AI Security: Protect the AI Your Company Uses
Signature Course No. 272 — A Signature AI Socratic Coaching Course.
No experience needed — your coach starts where you are.
A New Kind of Learning
Socratic coaching, delivered by an agentic AI coach.
Not a course you watch. An AI coach you work with.
The Lighthouse Coach begins by discovering how you think about the subject, teaches what is missing, and gives you realistic practice before asking you to prove that you can use it. You may test out of concepts you already understand, while capstones turn the learning into a practical plan, decision, conversation, or other real-world result.
The curriculum is deliberately authored; the AI delivers it through coaching. It is not an AI randomly generating lessons.
A coach that teaches by asking — not by lecturing
The Lighthouse Coach is an AI Socratic coach built on Cognosco Learning's AI Security: Protect the AI Your Company Uses course, in the Risk, Safety & Compliance category. It does not play videos at you. It holds a conversation: it asks you a question, listens to your answer, names the misconception it hears, affirms what you got right, and asks the next question — the way a great coach works in the room.
Your company already runs AI systems. A customer chatbot, a drafting assistant, a summariser reading your documents. Each one can be steered by the text it reads, can leak what it can reach, acts under somebody's identity, and depends on a vendor who can change it overnight. This course teaches you to defend those systems as systems — not the friendly chat window, but the whole assembly behind it: model, prompt, data, tools, vendor and people.
You learn to see reach first. Map any AI system into its components and flows, grade each part by what it can reach, and understand the confusion at the model's heart — it reads your instructions and a stranger's sentences in the same voice. Then recognise the attack classes that exploit it: steering by the person typing, steering by the documents the system reads, and the quiet leakage of data through ordinary helpful conversation.
It works in two movements. First, Module 1 — Know the System You Are Defending — work through Concepts 1–9, finishing with The Coppergate Assessment; then, Module 2 — Build the Defences and Keep Them Alive — work through Concepts 10–18, finishing with The Defended Estate.
Both capstones produce real artifacts — a board-ready security assessment of a live claims assistant, map, reach inventory, leakage verdicts and findings list complete; and the defended-estate plan, design plus programme in one document, that rebuilds the estate after its incident year.
The safety standard is part of the course. This course teaches recognition, architecture and controls at defensive strength only. It contains no working exploit material and no step-by-step attack procedures: every exercise asks you to map, bound, detect or respond, and testing means testing your own systems, under written authorisation, with synthetic data. One discipline runs through all of it — state what the system can reach, in plain words, before you discuss how it behaves. Behaviour varies; reach is fate.
The course is self-paced and always on — roughly 30 minutes per concept, about 9 hours in full, taken in as many sittings as you like. You can type your answers, or talk out loud: the Voice Coach speaks its questions and listens to your spoken replies. Learners who already know the material can test out concept by concept.
AI Security: Protect the AI Your Company Uses is part of The Lighthouse Signature Series — the online counterpart to the one-day, in-person learning Cognosco Learning has delivered since 2002.
Course Facts
One full concept, coached end to end — free: verify your email and we’ll send you a link to start.
Already enrolled? Enter the course →
Diagnose → Learn & Practice → Prove → Capstone
Every learner moves through the same discipline a Cognosco instructor would insist on in the room.
Diagnose
The Coach starts where the course starts: with the map. Before any control is discussed, name the assembly — model, prompt, history, tools, knowledge store and vendor — and what each part can reach. Every concept opens with three questions that locate where you actually stand, and your answers shape how deeply the Coach works the concept with you. Everyone begins with Module 1 — no skipping the foundations you only think you have.
Learn & Practice
Work each concept in conversation with the Coach — spoken or written — then practice it against realistic situations until it holds up.
Prove
Every concept ends in proof: answer the check cold and demonstrate the skill. Know it already? Test out and take credit immediately.
Capstone
Finish with two capstones — The Coppergate Assessment for Module 1 and The Defended Estate for Module 2 — that pull the whole course together, and earn the certificate.
What You'll Learn
Reach before wording. In every concept the decisive question is what a steered, confused or curious system can reach — data, tools, audiences — not how firmly its prompt is worded. Bound the reach and the wording becomes a detail.
Module 1 builds the defender's picture. The map and the mechanism; steering by users and by documents; leakage through conversation; and the governance of data, identity and outputs — closing with the discovery of the estate you actually have.
Module 2 builds the defences. Vendor diligence, architecture that fails small, the protected knowledge store, detection tuned to conversation, governed testing, the AI incident playbook, the standing duties, genuine human oversight, and the programme that keeps it all alive.
And it holds its line throughout. Assume steering will sometimes succeed; bound its consequences by architecture; watch the seams with logs and signals; convert every incident into permanent tests and memory.
What you will learn
- Map and bound any AI system: its components, flows, grades and the confusion at its heart
- Recognise and blunt the attack classes aimed at AI: steering by users, steering by documents, leakage, poisoning
- Govern data, identity and outputs: bands and vendor terms, least-privilege tool use, destination-based handling
- Run the standing discipline: diligence, architecture, detection, testing, incident response, oversight and programme
Everything in the course
- All 18 concepts of AI Security: Protect the AI Your Company Uses, in 2 modules
- A starting-point check first — the Coach finds where you actually stand before teaching
- Learn, Practice, Prove for every concept — no passive video watching
- A test-out on every concept: prove you know it and move on
- The Voice Coach: talk with the Coach out loud — it speaks, listens, and replies
- A personal Learner Record of your work across the course
- Two capstone exercises: The Coppergate Assessment and The Defended Estate
- A printable session summary whenever you pause
- The Lighthouse Coach completion certificate (Signature Series)
- Your progress is saved as you go — stop anytime, resume where you left off
Built for the people handed an AI proposal
Security architects and leads — asked to approve, assess or defend AI systems their organisation is adopting; and IT and platform owners connecting assistants to data, tools and vendors, who need the control set in plain language.
Compliance, privacy and risk professionals — whose duties now run through chat windows and retrieval stores; and service and operations managers running customer-facing assistants, who will meet the first odd output and need to know what it means.
Anyone handed an AI proposal — and expected to say, with evidence, whether it is safe to run. The course assumes no prior AI-security specialism: every term is defined inside the judgement it serves.
Prefer to learn live and in person? The same material anchors Cognosco's one-day programs — browse the in-person catalog.
Start with The Coppergate Assessment
$195 — introductory price. One payment. No subscription, no password to manage.
Here is exactly what happens when you enroll:
- Pay securely with Stripe — you are taken straight into the course
- Create your learner profile and begin the Module 1 starting-point check
- Save the access key you are given — it restores your enrollment on any device
- Learn at your pace; your progress is stored in your browser on your device
For the full voice experience, use Chrome and allow the microphone when asked. Typing your answers works everywhere, all the time. Questions before you enroll? Email hello@cognoscolearning.com.
Before you enroll
What is a Socratic coaching session?
A conversation, not a video. Your coach asks a question; you answer — out loud by voice, or by typing — and the coach responds to what you said: naming the misconception it hears, affirming what you got right, and asking the next question. You advance only when you have mastered each concept, so a finished course means the learning held.
How long does it take — and how long do I have?
About 30 minutes per concept. Learn in sittings of any length; your progress is saved as you go. You have a full year from purchase to finish, and you can revisit and retake within that year.
What does the certificate verify?
That you completed every concept and both capstones of this course. Anyone can confirm a Cognosco certificate online — enter its certificate ID on our verification page.
What if it isn't for me — what are the refunds?
If you have not started, cancel for a full refund within seven days of purchase. Once you have started, there is no cash refund — stop before finishing and we credit the full amount you paid toward any other course in the library (credit valid one year from your original purchase). Once you complete the course, no refund or credit applies.
More Signature Courses are coming
AI Security: Protect the AI Your Company Uses is Signature Course No. 272. Leave your email and we'll send you news of future Signature Courses and Lighthouse updates as they are announced — nothing else.