Answers, gathered.

CBEA, the Canadian Business Edutainment Association, is a Toronto-based Canadian business association built around four pillars: Education, Growth, Edutainment, and Community. Our flagship program is the Certified AI Advisor (CAA™) credential. We are independent, member-led, and unaffiliated with any single university, vendor, or political party.

Because attention is the first ingredient of any curriculum, and we refuse to pretend otherwise. The serious learning we have benefited from has almost always been delivered by people who were also generous, engaging, and frequently funny. Edutainment is not a lowering of standards, it is a raising of the standard for how rigorous ideas should be communicated to working adults.

CBEA is incorporated as a Canadian association and operates on a member-funded model. We do not currently hold federal registered-charity status, although that designation is on our medium-term roadmap. We publish a transparent annual statement of where member fees go.

CBEA was founded by Canadian operators with backgrounds in agency leadership, education, and applied AI. Day-to-day operations sit with a small core team in Toronto, with rotating faculty drawn from active CBEA members and guest practitioners. Leadership and faculty are listed on our About page.

The Certified AI Advisor is CBEA's signature program, a twelve-week, eight-module curriculum culminating in a four-week capstone advisory engagement with a real Canadian small or mid-sized business. It is taught in the evenings, recorded for replay, and capped at 40 members per cohort.

No. The program assumes you are a working professional, not a software engineer. We teach the technical skills you need, prompting, agent design, automation, evaluation, from a starting point of curiosity rather than computer science. The majority of our members come from non-technical backgrounds.

Plan for six to eight hours per week during the twelve weeks of the program, including the two live evening sessions. The capstone period is roughly the same. We have built the rhythm assuming you have a full-time job, but it is not a passive program, and you should not enroll planning to skim it.

Live, with full recordings. Tuesdays and Thursdays, 7:00–9:00pm ET, on Zoom. Every session is recorded and posted within 24 hours with searchable transcripts. We expect roughly 70% live attendance from each member and have built the rest to be properly replayable.

Primarily English. French-language office hours and supporting materials are available on request, we have a French-bilingual faculty member assigned to each cohort. We can also accommodate Persian and Kurdish language office hours by special arrangement, in keeping with the founders' background.

Yes, the Certified AI Advisor (CAA™) designation, listed in the public CBEA Registry with a unique credential ID. The credential is verifiable, post-nominal, and licensed in perpetuity to anyone who passes the program in good standing.

The CAA™ is a private industry designation issued by CBEA, not a regulated professional licence (in the way that, say, the CPA designation is). It is closer in nature to credentials like the CFA, PMP, or AWS Certified Solutions Architect, meaningful to the people who hire, but not a substitute for sector-specific regulated licensure.

Every CAA™ holder is listed in the public CBEA Registry with their name, cohort, and a unique credential ID. Employers can verify any claim by entering the credential ID at cbea.ca/verify. There is no paid-only verification path and no off-line CAA™ credential.

It does not expire, but it does require a light annual currency check, two short modules and a brief self-assessment, to keep the designation active. This is to ensure the credential remains genuinely current as the field changes. The currency check is included in alumni membership and takes most members under three hours per year.

Founding cohort pricing is $999 CAD, a $500 reduction from list. Pricing returns to $1,499 with Cohort 03. Payment plans are available; please reach out to enroll@cbea.ca to set one up. Most self-employed and incorporated Canadians can claim the fee as a professional development expense.

Full refunds are available up to seven days after the first live session of each cohort, no questions asked. After that point, the program is non-refundable, though we will accommodate genuine emergencies on a case-by-case basis and roll members into a later cohort where appropriate.

Yes. We reserve a small number of scholarship places in each cohort for full-time students, members of Indigenous communities, and applicants for whom the program would otherwise be financially out of reach. Apply through enroll@cbea.ca with a short note about your situation.