Size
Fourteen is large enough that you hear how the same tool fails in a municipality, a shop, and a nonprofit in the same evening. It is small enough that we can put your artefact on the table and stay with it. Past that number, the session becomes a lecture with a question box, and the “bring your own work” promise turns into theatre.
We run evening and morning streams on Eastern Time so people can join from across the country without pretending Vancouver and St. John’s share a lunch hour. In-person seats are in Toronto, Suite 610 on Spadina Avenue. Online participants are not an afterthought: they use the same briefs, the same review, the same recordings.
When a team books a closed room, fourteen still applies unless we are running a two-day intensive with a different contract: more people, less individual review, a shared rule as the artefact. We say which format you are buying before you pay. We would rather keep a waitlist than add a fifteenth chair and dilute the review.
The hour
We start from a job that already exists in someone’s week: a letter, a schedule, a briefing, a knowledge-base page. If the task cannot be de-identified, we substitute a cousin of it. We do not invent a case study to make the slides pretty.
We demonstrate a method on a sample we prepared. The showing includes a failure. Fluency is the risk; if the room only sees a clean demo, people copy confidence they have not earned.
You try the method on your own (safe) material while we are still in the call. Silence in this block is normal. We would rather you wrestle than watch us type.
We read. We mark invented facts, leaked identifiers, and instructions that will not survive a colleague. The artefact is not done when it sounds good. It is done when it can be checked.
Limits
We do not sell software licenses, and we do not take a cut from a vendor because you chose their assistant after class. You will hear tool names. You will not be walked into a shopping cart. If a platform is the honest fit for a job, we will say so and we will also say what it cannot do.
We do not promise that a course will replace a colleague, a translator, a bookkeeper, or a lawyer. Applied AI, as we teach it, is a method for drafting, sorting, and checking. It is not a headcount plan. If a manager asks us to frame the program as a way to shrink a team, we will decline that framing.
We do not build production systems that move money, grant access, or give medical or legal answers. A studio course can leave you with a documented assistant and a test log. Connecting that assistant to your identity provider, your payments, or your case system is work for people who are accountable for those systems — not a six-week classroom.
We do not issue legal opinions, privacy impact assessments, or accessibility certifications. Privacy-Aware AI Practice ends with a draft rule and a red-line list. Your counsel, your privacy office, or the commissioner you answer to remains the authority. We will say “this is practical training, not legal advice” in the room, not only on the website.
After the last class
You keep the slide-less notes, the templates, the checklists, and any instruction sets you wrote in class. We host the current versions for twelve months and mark the date on each file so you can see what changed when a tool moved. We do not lock the useful pages behind a second product.
For thirty days after the final session you can write to the collective with questions about the artefact you built — not with a request that we operate it for you. If a file needs a substantial rebuild, that is a new piece of work and we will say so.
Recordings of live sessions (where we have consent to record) and transcripts are part of the materials pack for people who missed a week or who work more slowly in English. They are for enrolled participants, not for publishing.
Delivery
Live sessions are the core. We record when the room agrees, and we supply transcripts so that catching up is not a test of bandwidth or of how fast someone speaks. If your connection is unstable, we will set you up to work from the notes and join for review rather than pretend a frozen video is attendance.
The Spadina Avenue room is in a building with elevator access. If you need a specific seating arrangement, captioning beyond our standard transcript, or a document in a particular format, tell us on the intake call. We will say what we can do in this space and what we cannot, before you enrol — not after you arrive.
We teach in English. We do not currently run French-language cohorts. If your team’s working language is French, we can still work on English artefacts and on a protocol for translation; we will not pretend we are offering a French classroom.
In the room
Do not bring files that identify a client, patient, student, donor, employee, or child. Do not bring unpublished complaints, health information, or anything you would not put on a postcard. If your example needs those details to make sense, it is the wrong example for class. We will help you strip it or we will give you a cousin of the task.
De-identification is a skill we teach in the first sessions: drop names, file numbers, exact addresses, rare job titles, and any combination that would point to one person in a small town. A model does not get to see your real week until that week has been made boring on purpose.
We do not require you to create accounts with a vendor in order to sit in the room. When we use a shared demo tool, we use sample data we control. Your organization’s approved tools stay your organization’s decision. We will work with what you are allowed to use, including “not that, not yet.”
Tell us the course you have in mind, whether you need evenings or mornings, and whether you are coming as one person or as a team. We will answer with dates and with an honest note if the fit is wrong.