Course Syllabus

• Course 1: Your AI Opportunity in IT

  Are you trapped in reactive mode — spending your days resolving the same tickets, triaging an endless stream of alerts, patching under pressure, and acting as the human integration layer between tools that don't talk to each other? You are not alone. IT professionals across every industry are hitting the same wall: human capacity simply cannot keep up with the demands placed on the function. This course will help you understand why the old model is breaking and what comes next.

  What You’ll Learn

  • Identify the fundamental tension between proactive engineering work and reactive firefighting that affects every IT professional.
  • Analyze the forces, including ticket volume, operational toil, alert overload, fragmented tooling, and the run-versus-change tension, that prove the traditional operating model is unsustainable.
  • Differentiate generative AI from previous IT technology investments and understand why natural language changes who can harness it.
  • Evaluate real-world case studies of organizations achieving transformational results through AI-enabled IT.
  • Articulate what it means to be AI-Forward and the competitive and career risks of delayed adoption.

• Course 2: The AI-Powered Playbook for IT

  With thousands of AI tools, every vendor bolting "agentic" onto their roadmap, and a new model or headline every week, how do you avoid scattered experiments that waste time and fail to deliver real value? This course gives you a strategic mental model to rise above the noise and focus on what actually moves the needle for your team, your organization, and your career in IT.

  What You’ll Learn

  • Apply the 3 A's Framework to categorize any AI opportunity by its value and transformation potential.
  • Identify automation opportunities, including ticket deflection, alert correlation, access provisioning, and patch prioritization, that eliminate repetitive work and give you time back.
  • Leverage augmentation to enhance your human skills with AI copilots for incident investigation, code and script generation, posture reporting, and vendor risk synthesis.
  • Envision acceleration opportunities, including AI SRE teammates, closed-loop operations, and governed agentic operating models, that reinvent how IT works.
  • Prioritize opportunities using targeted diagnostic questions grounded in your specific role.

• Course 3: Finding Your AI Advantage in IT

  About This Course

  You have brainstormed ideas, but how do you move from interesting possibilities to a prioritized action plan? How do you find the opportunities you might be missing and decide where to invest your limited time and energy? This course provides the systematic methodology to turn abstract ideas into executable strategy.

  What You’ll Learn

  • Unbundle your role and workflows into component tasks to discover AI opportunities hiding in plain sight.
  • Assess each task for AI applicability, time-savings potential, and implementation feasibility using Value and Ability ratings.
  • Articulate strategic problems as clear Problem and Value statements that build compelling, quantified business cases.
  • Prioritize opportunities using a structured methodology that balances value, ability, and strategic alignment.
  • Create a balanced portfolio of quick wins and strategic bets, including Quick Wins, Sweet Spots, and Moonshots, that builds momentum over time.

• Course 4: Applied AI for IT

  You have the plan, but how do you actually execute? With thousands of AI tools on the market and new ones launching daily, how do you find the right technology for your specific use cases? And what hands-on skills do you need to get real value from AI starting today? This capstone course has the answers.

  What You’ll Learn

  • Navigate the AI technology landscape using the Three Tiers of AI Technology to minimize risk and maximize the tools you already own.
  • Evaluate AI vendors using a structured vetting framework that separates real solutions from marketing hype.
  • Master a simple prompting framework, Role, Task, Context, Examples, and Format, that dramatically improves AI output quality.
  • Build custom GPTs that turn your best prompts into reusable, shareable applications for your team.
  • Leverage AI-powered deep research to synthesize complex technical and vendor information in minutes instead of hours.
  • Create grounded knowledge bases with Google NotebookLM for accurate, citable answers from your own trusted documents.

• Final Exam

  Upon successful completion, you will earn a Professional Certificate for the AI for IT course series.