XCPD-747 - AI Ethics and Governance Leadership

Course Description

The Executive Certificate in AI Ethics and Governance Leadership prepares experienced professionals to design, lead, audit, and defend the governance of artificial intelligence in government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and companies. The program serves the emerging profession of AI ethics and governance, whose positions include Chief AI Officer staff, AI Ethics Officer, Responsible AI Lead, AI Governance Manager, AI Policy Analyst, and Director of Ethics and Compliance with responsibility for AI. It also serves incumbent professionals in compliance, risk, privacy, audit, legal, policy, and information security functions who have been assigned AI governance within an existing role.

The program is organized into eight weekly modules and a two-week capstone practicum, for a total of 60 contact hours over ten weeks. The eight modules address the technical foundations of AI systems for governance leaders, governance frameworks and program design, law and regulation, ethical reasoning and responsible AI practice, risk analysis across the AI lifecycle, auditing and investigations, monitoring and governance reporting, and the leadership of a governance function in each of the three sectors. The capstone practicum integrates the work of the eight modules into a complete governance program that each participant defends before a panel of faculty and practitioners.

Course Objectives

1. Analyze the architecture, data dependencies, performance characteristics, and failure modes of AI and generative AI systems in order to determine the governance controls each system requires.
2. Design a complete AI governance program for a specific government agency, nonprofit organization, or company by adapting the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, ISO/IEC 42001, and the OECD AI Principles into a charter, policies, decision rights, and workforce training.
3. Evaluate AI systems and proposed use cases against current law, regulation, and public policy, including the European Union Artificial Intelligence Act, OMB Memorandum M-25-21, state automated decision-making statutes, privacy law, and sector rules, and determine the obligations that apply.
4. Construct a defensible lifecycle risk register for an AI system that scores likelihood and impact, assigns ownership, and specifies treatment across bias, privacy, security, safety, reliability, and third-party risk.
5. Design AI audits, assurance reviews, and internal investigations, and defend the findings to the evidentiary standard that regulators, auditors, inspectors general, and counsel expect.
6. Construct governance monitoring dashboards and recurring reporting packages, and evaluate deployed AI systems against quantitative fairness, accuracy, drift, and policy adherence metrics.
7. Justify ethically contested governance decisions to senior leadership, boards, and oversight bodies by integrating ethical reasoning, stakeholder analysis, legal judgment, and persuasive written and oral argument.
8. Formulate the structure, staffing, resource requirements, and implementation plan for an AI governance function suited to the constraints of the participant's own sector, and lead its adoption.