AI Leadership Strategies

AI Leadership Strategies is a 16-week live online course from Rathinam Trainers for senior leaders. It is a decision course, not a technology course: it covers the five judgements a leader has to make about AI — where to bet, what to build versus buy versus wait for, how to govern it, how to reorganise around it, and how to talk about it without over-claiming. It runs to nineteen modules covering value identification, business cases, agentic autonomy, the EU AI Act, the US and India regulatory picture, ISO/IEC 42001, the NIST AI RMF, operating model and change management.

Chief executives, board members and non-executive directors, functional heads in finance, operations, HR, legal, marketing and technology, and the senior leaders one rung below them who will be asked to own an AI programme. It suits leaders in regulated and consumer-facing businesses particularly well, because that is where the 2026 regulatory picture has actually tightened.

No. Assumed prior knowledge is none, technically. You are expected to read a P&L, chair a steering committee and challenge a business case. You are not expected to have written code, used an AI assistant seriously, or read a line of the EU AI Act. Where the course needs a technical idea it builds it in the room, at the resolution required to call a vendor's bluff and no further.

Sixteen two-hour sessions over 16 weeks — 32 live hours. Sessions run every Sunday from 10:00 AM to 12:00 noon IST (Asia/Kolkata), starting Sunday 6 September 2026 and ending Sunday 20 December 2026. Delivery is live online on Microsoft Teams and every session is recorded, so learners worldwide can catch up across time zones.

Fully live online on Microsoft Teams. There is no in-person requirement and the program is open to learners worldwide. Sessions are trainer-led — teach plus demonstration plus Q&A — and recordings are available afterwards.

The program fee is INR 13,400 (or the equivalent in USD, EUR, GBP, CAD, AUD, SGD or AED depending on your region). Pricing and payment options are shown on the pricing section of this page. Payments are processed via Razorpay. There are no tools, licences or cloud costs to buy — you need a Teams client and a browser.

Yes — a full refund, no questions asked. Attend the first session of this training, and if you are not satisfied, we refund your entire fee. You do not have to give a reason. Just email rathinam@rathinamtrainers.com or message us on WhatsApp, and the refund goes back to your original payment method through Razorpay, usually within 5-7 business days. We would rather you leave satisfied than stay in a program that is not right for you.

A one-page AI thesis for your own organisation covering four things: where we bet, what we will not do, what the board sees quarterly, and what would make us stop. It is built incrementally — the value-chain map, business case, autonomy decision, legal exposure map, EU AI Act classification and board pack are each a takeaway artefact from an earlier session — then assembled, presented and challenged in session 16.

Yes, and with actual dates rather than generalities. On the EU: risk tiers, the provider/deployer distinction, Article 5 prohibitions, GPAI obligations, Article 50 transparency in force since 2 August 2026, and the Digital Omnibus (Regulation (EU) 2026/1744) deferrals of Annex III and Annex I. On India: the IT Amendment Rules 2026 in force from 20 February 2026 as the only India AI obligation live today, the DPDP Act and Rules phased commencement into 2027, Rule 12 Significant Data Fiduciary duties, and how SEBI, RBI, IRDAI and TRAI are moving unevenly. The US federal and state picture and the UK and China are covered too, the latter at survey depth.

No. The governance content is mapped competency by competency against the IAPP AIGP Body of Knowledge v2.1, but that is a statement about curriculum coverage and nothing more. This course is not accredited, endorsed or recognised by the IAPP, completing it does not confer the AIGP designation or count toward AIGP continuing education, and it is not exam preparation. Anyone intending to sit the AIGP should buy the Body of Knowledge and preparation materials from the IAPP directly.

Yes. A certificate of completion is issued to learners who attend at least twelve of the sixteen sessions and present a capstone. It is a professional development certificate from Rathinam Trainers and Consultants Private Limited — not an accredited academic qualification, and not an ISO/IEC 42001 or any other certifiable-standard credential. We say that plainly because the course itself teaches you to be suspicious of credential inflation in this market.

No hands-on building — no prompt engineering curriculum, no fine-tuning, no retrieval pipeline construction, no coding of any kind. No mathematics of machine learning. No legal advice; the course teaches you to classify your own systems and ask counsel the right question. And no specific model or per-token price recommendations, excluded on evidence grounds because capability leadership rotated four times in a single month during 2026.

Those three are practitioner programs — you build, attack or defend real systems in them. AI Leadership Strategies (Program 04) is the decision course for the people who fund and govern that work. They are independent cohorts; you do not need one to take the other.

No. Rathinam Trainers and Consultants Private Limited (CIN: U80900TZ2013PTC019500) is an independent technology training and consulting company. We are not affiliated with Rathinam Group of Institutions, Rathinam College of Arts and Science, Rathinam Technical Campus, Rathinam Institute of Management, or any other entity in the Rathinam Group — these are entirely separate legal entities. Rathinam Trainers is located at Irugur, Coimbatore 641103; the Rathinam Group of Institutions is located at Eachanari, Coimbatore 641021, a different part of Coimbatore.