This newsletter provides practical guidance, tools and resources for the real work of governing safe, secure and lawful AI.

Newsletter #57 - May 2026

Feature Article

A new path to demonstrated practitioner capability in AI governance.

By James Kavanagh

Law has supervised practice before admission to the bar. Medicine has residency. Engineering has years of oversight by senior engineers before obtaining a charter. Each serious profession recognizes that capability builds in stages, and that different stages deserve different kinds of recognition. AI governance is young, and the credentials we use are still catching up to that reality.

In the last edition, I wrote about why professional certification is a great first step that puts you at the start line for a career in AI Governance, an entry point of foundational knowledge. Since then, hundreds of you have taken the assessment, and the patterns are clear. Knowledge scores well across most practitioner profiles. Judgment and Influence - the two dimensions that separate governance you can talk about, from governance that actually moves an organization - score noticeably lower. The gap is real, and it's largely the gap between knowing and doing.

This week's article is about how we start closing that gap, introducing our Foundation Track Cohort and Governance Foundations Practitioner Award.

​Read the full article​

From the Blog

The Three Leaps in Your AI Governance Career.

By James Kavanagh. Published 24 April 2026.

The feature article above introduces the credential pathway we've built. This earlier piece is the framework underneath it - and the reason the pathway is structured the way it is.

The practice leap, from knowing to doing. The adaptive leap, from building to influencing. The leadership leap, from individual capability to organizational capacity. Each one shows up clearly in the data from over two hundred practitioner assessments. Eighty-seven percent of early-stage practitioners score higher on Knowledge than Application. Forty-one percent of all respondents have Judgment as their weakest dimension. Less than ten percent self-assess at Proficient level. The leaps are real, sequential, and uncomfortable.

The article also tells the personal story behind the framework - my career leaps from safety engineering on chemical plants, to leading security at Microsoft to a difficult email to Satya Nadella that changed how I understood professional impact, and my work leading regulatory engagement at Amazon. Each leap is one I had to make myself, with the help of mentors and a lot of grinding repetition. If you're standing before one of those leaps right now, this might help you see where you are, what comes next, and give you the confidence to take the leap.

​Read the full article​

What we're working on

Compliance has been the most popular specialty domain, followed by Risk, as voted on by our community (based on specialty course waiting list numbers) - so it's the AI Compliance Track that will be the first to be released in July 2026 (or we hope, before). There are six domain-specific tracks in total, all building from the Foundation Track, including compliance, risk, engineering, evaluation, operations, and leadership.

Join specialty course waitlists here.

We're also close to releasing our standalone Practitioner Award, AI Governance Foundations, for those students who have or are completing the Foundation Track self-paced, and want to be assessed to earn this credential. NB. The credential will be available to all students enrolled in practitioner cohorts as part of their cohort fee.

Learn more about AI Career Pro Practitioner Awards and other credentials here.

As always, reach out if you have questions or need further clarity on any of our work, or if you need help navigating your professional path. We're learning with you and really appreciate your enquiries and feedback.

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