Responsible AI Professional
Everyone’s shipping AI fast. Almost nobody’s doing it responsibly. This fixes that.
RAP is a four-week certification that closes the gap between how fast we deploy AI and how slowly we get responsible about it. Built by BC + AI with The Upgrade — cohort-based, framework-driven, and built so you leave with tools you’ll use on Tuesday, not a certificate to frame.
The moment I knew we had to build this
Last October, a room of 250 people at the Vancouver Planetarium leaned in when our speaker asked, “How many of you are deploying AI at work right now?” Nearly every hand went up.
Then he asked, “How many of you have a governance framework for how you’re doing it?” The hands dropped. Maybe a dozen stayed up. That gap — between deployment speed and ethical practice — is the whole reason RAP exists.
I’ve been building technology for 25 years: the world’s first Drupal development company, Dead.net for the Grateful Dead, books on BitTorrent and iPhone photography when those were the new scary thing. I’ve seen this movie before. New tech arrives, everyone scrambles to adopt it, and the ethics conversation happens later — usually after something breaks. With AI, “later” is too late.
Why BC + AI built it
We started the Vancouver AI Meetup in 2024 with 80 people in my studio. It grew into 250+ a month at the Space Centre, 850+ on Discord, and a community that kept asking the same three questions.
“How do I evaluate whether this AI system should be deployed?”
“What frameworks actually work for assessing risk?”
“Who’s teaching this in a way that’s practical, not just academic?”
The certs that existed were either too theoretical (great for a paper, useless for Tuesday’s deployment call) or too narrow (one jurisdiction, one vendor, one technical lane). We wanted practical frameworks from many perspectives — UNESCO, OECD, NIST, IEEE — applied to real scenarios, learned in a cohort, with artifacts you keep. So we built it.
What you’ll actually learn
Four weeks, 90 minutes live each week. Not attendance-based — you pass quizzes and build a real artifact every week.
Personal AI Inventory
Map where AI already touches your work and where the risk actually lives. Artifact: your AI inventory.
Core ethics: bias, privacy, ownership
The questions that decide whether a system is fair, legal, and yours to ship. Artifact: an ethics assessment.
Societal impact: deployment, labor, environment
Who benefits, who pays, and what the rollout costs beyond the demo. Artifact: a deployment checklist.
The human element: authenticity, relationships, meaning
What we refuse to automate, and why. Artifact: an ethics impact assessment.
By the end, those four artifacts become your custom Ethics Practice Assistant — a GPT trained on your work that knows how you think about these questions. You leave with a practice, not a PDF.
Who’s teaching it
You can’t do responsible AI with just frameworks. You can’t do it with just good intentions either. So we paired both.
Kris Krüg
Two years running the Vancouver AI Meetup taught me exactly where people get stuck between the theory and Tuesday. I bring the community lens — what people actually struggle with.
Martin Lopatka
PhD in forensic statistics, master’s in AI, Mozilla alumnus with production ML behind him. He knows responsible-AI assessment frameworks cold — and he’s volunteering because this work matters to him.
Sarah Downey
20+ years in nonprofit leadership, now helping mission-driven orgs adopt AI responsibly. She keeps everything grounded in values-centered practice.
Who it’s for
Leaders & executives
You’re overseeing AI deployments and need governance that works — real tools for real decisions, not policy that dies in a drawer.
Career transitioners
You’ve got upskilling funds and want to be the person your org turns to when the hard AI questions land.
Practice-builders
You’re not here to check a box. You want frameworks and artifacts you’ll use next week.
What you don’t need: technical AI experience. We’ll explain how the systems work — but if you’re making decisions about AI (budgeting, deploying, governing), you’re qualified. This isn’t a programming course.
The bigger picture
At BC + AI we open every monthly meetup with Indigenous ceremony — not acknowledgment theater, structural grounding. We’re on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, and we try to act like it. We’ve turned down $10K sponsors whose practices conflicted with our values. When your community has principles, you live by them.
RAP is an extension of that. We’re not training people to check compliance boxes — we’re building practitioners who get that technology choices are human choices, that AI systems encode values, and that “neutral” is a position too. The orgs that lead the AI era won’t be the ones with the fastest models. They’ll be the ones with people who know to ask: Should we build this? Who gets hurt if we’re wrong? How do we keep human agency?
How to join
Cohort capped at 30 — we want real discussion and instructor access, not a webinar.
$1,500
Full certification, all four weeks, artifacts, and your Ethics Practice Assistant.
$1,200
Same program, earlier commitment.
$750
Membership is $340/yr and saves you $750 here — net money back, plus office hours, Discord, and every future cert discount.
$600
The best the math gets.
Build the practice, not just the credential
Cohort 1 is live. Register through Luma, or come to free Friday Office Hours (12–1 PT) and ask me anything first.