Build AI systems that hold under production load
GIA Practitioner is a nine-module certification for teams architecting agentic commerce systems. You learn to design governance that passes an audit, survives its failure modes, and operates at scale — because it was designed for those conditions rather than retrofitted after them.
Nine modules. Three credential tiers. Real audit data. Every lesson is grounded in production catalog work, not abstractions.
What you will learn
Consequence Tiers & HITL gate design
How to formalise a human-in-the-loop gate so that it actually freezes the decision — and how to recognise the decorative gates that do not.
The Mandate Pattern & Freeze–Sign–Bind
The three-move governance sequence four separate industries converged on independently, and how to implement it in a commerce context.
Plausibility Corridor & evidence chains
Setting decision bounds that respect real business constraints, and producing the evidence trail that makes a decision defensible afterwards.
Audit frameworks & catalog readiness
Auditing production systems against a deterministic rubric, including the census-versus-sample distinction that decides whether a finding is even sayable.
Capstone & certification defence
Design your own governance architecture, then defend it to the panel. You pass by withstanding the questions, not by submitting the document.
Three credential tiers
Practitioner
Command the core patterns and the vocabulary. You can read a governance architecture and say what is missing.
Foundation level
Auditor
Audit production systems against the GIA standard and produce findings a merchandising team can act on.
Intermediate level
Authority
Design governance architectures from first principles, and defend the design decisions under challenge.
Advanced level
Grounded in real audit work
The teaching corpus is built from catalog audits run against live retail product data using the GIA rubric. The recurring pattern across those catalogs — missing image descriptions, absent structured identifiers, single-level taxonomy — is the reason agentic commerce quietly underperforms on most retail catalogs. You learn on the same material, anonymised.
Enrol
Cohort-based programme: Q4 2026, limited places. Self-paced track available on demand.
Questions
What does it cost?
Cohort-based: £3,500. Self-paced: £1,995. Authority tier upgrade: £2,000 in addition. Invoiced; purchase orders accepted.
How long does it take?
Cohort: eight weeks at roughly five hours per week. Self-paced: twelve weeks on your own schedule.
Do I need deep AI experience?
No. The assumption is that you already know how to build and deploy. The subject here is how to govern what you have built.
Is the credential recognised?
The Practitioner tier issues an OpenBadge 3.0 credential, which is verifiable and portable. The Auditor and Authority tiers issue formal certificates against the GIA standard.
Not sure which tier fits? Take the free 30-minute consultation first →