The role is barely three years old. There is no degree for it, no licensing body, and nobody with a twenty-year head start.
What separates the rare ones is not what they know about AI. It is that they can run the whole engagement, from the first discovery conversation through to proving it worked.
Merilyn Thompson teaches every session herself. Thirty years at the intersection of people, process, and technology. She has led major technology transformations for government agencies, education, healthcare, and insurers, run a technology company for twenty-four years, worked as a board-certified psychotherapist for over a decade, and is a Maxwell Leadership Certified Team Member.
Twelve sessions, live. Tuesdays, with two Thursdays in December. Founding cohort begins October 27.
Almost anyone can show what is possible with AI.
Very few people can answer what comes next.
The budget. The risk. The governance. The rollout. The adoption. The proof that it delivered business value.
That is where projects succeed or fail. That is where trust is won or lost. And that is where consultants become indispensable.
This program teaches the part most people never learn: how to move from an impressive demonstration to a defensible business decision.
Because organizations do not pay for demos.
They pay for outcomes.
You know that gap, because you have stood in it.
So you overpromise, and cannot deliver.
Or you underprice, because you cannot defend the number.
Or you never make the offer at all, because somewhere underneath you know you are not ready.
You did not fail at AI. You learned the part that gets you into the room, and nobody taught you the part that keeps you there.
The first half is the technology. What the tools do, what they cost, where they break, what they cannot be trusted with. If you are on this page, you probably know more about this than most of the people who will hire you.
The second half is the engagement. It is nine things.
Most AI training covers the first half and stops.
Discovery is where it starts, and discovery gets the most attention because it is the part that looks like consulting. But an engagement is won or lost in the planning, the risk work, the governance, and the execution. Those are the four places a client has been burned before, and they are the four things they will ask you about.
Read the right-hand column again. That is what deliver means, and none of it is about knowing more AI.
Not from the software vendors, who sell the license and leave.
Not from the large consulting companies, who will not take a project this size.
Not from their IT provider, who is already stretched and was never asked to do this.
What those businesses need is one person who will sit down with them, work out how the job actually gets done, design something that fits, build it, and stay long enough to prove it held up. Not a pilot that impresses in March. An implementation the client is still using in month six.
That person is a new kind of professional, and the role is barely three years old.
No degree. No licensing body. No association with a waiting list. Nobody ahead of you who has been doing this since college, because three years ago there was nothing to do.
What there is instead is a gap. The people who fill it will not be the ones who knew the most about AI. They will be the ones who learned to run the whole engagement.
Every day, organizations are making decisions about AI adoption. New projects are launched, new roles are created, and new consultants are hired. The question is whether you will be watching those opportunities or leading them.
Become the trusted advisor leaders, teams, and clients rely on to make confident decisions and turn uncertainty into action.
What you are known for changes. You are no longer the person asked to execute. You are the person leaders trust to determine what should be done, what should not, and why.
Most leaders understand the business but not the AI. Most technologists understand the AI but not the business. Few people can translate between both worlds and help each side decide. That is where the opportunity is.
AI is creating opportunities that barely existed a few years ago, and organizations are actively looking for people who can lead them. By the time you finish this bootcamp, you will not only understand the work. You will have done it. Discovery, readiness assessments, business cases, governance, rollout, and proof of value.
The question is not whether these opportunities exist. It is whether you will be ready when they appear.
Whether you build your own practice, launch a new service line, or become the person leaders call when the stakes are high, the transformation is the same. You become the trusted advisor who turns AI opportunity into business outcomes.
Every month you wait to master AI, the AI gap grows. It is not growing between you and the technology. It is growing between you and the people who decided to learn how to run it.
For twenty-four years I ran a technology company and implemented systems for government agencies, education, healthcare, and insurers.
Multi-year programs, multi-million dollar budgets, environments where being wrong shows up in a patient’s care or a business’s ability to operate. I trained hundreds of people in systems, applications, and tools.
For ten of those years I was also a board-certified psychotherapist, which is a strange thing for a technologist to carry, and the reason I know that the hardest part of a discovery session is not the questions.
It is hearing what the client is not saying.
At one point senior leadership brought me in to rescue a project that was failing. Not to advise on it. To take it and turn it around.
Here is what that taught me, and it has almost nothing to do with software.
Projects do not fail at the tool. They fail at implementation, testing, quality control, and handoff.
The build works in a demo. Everyone nods. Then the truth surfaces:
The manager who inherits it is the one who discovers the gut punch: it never worked outside that demo.
I watched projects fall apart under consultants who were highly skilled but could not deliver. And I watched consultants with less technical depth win those same engagements.
Not because they knew more, but because they showed a plan, a test everyone could believe in, and a calm, prepared answer for the moment something goes wrong.
That is what clients remember. That is what decides who gets the next engagement.
That difference is not talent. It is a method. It changes how you show up, how you execute, and how you lead.
In twelve weeks you can master it, and it will reshape how you deliver and how you run AI consulting engagements for your clients.
I teach every session myself, because I have spent thirty years running technology projects and consulting engagements, and I know what it takes to deliver work that succeeds.
The part nobody admits
It is in a tab somewhere. Thirty percent finished. From a month when you had more time.
A self-paced course asks you to be your own deadline, your own accountability, and your own quality check, at the end of a working day, on a subject you do not yet know well enough to judge your own work in.
Nobody is disciplined enough for that. Not you. Not me.
And the people who do finish reach the end holding a certificate and no answers. No one watched them run a discovery session. No one told them their business case would not survive a CFO. No one said the workflow they were about to automate was broken, and automating it would make things worse.
They finished the course and they are still guessing.
By week four you have a discovery session booked with a real business that is expecting you. You cannot quietly stop. That is not motivation. Motivation is what you run out of in week three.
You may be thinking you are not technical enough. Or that you are too far into a career to start something new. Or that the people already doing this have something you do not.
There is no code in this program. Not one line.
Twelve weeks teaches you the method. What it cannot teach, and what you have already spent years building, is the instinct underneath it. Sitting across from an owner, asking the question underneath the one they actually asked, and working out what they really need.
If you have spent years in project management, operations, IT, HR, or client service, you have been doing that the whole time and calling it something else. You are not starting from zero. You are adding structure to something you already do.
Some people arrive here by choice. Some arrive because a role ended. Both work. What matters is whether you will do the work.
Two hours on a Tuesday, and five to seven hours a week in total. One evening and part of a weekend, for twelve weeks. That is not nothing, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. It is also less time than most people spend deciding whether to begin.
You do not need one. The discovery session in week four is with a business or nonprofit you approach as a free assessment. If you cannot find one, we provide one. No one gets stuck at week four for lack of an introduction.
The founding cohort is $2,997, or three payments of $1,049. From the winter cohort onward the rate is $4,997. What we ask in exchange is below, and it costs you no extra work.
Twelve sessions, 4:00 to 6:00 PM Eastern · Tuesdays, with two Thursdays in December
Every phase produces work you own. The milestones below are the four moments where something real exists that did not exist before.
Weeks 1 – 2
Run a discovery conversation a client will thank you for. Assess where an organization actually is and score its maturity.
Weeks 3 – 4
Map the work as it is really done, fix it before automating, and cost the recommendation so a finance team accepts the number.
Weeks 5 – 7
Evaluate tools against a client's environment and risk tolerance. Then build, with permissions and escalation worked out.
Weeks 8 – 12
Charter, scope, and go-live discipline. Test plans and acceptance criteria. Governance that gets a project approved instead of shelved. Adoption for people who may resist it.
Two hours a session. Office hours in seven of the twelve weeks. No session the week of Thanksgiving. Two weeks in December carry two sessions, December 1 and December 3, then December 8 and December 10. A three-week break runs from December 16 to January 4, and you come back for the last three sessions with your client work already delivered and the capstone in view.
Not theory. Each of these is something you produce during the twelve weeks, on a real organization, before you ever charge for it.
The credential
Awarded by Novativ AI Academy when your capstone demonstrates competency against the program’s standards. Unlike a certificate of completion, it recognizes demonstrated capability rather than participation.
Issued when your capstone meets the standard, not when the twelve weeks run out. It is proof that you sat with a real organization, found the problem, designed the answer, built it, tested it, wrote the governance, and defended the whole thing under questioning.
That is what the title AI Consultant is supposed to mean, and it is why this one is worth putting on a proposal.
No universally recognized licensing body exists for AI consulting, and this is not a license. You may use the Certified AI Consultant™ designation to show that you completed the program and met its assessment requirements in your professional and client-facing work.
Twenty-four structured learning hours, eight in each area of the PMI Talent Triangle. A PMP renewal cycle requires a minimum of eight in each, so this program covers all three minimums in one enrollment.
Hours are self-reported through PMI’s Continuing Certification Requirements System. Novativ AI Academy is not a PMI Authorized Training Partner.
A bonus is something you could do without. None of these qualify, so none of them is dressed up as an extra.
Almost nobody in this market gets to hear the person on the other side of the table explain why they said no. Week eight is that conversation.
Outreach scripts and a target list framework. The discovery-to-proposal path. Proposal templates at three engagement sizes. A pricing guide with rate benchmarks. Objection responses, a statement of work checklist, and a plan for your first ninety days.
Voice clone setup. An avatar walkthrough for client updates and personalized proposal walkthroughs. LinkedIn positioning built from your own expertise. Thirty days of authority content, a presentation deck template, and disclosure guidance for anything client-facing.
Twelve short practitioner sessions on what a curriculum cannot cover. Why AI projects fail after the demo. How to tell whether a client actually has budget. How to avoid scope creep. How to turn a pilot into a retainer. When to walk away.
Each of these arrives at the point in the program where you will use it, rather than all at once on day one.
$2,997
or three payments of $1,049
Available until enrollment closes on Tuesday, October 20. From the winter cohort, the rate is $4,997.
If the program worked for you, two things.
A testimonial. A few honest sentences about what changed, in your own words.
And permission to write up your capstone as an example. What the problem was, what you designed, what you built, and what happened. You do not write it. We write it from work you have already done, and you approve every word before it goes anywhere.
The business you worked with is never named. Your client is never named. No financial figures appear. Your own name goes on it only if you want it to.
Founding cohort also receives a private sixty-minute positioning session with Merilyn covering your niche, your first offer, and who to approach first. Plus lifetime access to every future update of the curriculum and the template library.
Enroll directly, no application. Seven days from purchase to change your mind, whenever you buy. After that your place transfers once to a future cohort.
No. The week four discovery session is with a business or nonprofit you approach as a free assessment, and we provide one if you cannot find your own.
No, and there is no code. Both builds use low-code tools with recorded, step-by-step walkthroughs. If you can configure business software, you can do this.
Every session is recorded and kept. Office hours run in seven of the twelve weeks. But this is a live cohort, and the people who get the most from it are the ones in the room.
A paid plan on a general AI platform, free-tier Zapier, and a Copilot Studio trial. Under a hundred dollars across the twelve weeks.
No, and be careful of anyone who says otherwise. What it gives you is the method, the portfolio, and the evidence. What you do with them is yours.
Three payments of $1,049 for the founding cohort.
You have a capstone, a service menu, a proposal starter, and a method. The cohort community stays open for ninety days, which is when the first real engagement usually appears. Founding members keep access to curriculum updates for life.
You practice on a real organization, you build two working systems, your work is reviewed against a rubric, and Merilyn teaches every session herself.
You will still be reading about AI, following the conversations, watching the opportunities, and waiting for somebody to decide you are ready.
Or you will have led discovery with a real business, built two working systems, written a governance package, defended your recommendations under questioning, and assembled a portfolio that proves you can do the work.
The calendar reaches December either way. The difference is who you have become by the time it gets there.
The second one is available. Enrollment closes Tuesday, October 20. Enroll directly when you are ready. There is no application and nothing to wait for. If you would rather talk it through first, a fit call is available, but it is not a step you have to clear.
Cohort 1 begins Tuesday, October 27. Twelve sessions, Tuesdays, with two Thursdays in December, finishing Tuesday, January 19, 2027. Merilyn teaches every session.
