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 weeks, live. Tuesdays. Founding cohort begins September 29.
You have felt this.
The demo lands. The client says that is impressive. And then the questions come. What would this cost to run? Who maintains it? What happens when it gets something wrong and a customer sees it? How would we know it worked?
The room goes quiet.
Those questions are fair. They are also the job. And everything you learned about AI was about the first ten minutes of 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.
For twenty-four years I ran a technology company that 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.
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. Then it turns out how to run it was never written down. The staff who have to use it every day were never trained on it. The product owner cannot tell you whether it passed, because there was no test anyone agreed on. And the manager who inherits it is the one who finds out it did not work.
I watched projects fail because the consultants could not deliver. And I watched other consultants, with less technical depth, win that same work. Not because they knew more. Because they could show a plan, a test approach, and an answer for what happens when something goes wrong.
That difference is not a talent. It is a method. It can be taught, and it takes about twelve weeks.
Before all of that I spent ten years working as a board-certified psychotherapist, which is a strange thing for a technologist to have done and the reason I know that the hardest part of a discovery session is not the questions. It is being able to hear what the client is not saying.
I teach every session of this program myself.
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 Tuesdays, 4:00 to 6:00 PM Eastern
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 every Tuesday. Office hours in seven of the twelve weeks. No session the week of Thanksgiving.
Not theory. Each of these is something you produce during the twelve weeks, on a real organization, before you ever charge for it.
The certificate
Issued when your capstone meets the standard, not when the twelve weeks run out.
Which is the point. It is not proof you attended. 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.
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 and this program is not PMI-approved. Office hours and expert sessions are open discussion and are not included in the count.
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 Monday, September 28. 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.
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.
Either it is December and you are still reading about AI.
Or it is December and you have run discovery with a real business, built two working systems, written a governance package, defended a capstone under questioning, and have a portfolio ready to put in front of a client.
The second one is available. Enrollment closes Monday, September 28.
Founding cohort begins Tuesday, September 29. Twelve Tuesdays. Merilyn teaches every session.
