AI Literacy Certificate
The syllabus
Five domains, their weightings, and every topic inside them. Published before anybody sits the assessment, because a syllabus written afterwards is a description rather than a promise.
§ 1 — At a glance
The shape of the paper
About 30 multiple-choice questions in 30 minutes,70% to pass, free, with no prerequisite and no course requirement. Each paper is drawn fresh against the weightings below, so two candidates sit different questions and the same assessment.
| Domain | Weight | Questions | What it asks of you |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. AI fundamentals | 20% | 6 | Do you know what AI is, and what it is not? |
| 2. How AI works | 20% | 6 | Do you understand why it behaves as it does? |
| 3. Generative AI and everyday use | 20% | 6 | Can you get useful, checkable work out of it? |
| 4. Risks, limits and responsible use | 25% | 7 to 8 | Do you know where it goes wrong, and how to avoid harm? |
| 5. AI governance awareness | 15% | 4 to 5 | Do you know the rules, and who is accountable? |
The last two domains carry 40% between them. That is deliberate: they are the part daily AI users most often skip, and the part an employer is relying on when they accept a result.
§ 2 — Domain 1
AI fundamentals 20%
Do you know what AI is, and what it is not?
- What "artificial intelligence" covers, and what it does not
- Machine learning against rule-based software
- Generative AI against predictive and classification systems
- Workplace examples: assistants, copilots, document extraction, fraud detection, recommendation
- AI agents, meaning systems that take actions rather than only produce text
- The realistic capabilities and limits of current tools
§ 3 — Domain 2
How AI works 20%
Do you understand why it behaves as it does?
- Training data, models and inference, in plain language
- How language models generate text, and why that produces fabrication
- Training cutoffs, context windows, and why a tool appears to forget
- Retrieval and search, meaning answers grounded in a source
- Why the same prompt can return a different answer
- Why models are weak at exact arithmetic and counting
§ 4 — Domain 3
Generative AI and everyday use 20%
Can you get useful, checkable work out of it?
- Clear instructions: task, audience, format, constraints, examples
- Providing source material rather than relying on the model to recall it
- Iterating on a draft rather than restarting
- Choosing the right tool: assistant, spreadsheet, search engine, or none
- Checking output: citations, figures, names, dates, and omissions
- Disclosing AI assistance where an organisation requires it
§ 5 — Domain 4
Risks, limits and responsible use 25%
Do you know where it goes wrong, and how to avoid harm?
- Confidential and personal data in prompts, and enterprise against consumer tools
- Bias: how it enters through data, and how it shows in outcomes
- Over-reliance, and the pull towards accepting what a machine produced
- Intellectual property and copyright questions in generated content
- Deepfakes, impersonation and AI-assisted fraud
- Prompt injection and manipulated inputs, at awareness level
- When not to use AI at all
§ 6 — Domain 5
AI governance awareness 15%
Do you know the rules, and who is accountable?
- The EU AI Act risk tiers and prohibited practices, at awareness level
- The AI literacy duty in Article 4, as it stands after the 2026 amendment
- National approaches elsewhere, which are mostly voluntary frameworks rather than AI-specific statutes
- Organisational AI policies and acceptable-use rules
- Human oversight and accountability, meaning who signs
- Reporting an AI incident or a concern
§ 7 — Preparation
Free material that fits the syllabus
No course is required and none confers the certificate. Assessors never see how a candidate prepared. What follows is listed because it maps onto the domains above, and the cost is stated because several widely-recommended courses have moved behind a subscription while the recommendations have not caught up.
Elements of AI · University of Helsinki and MinnaLearn
Course and certificate both free. The best fit for domains 1 and 2.
AI Fluency: Framework and Foundations · Anthropic
Free, with a certificate after a final assessment. The best fit for domain 3.
AI for Everyone · DeepLearning.AI on Coursera
Free to audit. The certificate is paid. A sound non-technical overview.
Google AI Essentials · Google on Coursera
No longer free, and a subscription is required. Useful, and not needed for this assessment.
§ 8 — Out of scope
What is not assessed
No coding. No statistics or mathematics. No questions about where a control sits in any particular product, and no assumption that a candidate uses one assistant rather than another.
This is an awareness credential and the syllabus is drawn to that claim. It does not assess whether somebody can perform a role, which is what the Council’s examined certifications are for.
§ 9 — Questions
Frequently asked
What does the AI literacy test cover?
Five domains: AI fundamentals, how AI works, generative AI in everyday use, risks and responsible use, and governance awareness. Every topic in each is listed on this page, and the paper is drawn against that list. An item that maps to no published topic is a defect in the item bank rather than a hard question, and is treated as one.
How many questions is it, and how long?
About 30 multiple-choice questions in 30 minutes, which is roughly a minute each. The clock starts when you press Start and does not pause. The pass mark is 70%.
Do I need to study everything listed?
No. The list is what may be assessed, not a course to complete. Most working adults who use AI tools thoughtfully already hold the first three domains and lose marks in the last two, which is why those two carry the larger share between them.
Is there a course I have to take first?
No course is required, none confers the certificate, and no assessor sees how any candidate prepared. The free third-party material listed here is suggested because it fits the syllabus, not because the Council has any arrangement with the publishers.
What is not assessed?
No coding, no statistics, no mathematics, and no questions about where a button sits in any particular product. The assessment is about judgement, not about tools, and a candidate who has never opened a specific assistant is not disadvantaged.
§ 10 — Next
Ready to sit it?
The assessment is free, takes 30 minutes, and returns a result scored by domain. If you would rather check where you stand first, the practice test takes five.