Frequently asked questions

No. The Council is a private industry certification body. Its certifications are industry credentials. They are not government licensing, they are not required by law, and holding one does not confer any regulatory status. Any organisation claiming otherwise on the Council's behalf is misrepresenting it.

ISO/IEC 17024, the international standard for bodies certifying persons: independence of examination from preparation, a documented competency framework, a defensible cut score, and an appeals process independent of the assessor. That is a design claim about how the scheme is built, not a conformity claim, and it is never to be read as certification or endorsement under the standard.

Two certifications, both in finance and accounting: the Fundamentals grade for a professional's own AI-assisted work, and the Professional grade for the person who sets the terms on which a finance function uses AI. Ahead of them sits the Council’s flagship, the Certified Applied AI Associate (AIAC-CAAA), its fee waived by a coupon code from the AI-Readiness Check. The Council started with one discipline on purpose, and will add others as it can examine them to the same standard.

Fundamentals if you use AI in your own finance or accounting work and want to show you can verify what it produces and answer for it. Professional if you decide how a finance function uses AI, which controls change when a model sits inside them, what is disclosed about a model-produced estimate, and what is shown to an auditor or a committee. Neither requires the other. Both certify using AI competently inside the profession, and neither certifies assurance of anybody else’s AI system. Every credential page states who it is for and who it is not.

Yes. The Certified Applied AI Associate assessment carries a fee of US$199, and a coupon code waives it in full. Anyone receives one by completing the AI-Readiness Check, sharing their result on LinkedIn and pasting the address of the post on their result page. One fee, or one code, covers every attempt. The assessment is 30 minutes online, unproctored and machine-marked, and a holder may write AIAC-CAAA after their name. Most people should start there.

It became the Certified Applied AI Associate, the Council’s flagship credential. Every holder of the AI Literacy Certificate has been upgraded to the Certified Applied AI Associate, with the same identifier, the same issue date and the same verification link. The assessment is the same, so there is nothing to retake.

Yes. The first holders of the Certified Applied AI Associate are on the register now. For the finance and accounting credentials, enrolment is open, and the first candidates are sitting now. Every credential appears on the public register at the moment of issue, so any claim can be checked there; a claim that does not verify against the register is false, and can be reported through the contact page.

A finance and accounting credential is valid for two years, then revalidation — and an active membership throughout, without which it expires at the end of the term. A lifetime credential in a field changing this fast would misrepresent current competence. The Certified Applied AI Associate does not expire and carries its issue date instead. Withdrawn and expired credentials remain on the public register with their status shown.

Every credential carries a unique identifier of the form AIAC-2026-000001 and a public register entry, so a claim can be checked without contacting the holder — the lookup is live on the verify page. The holder’s name appears only where the holder has consented to listing; without that consent the register confirms the credential exists and is in force but withholds the name, so a holder who wants to be verifiable by name should consent to being listed.

US$695 for the Fundamentals examination and US$895 for the Professional, with the first year of membership included. Membership then renews at US$165 a year, or US$275 for a two-year term. The Certified Applied AI Associate carries a fee of US$199, waived by a coupon code from the AI-Readiness Check. Nothing is payable until you register for an examination, and there is nothing else to buy. The examination fee includes the Council’s self-paced video course.

To sit, no. To keep a credential in force, yes — the first year comes with any paid examination, and if membership lapses the credential expires. Members pay a reduced rate on further examinations and on revalidation; that rate publishes with the rest of the fee schedule. What membership never buys is standing: within the individual plan, grade follows the credential you hold, never the amount you have paid.

There is no sitting date to move. Once the fee is paid, you take the examination any day in the 90 days that follow. Until you begin it, you can cancel for a 75% refund. Once you have begun, or once the 90 days have passed unused, there is no refund. A delivered examination is not refundable because the result was a fail, since the service was the assessment and not the outcome. Where something outside your control stopped you sitting, exceptional circumstances are considered on evidence, up to 2 days after the access period ends but never once a result has issued. Where the Council cannot deliver the examination, you choose a fresh access period or a full refund. And if the consumer law where you live gives you better rights than any of this, that law applies.

Each finance paper has 65 multiple choice questions with one best answer, taken in 2 hours. 60 are scored and 5 are unscored trial questions mixed among them, which never count. The questions are applied, set in the situations of finance and accounting work, and ask what you would do or conclude rather than what a framework says. It is sat remotely in Chrome or Edge on a desktop, recorded, one question at a time, and in one sitting. Your paper is drawn at random from the live forms when you begin, and its questions and options are shuffled for you. It is marked by machine against the form's key, and the pass mark is 70% of the scored questions. A member of staff reviews the recording before the result is released.

Once begun, the examination is taken in one sitting. Closing, reloading or reopening the examination window ends it, the paper is held at your last saved answers, and you write to support. Where the cause was technical, the Council may allow one resumption, with the time that remained when the sitting stopped. Leaving the examination window or full screen hides the paper with a warning. Leaving it more than twice, or staying away longer than 10 seconds, submits the paper. If the screen share or the camera stops, the paper is hidden until it is restored, and it is submitted if it is not restored within 30 seconds. An interrupted sitting that nobody acts on is closed as submitted after 7 days.

Yes, once. A credential carries the holder’s name, so identity is verified once before any examination is sat: a photograph of a government-issued identity document and a short face check, handled by a specialist verification provider. The Council receives the outcome of that check and the name as it appears on the document — it never holds the document images or the biometric data. The provider that does holds them for two years and then deletes them, or sooner if the candidate asks. That verified name is the name the credential and the register entry carry, in place of the name given at sign-up. Registering and paying do not wait on verification. Sitting does. It applies to every examination the Council marks, and to candidates who registered before the check existed. The Certified Applied AI Associate assessment is the exception. You confirm you are eighteen or over, and no identity documents are needed for that certificate. A credential is a statement about a named person; the Council establishes that name rather than assuming it.

However suits you. The examination fee includes the Council’s self-paced video course, and using it is optional. Every credential page publishes its examination domains today, and each full syllabus is published before that credential’s examination window; self-study against the published materials and an employer programme are routes of equal standing. No route affects the fee, the marking standard, or what the staff who release results see.

Yes, and it comes with the examination. The fee includes access to the Council’s self-paced online video course for that grade, taken in the candidate portal in your own time, with no instructor and no timetable. It is built from the published syllabus and never from live examination content. Using it is optional and confers no advantage in marking. Nobody who writes or delivers the course has any part in setting or marking the examination, assessors never see how a candidate prepared, and pass rates by preparation route are published each year, the Council’s own included. The Certified Applied AI Associate has a free video course of its own in the portal, and needs none of it to pass.

By machine, against a fixed answer key. The finance examinations are single-best-answer papers, and that is how every comparable examination is marked. No AI model marks anything. What a person does is review. Before any result is released, a named member of the Council’s staff reviews the recording of the session and the marked script, then releases the result, within 3 working days of submission. Any candidate may also ask for a clerical check, in which a named member of staff confirms the script was marked against the right key and the count is right. It is free and separate from an appeal, and the appeals page says how to ask. The Certified Applied AI Associate assessment is also machine marked, but it is unproctored and its results are not reviewed before release, which is one of the reasons it is not a certification.

You may re-sit after 21 days, up to three attempts in twelve months, on a different form. A Fundamentals re-sit costs US$348 if you hold a current membership at the time, and US$695 if not. The first attempt was delivered and marked, so it is not refunded, but a member is not charged twice over for the same paper. Results are reported as pass or fail with domain-level feedback rather than a percentage or a rank, because a percentage invites comparison between forms that are not comparable.

Request it at registration and it is arranged in advance — extra time, breaks, assistive technology, or an alternative format, under the equal treatment policy. An adjustment changes the conditions of the examination and never the standard it assesses, which is why an adjusted pass is an ordinary pass and is not marked on the register. A refused adjustment can be appealed.

Yes. Appeals are decided by people who were not involved in the original assessment, against the published competency framework rather than against an opinion. The appeals and complaints policy sets out how to raise one and what timeframes apply.

No. Each credential names the framework or regulation it is mapped to — ISO/IEC 42001, the EU AI Act, the GDPR, the MAS instruments, DORA, and the others named per credential. Curriculum mapping indicates alignment of learning content with published frameworks. It does not constitute endorsement by, or certification under, any standards organisation or regulator. Anyone claiming to be "certified under" or "endorsed by" a standards body is describing something that does not exist — those bodies publish standards, they do not endorse anyone.

That is for each employer to decide, and the Council does not claim a recognition it cannot show. What an employer can rely on is what the credential attests to. It is examined against a published competency framework, it cannot be passed by buying a course, and every holder appears on a public register that anyone can check with the holder's identifier. The first holders of the Certified Applied AI Associate are on the register now.