A new kind of Canadian business association.
We started CBEA because the Canadian business association we wanted to join didn't exist yet, a place where serious credentials, working community, and a sense of humour could share a roof.
Origins.
CBEA, the Canadian Business Edutainment Association, was founded in Toronto by operators who had spent a decade inside Canadian agencies, classrooms, and startups, and who kept noticing the same gap. Canada has world-class universities and a vibrant continuing-education scene. It has trade associations for almost every industry. What it lacked, in 2024, was a single place where a working professional could come to learn a new frontier skill, sit beside other people doing the same, earn a credential people actually recognized, and then put that skill to work the following week.
Our founding question was almost embarrassingly simple: what would a Canadian business association look like if you designed it today? If you assumed people learn best in cohorts, not lectures. If you assumed attention is scarce, and that the best teachers are also the best storytellers. If you assumed every new member was already busy, already curious, and already partway through a career, and that what they really needed was leverage, not theory.
Mission.
Our mission is to make Canadian businesses, and the Canadians who run them, demonstrably better with AI and modern technology. We do that through four pillars, Education, Growth, Edutainment, and Community, each backed by working programs, a public-facing journal, and a credential we stand behind. We expect our members to ship. We expect our faculty to be operators. We expect our content to be useful within forty-eight hours of you encountering it.
We are not in the business of selling certificates. We are in the business of making people noticeably better at their work. The Certified AI Advisor (CAA™) credential is a forcing function for that: a public commitment, made in front of peers, that the person carrying it can do specific, named things, scope an AI advisory engagement, design a workflow, ship an agent, write a privacy review under PIPEDA, and present an executive-grade roadmap to a real Canadian leadership team.
Philosophy.
The "edutainment" in our name is deliberate, and we use it without apology. Serious learning does not have to feel grim. Some of the best lectures we have ever attended were also the funniest. Some of the most useful operating manuals are conversational. Some of the most rigorous research is delivered by people who genuinely enjoy explaining their work. We believe attention is the first ingredient of any curriculum, and that you do not get to skip that step by claiming to be serious.
At the same time, edutainment is not vibes-and-good-feelings. Every CBEA program ends with an artefact: a credential earned, a capstone shipped, a workflow deployed, a written advisory plan delivered to a real client. We grade on output. We expect our members to graduate with something they can show in an interview.
Built by two, for many.
CBEA was founded by Amir Vincent and Armin Baghernejad, two practitioners who believe Canadian business deserves an institution of its own, one that teaches the work, certifies the skill, and convenes the people doing it.
Their conviction is simple. The next decade of Canadian enterprise will be defined by the operators who can put artificial intelligence to work responsibly, profitably, and at speed. CBEA exists to train those operators.
- Amir VincentCo-Founder
- Armin BaghernejadCo-Founder
The Canadian context.
We are unapologetically Canadian. That means PIPEDA-aware privacy practice in every workflow we teach. It means watching Bill C-27 and the Artificial Intelligence and Data Act closely, and updating our curriculum the same week the legislation moves. It means tracking the federal AI Strategy and the provincial procurement rules that govern how AI gets deployed in Ontario, Quebec, BC, Alberta, and the Atlantic provinces. It means bilingual programming when our members ask for it, and a genuine attempt to serve Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Calgary as one network rather than four solitudes.
Canadian businesses are at a particular moment. Our productivity gap with the United States has widened for the better part of two decades. AI, deployed well, is one of the few technologies that could meaningfully close that gap at the level of the firm. CBEA exists to make that deployment competent, ethical, and routine, one advisor, one workflow, one company at a time.
Vision.
By the end of 2027, we want every mid-market Canadian company to know a Certified AI Advisor by name. We want CAA™ to be the credential a hiring manager looks for when she opens a resume. We want our journal to be the first thing a Canadian executive reads on Sunday morning. We want our annual convening, small, focused, in person, to be the most useful day on the calendar of the people who attend it. And we want the second cohort of every program to be twice as good as the first, because that is how associations earn their longevity.
CBEA is a young association. It is also a serious one. If any of the above resonates, you are exactly the person we are building this for.
The founders, Toronto