A non-profit’s staff left applying generative AI to administration, communications, and program documentation. A chamber of commerce that started with a sold-out general introduction for members in 2025 followed it with a second sold-out applied session in 2026, with members leaving the engagement excited and enabled to take on new AI initiatives.
These posts cover the ground our literacy programs teach, and are a fair preview of the approach.
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.
Tell us about your team and what they are already doing with AI. We will come back with what an assessment would involve and what it would cost, at no charge.
Our mission is to help Canadians learn, adapt and succeed with AI. Literacy is the first of those three and the one everything else rests on: an organization that cannot tell good AI use from bad cannot adapt safely, and it certainly cannot succeed at scale.
