AI Leadership Strategies
A decision course for the people who sign the budget, own the risk, and answer to a board
Live Sessions
Live Hours
Modules
Movements
Who Decides What Your Company Does With AI?
Not the people building it. The people who sign the budget, own the risk and answer to a board — and in 2026 they are being asked to commit capital against statistics they cannot audit, obligations whose dates they have misread, and price lists that changed twice this month.
"The scarce executive skill in 2026 is not knowing what a transformer is. It is knowing which AI claims to disbelieve, and how to convert a pilot into a line in the operating plan."
What is hard right now. Everyone can get a demo; almost nobody can get a line in the operating plan. Leaders hear "the EU delayed the AI Act" and miss the transparency rules that landed on 2 August 2026. They default to the most capable model and pay far more than the task needs. They quote a consultancy forecast as if it were a measurement. And they govern an agent as if it were either a person or a piece of software, when it is neither.
Five judgements, taught to decision depth and nothing further — 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. This is not an AI course: nobody leaves it able to build an agent, and that is deliberate.
One Fictional Client, and Your Own Board Paper
Two things are built across the sixteen sessions, and they are deliberately different. The trainer's worked case is one fictional client, carried end to end. Your deliverable is the same dossier for your own organisation — and it is the capstone.
One Worked Client
Kaveri Home Retail Limited — an invented company, carried end to end, with five AI activities already running and nobody owning them
Assembled in the Open
The board-ready AI dossier is built section by section in front of the room, so it can be checked item by item
Yours in Parallel
Six named artefacts from six sessions, built on one real workflow you bring — they assemble into your capstone
Kaveri Home Retail Limited — an invented company
A fictional Bengaluru-headquartered omni-channel home and lifestyle retailer: about 9,000 employees, 140 stores across India, a direct-to-consumer e-commerce arm shipping into Germany and the Netherlands through a Rotterdam third party, a small United States web storefront, a captive consumer-finance arm offering point-of-sale instalment credit in India, and roughly 400 suppliers.
Its constraint is the ordinary one: margin pressure, a board that has approved an AI budget without agreeing an AI thesis, and five AI activities already running without anyone owning them — a customer-facing FAQ assistant on web and WhatsApp, an AI-assisted CV screening pilot in HR, an AI-assisted credit-limit model in the finance arm, an agency producing AI-generated marketing video for Indian channels, and a stock-replenishment agent a supply-chain manager built in a weekend. Kaveri is not a case study read at the start and forgotten: it is the organisation every demonstration happens to.
What the Board-Ready Dossier Contains
| Section | What It Answers |
|---|---|
| Value chain and prioritised portfolio | Where the group bets, in what order, and what it will not do |
| Business case, run twice | Costed at falling compute prices, then again at flat ones |
| Autonomy decisions | Two workflows, decided on reversibility and blast radius |
| Legal exposure map | The law that already reaches the group, with no AI-specific statute required |
| EU AI Act classification | All five running activities, with the Article 50 findings |
| India obligations timeline | Against the 20 Feb 2026, 13 Nov 2026 and May 2027 clocks |
| US position | A stance on automated decision technology |
| Framework selection and board pack | What the group governs by, and what the board sees each quarter |
| Operating model | Named roles, and the credential required for each of them |
| Communications plan | Investors, employees, regulators and customers — without over-claiming |
| The one-page AI thesis | Where we bet, what we will not do, what the board sees, what would make us stop |
Bring one real workflow. An approval chain, a screening process, a customer interaction, a reporting cycle — something you own, sanitised, never live customer or personal data. Your own value-chain map, business case, autonomy decision, exposure map, AI Act classification and board pack assemble into the one-page AI thesis you present in the final session. The capstone is never bolted on at the end; it accumulates.
Instruments & Platforms Covered
A Room That Argues About Decisions, Not Definitions
Chief executives, board members and non-executive directors, functional heads, and the senior leaders one rung below them who will be asked to own an AI programme.
Chief Executives
A defensible thesis, a stop rule, and the ability to challenge an AI business case line by line
Board Members & NEDs
The quarterly pack you should be asking for, and the questions that expose an overstated programme
Function Heads
Finance, operations, HR, legal, marketing and technology — one workflow of your own, redesigned and governed
Programme Owners
The leaders one rung below the C-suite who will be handed the AI programme and its risk register
Regulated Businesses
Financial services, insurance, healthcare and anything consumer-facing, where 2026 actually tightened
India-Exposed Groups
A protected full hour on what binds an Indian entity now, and what commences in 2026 and 2027
Assumed prior knowledge: 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.
There is a seniority bar, and it is deliberate. Enrolment is scoped to leaders who carry profit-and-loss, board or function-level accountability — in practice around twelve or more years of professional experience with at least three at senior level, or a board seat. Enrolment is confirmed after a short scoping conversation.
Six Movements. Nineteen Modules. Nothing Dropped.
The order is the argument. The course is taught value-first, with a governance thread running through every module, and just enough technology to make both credible — a contested ordering that is stated and defended in the first session rather than assumed.
The session ranges are indicative and deliberately so — how far a room of senior leaders gets in a two-hour sitting is not knowable in advance. Nineteen modules, 28.5 hours of content inside a 32.0-hour schedule; eleven modules are taught at reduced depth and every reduction is named in the brochure's capacity ledger. No aspect of the source material is dropped, and there is no follow-on part to buy.
Named Instruments, Named Dates.
Frameworks are taught as a chain, not a shelf — and every one is named with its number, its article and its date, so a sceptic in your room can check it against a primary source.
Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 as amended by Regulation (EU) 2026/1744 — Articles 5, 50 and 111 taught with their dates
A certificate answers a customer; only a cited harmonised standard answers a regulator — and on the best reading available to this course, none has been cited
Still version 1.0 of 26 January 2023 and under revision — adopted for method, not as a stable authority
The one India AI obligation live today, the DPDP phases, and the sector regulators that actually own you
Alongside these sit ISO/IEC 42005 for impact assessment, ISO/IEC 22989 for terminology, the OECD principles, the US federal and state picture with Colorado as the worked example, and the credential landscape read as a hiring instrument. All of it is covered at decision and procurement resolution — this is not legal advice, and the trainer says so at the top of the EU AI Act module.
Why Take This Course
It Names Instruments, Articles and Dates
Regulation (EU) 2026/1744 with its dates, Article 50 as a live obligation since 2 August 2026, Article 111’s legacy carve-out, Colorado SB 26-189 and its draft rules, India’s IT Amendment Rules 2026, ISO/IEC 42001, EN 18286 and the NIST AI RMF. A sceptic can check every one of those against a primary source, which is the point.
It Is Current to the Week It Runs
The material behind this course was re-verified on 27 August 2026, ten days before delivery starts — and that check found a cancelled price rise, a new one introduced three days later, draft state rules, and a new harmonised European standard. The shelf life of a specific number in this domain is now measured in weeks, and that is taught explicitly.
The Economics No One Else Publishes
Capability tiers, routing by task, what defaulting to the flagship model actually costs, how to scrutinise a multi-year single-model commitment, and what happens to your business case if compute prices stop falling.
India as a Jurisdiction, Not a Footnote
A protected full hour on what binds an Indian entity today, what commences in 2026 and 2027, which sector regulator actually owns you, and where the national guidelines stop being law.
Thirty-Two Live Hours, One Accountable Trainer
Every session is taught live, by the same person, and recorded. Sixteen Sunday mornings is a real diary commitment and we do not pretend otherwise; what it buys is more live contact with one accountable teacher.
A Cohort That Argues About Decisions
The seniority bar is a promise about the room. It is the difference between a discussion of whether a threshold is a business decision and a discussion of what a threshold is.
You Leave Holding Something
Six named artefacts assemble into a one-page AI thesis for your own organisation, presented and challenged — a document you can take to your board on Monday, not a certificate of attendance with a project attached.
The Arithmetic Is Published
The brochure’s capacity ledger shows every module, its full-depth estimate, what it is actually taught at, and what was tightened to make it fit: 34.0 hours of material at full depth, a 28.8-hour practical fill, 5.5 hours of depth reduction across eleven modules, 28.5 hours taught — with no aspect dropped.
The certificate is a professional development certificate issued by the trainer, not an institutional or accredited credential. No claim is made or implied about salary, placement or employment.
Outcomes
Each outcome is written as something you can be seen to do. On completing this course you can:
- State what an LLM and an agent actually are, and identify the questions that expose an overstated vendor claim
- Explain why model leadership rotates on a two-to-four-month cycle, and why model-agnostic architecture is therefore a governance requirement
- Scrutinise a multi-year single-model commitment and route workloads across capability tiers on cost grounds
- Know which of your models sit on introductory pricing, and when it expires
- Sort any AI statistic into measurement, forecast or marketing, name who funded it, and underline the verb before arguing about the number
- Map your own value chain and produce a prioritised, sequenced use-case portfolio
- Write an AI business case whose benefit line is not headcount and whose cost line reflects 2026 economics
- Re-run that business case at flat compute prices and see whether it still clears its hurdle rate
- Make a defensible build / buy / partner call and describe the AI stack at the resolution a board needs
- Distinguish "we have data" from "we have governed, joined, permissioned data" — and price the gap
- Decide whether a workflow runs autonomously, using reversibility and blast radius rather than model quality
- Name the risks that actually stop AI programmes scaling, and why security and risk maturity is a speed advantage
- Map the law you are already subject to — privacy, IP, nondiscrimination, consumer protection, product liability — that reaches your AI systems today
- Classify your own use cases against EU AI Act Annex III and Article 50, and say which obligations bind you today rather than in December 2027
- Answer whether you are signing the Code of Practice on Transparency, or documenting an alternative equivalently adequate means
- Read the US federal and state picture well enough to say whether a given jurisdiction changes a product decision
- Say what actually binds an Indian entity today, and hold apart an obligation’s date from its enforcement capacity
- Demand and read the artefacts an AI life cycle should produce — and know what a missing one means
- Combine ISO/IEC 42001, EN 18286, ISO/IEC 42005, the NIST AI RMF and AI Act obligations into one governance approach, and define the quarterly board pack
- Design the operating model, roles and incentives an AI programme needs, and specify which credential to require for each governance role
- Lead the change and communicate to investors, employees, regulators and customers without over-claiming
- Present a one-page AI thesis for your own organisation
When It Runs, and Where You Will Be
- Format
- Trainer-led teach + demo + Q&A. Each session carries roughly 1.8 hours of module content in a 2.0-hour slot; the balance is recap and Q&A
- Delivery
- Live online on Microsoft Teams — every session recorded and made available
- Duration
- 16 sessions of 2 hours · 32.0 live hours
- Session
- Every Sunday, 10:00 – 12:00 IST (Asia/Kolkata)
- Starts
- Sunday 6 September 2026
- Ends
- Sunday 20 December 2026 — derived from the weekly cadence rather than fixed with the course shape, and confirmed at enrolment
- Content
- Nineteen modules, 28.5 hours of content, and no follow-on part to buy
- What you bring
- One real, sanitised workflow you own — never live customer or personal data — plus a Microsoft Teams client and a browser
- Assessment
- Capstone, not examination — a one-page AI thesis presented in the final session and challenged by peers and the trainer
- Enrolment
- Confirmed after a short scoping conversation; the seniority bar is deliberate
Local Start Time by Region
The course runs on Indian Standard Time, and that is the clock it keeps. The times below are the local start as at 6 September 2026. India keeps no daylight saving; several of these zones do. Two of these are on a different calendar day from the Indian one, and one of them changes day mid-course.
| Where | Local start, as at 6 Sep 2026 | After local clocks change |
|---|---|---|
| India (the course clock) | Sun 10:00 IST | no change — IST keeps no daylight saving |
| Gulf (UAE, Qatar) | Sun 08:30 | no change |
| United Kingdom | Sun 05:30 BST | Sun 04:30 GMT from 25 Oct 2026 |
| Central Europe | Sun 06:30 CEST | Sun 05:30 CET from 25 Oct 2026 |
| Singapore | Sun 12:30 | no change |
| Australian Eastern (Sydney, Melbourne) | Sun 14:30 AEST | Sun 15:30 AEDT from 4 Oct 2026 |
| United States Eastern | Sun 00:30 EDT — the same calendar day, just after midnight | Sat 23:30 EST — the previous day, from the session of 8 Nov 2026 |
| United States Pacific | Sat 21:30 PDT — the previous day | Sat 20:30 PST from the session of 8 Nov 2026 |
Every session is recorded and made available, so a participant in a difficult time zone can follow asynchronously; the exercise artefacts accumulate either way, and the capstone is presented live.
Simple, Transparent Pricing
One-time fee. No hidden charges. Full program access from day one — and a full refund if you are not satisfied after the first session.
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AI Leadership Strategies (2026)
one-time payment
- 16 live sessions · 32.0 live hours, taught by one trainer
- Nineteen modules, 28.5 hours of content, no follow-on part
- Every session recorded and made available
- Six named artefacts assembling into your one-page AI thesis
- Certificate of completion on twelve of sixteen sessions plus capstone
- Full refund if the first session is not for you
Full refund, no questions asked
Attend the first session of this training. If you are not satisfied, we refund your fee in full — you don't have to give us a reason.
Enrolment is confirmed after a short scoping conversation — there is a deliberate seniority bar.
AI Leadership Strategies (2026)
Frequently Asked Questions
Everything you need to know before enrolling.
AI Leadership Strategies (2026) is a live online decision course for the people who sign the budget, own the risk, and answer to a board. It is not an AI course: nobody leaves it able to build an agent, and that is deliberate. It covers the five judgements a senior 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. Nineteen modules across six movements, 28.5 hours of content inside a 32.0-hour schedule.
Chief executives, board members and non-executive directors, functional heads (finance, operations, HR, legal, marketing, 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, and leaders of India-based or India-exposed groups especially, because one full module is spent on what binds an Indian entity today. There is a deliberate seniority bar — in practice around twelve or more years of professional experience with at least three at senior level, or a board seat — and enrolment is confirmed after a short scoping conversation.
Sixteen sessions of two hours — 32.0 live hours in total. Sessions run every Sunday, 10:00 to 12:00 IST (Asia/Kolkata), for sixteen consecutive weeks from Sunday 6 September 2026. On that weekly cadence the final session falls on Sunday 20 December 2026; the end date is derived from the cadence rather than fixed with the course shape, and is confirmed at enrolment. Every session is recorded.
Fully live online, on Microsoft Teams. Sessions are trainer-led — teach, demo and Q&A — and every one is recorded and made available, so a participant in a difficult time zone can follow asynchronously. The capstone is presented live.
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 — no further.
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.
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 — where we bet, what we will not do, what the board sees quarterly, and what would make us stop. You bring one real, sanitised workflow you own to the first session and build alongside the trainer: your own value-chain map, business case, autonomy decision, existing-law exposure map, EU AI Act classification and board pack. Those six named artefacts assemble into the thesis, which is presented and challenged in the final session.
Kaveri Home Retail Limited — an invented, fictional Bengaluru-headquartered omni-channel home and lifestyle retailer with about 9,000 employees, 140 stores across India, a direct-to-consumer arm shipping into Germany and the Netherlands, a small United States storefront, a captive consumer-finance arm and roughly 400 suppliers. Five AI activities are already running in it without anyone owning them. Every demonstration happens to Kaveri, and by the final session the trainer has assembled a complete board-ready AI dossier for it in the open.
The EU AI Act — Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 as amended by Regulation (EU) 2026/1744 — with Articles 5, 50 and 111 taught specifically, the Commission’s Article 50 guidelines of 20 July 2026 and the Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-generated Content. The United States: Executive Order 14365, the GAAIA discussion draft, Colorado SB 26-189 and HB 26-1263 with the Attorney General’s draft rules. India: the DPDP Act 2023 and Rules 2025, the IT Amendment Rules 2026, SEBI Regulation 16C, the RBI FREE-AI report, IRDAI, TRAI, MeitY’s guidelines and the IndiaAI Mission. Standards: ISO/IEC 42001, EN 18286:2026, ISO/IEC 42005, ISO/IEC 22989, the NIST AI Risk Management Framework and the OECD principles. Plus the frontier model platforms as a price and procurement landscape, and the credential landscape as a hiring instrument.
A certificate of completion is issued to participants 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. It is not an accredited academic qualification, and it is not and does not claim to be an ISO/IEC 42001 or any other certifiable-standard credential.
No. The governance content has been mapped competency by competency against the IAPP AIGP Body of Knowledge v2.1, effective 2 February 2026, and that is a statement about curriculum coverage and nothing more. This course is not accredited, endorsed or recognised by the IAPP, and no relationship with the IAPP is claimed or implied. Completing it does not confer the AIGP designation, exempt a candidate from the AIGP exam, or count toward AIGP continuing education. It is not exam preparation and should not be bought as such — anyone intending to sit the AIGP should buy the Body of Knowledge and preparation materials from the IAPP directly.
Hands-on building — no prompt engineering curriculum, no fine-tuning, no retrieval pipeline construction, no coding of any kind; participants watch agents demonstrated and watch one fail, but do not build them. The mathematics of machine learning. Legal advice — the course teaches leaders to classify their own systems and ask their counsel the right question, and is not a substitute for counsel. An industry-by-industry tour. Vendor and model recommendations. AIGP Domain III at practitioner depth, and exam technique. The UK, China and other national regimes are named at survey depth only, and that limit is stated in the room.
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.
Bring One Workflow. Leave With a Thesis Your Board Can Act On.
Sixteen Sunday mornings from 6 September 2026, live on Microsoft Teams and recorded. Where we bet. What we will not do. What the board sees each quarter. And what would make us stop.
Rathinam Trainers & Consultants Private Limited
The next step is a short scoping conversation. Enrolment is scoped to leaders who carry profit-and-loss, board or function-level accountability.