Digital Operations Institute

AI Implementer Certification Terms of Use

Version 2026-10-31

Effective: 2026-10-31

1. This agreement

(a) These Terms of Use are an agreement between Digital Operations Institute LLC ("DOI", "we", "us") and you. DOI runs the course and FDE App (formerly AI Ops). DOI is a wholly owned subsidiary of ClickDown, LLC, doing business as 3rd Brain Digital Operations ("3rd Brain"), which helps run the course.

(b) You accept these terms, which include the Course Non-Disclosure Agreement in section 7 (the "Course NDA"), and our Privacy Policy by ticking the box and clicking "I agree" when you create your account, accept an invite, or pay for the course. If you already had an account when these terms took effect, you accept them by clicking "I agree" when the course asks you to, including when you pay, or by using the course after they take effect. The Privacy Policy is part of these terms.

(c) You must be at least 18 years old, and able to make a binding agreement, to apply or take part. You may not apply or take part if you are located or ordinarily live in a country or region under comprehensive US sanctions, or if you are named on a US sanctions list.

(d) Definitions:

  1. "The course" means the AI Implementer Certification run by DOI: the application, the lessons, exercises, quick checks, module reviews, case work and projects, persona chats, reviews, interviews and the certificate. It includes the course site at the addresses we give you, the downloads it offers (such as the starter kit and the reference pack), and any tools we offer for your AI assistant, with everything they serve.
  2. "Course Materials" means everything we make available to you in or about the course, in any form: lesson text, diagrams, videos we made, exercises, quick checks, answer keys, review criteria and rubrics, templates, the starter kit, downloads, the principles page, the fix library, prompts, the case files (section 7(a)), and the FDE App material you see during the course.
  3. "Your submissions" means everything you put into the course: your application and profile, résumé, background video, personality assessment answers, examples of past work, exercise and project hand-ins, answers, feedback and comments, chat messages, and anything you send through tools we offer for your AI assistant.

2. The course and your access

(a) Subject to these terms, we give you a limited, personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable right to use the course and the Course Materials for your own learning while you are an applicant or trainee.

(b) Fees. The course has a fee, shown before you pay. You pay it once, after you are accepted, through Stripe's Link service (2(e)), and the course opens when the payment completes. You don't pay it if you hold a scholarship under 2(h) or we invite you into the course without charge.

(c) We decide who is accepted into the course, what it contains, how it is assessed, and who is certified. We may change, add or remove any part of the course, set limits on its use, pause it, or end it at any time, with or without notice. If we end the course or your access, 14(d) says what happens to the fee.

(d) Taking part does not promise you a place in the course, a certificate, a job, work with 3rd Brain or its clients, or any income. Paying the fee buys the course, not a job or an introduction to one.

(e) Who sells you the course. You buy access to the course through Stripe's Link service, which resells it to you as the seller of record (the "merchant of record"). Link takes your payment, works out and pays the tax, sends your receipt and invoice, and handles payment questions, refund requests and disputes. Your purchase shows as "Sold through Link", and your card statement shows "LINK.COM*". Link's own terms and privacy policy apply to the purchase itself; these terms apply to the course. The price may be shown and charged in your local currency. We don't see or store your full card number.

(f) Taxes. The fee doesn't include taxes. Where tax applies, Link adds it at checkout, based on where you are, shows the total before you pay, and pays it to the tax authorities. If you give a valid business tax ID, the tax may be handled under reverse charge instead.

(g) No refunds. We don't refund the fee, except where the law requires it. As seller of record, Link may also refund a purchase under consumer law or its own policies. Any refund, from us or from Link, ends your access to the course and the FDE App access that came with it (2(i)).

(h) Scholarships.

  1. A scholarship covers the whole fee. It is for people on a low income who live in a country we list as eligible. When you ask, you tell us your monthly income and declare that the figure is true. You may ask for one in your application. We decide each request, may ask you about it, including in the interview, and may refuse it. We decide it separately from whether you are accepted into the course; one doesn't change the other.
  2. We check where you are, including from your IP address, your phone number and your time zone, as the Privacy Policy describes. A difference between these and the country you give doesn't decide a request on its own; we may ask you about it.
  3. A false declaration voids the scholarship. If you declared your income or where you live untruthfully, the scholarship is void from the start. We may then pause your access until you pay the fee, end your access, withhold or revoke your certificate, and end the FDE App access that came with it.
  4. A scholarship is personal. It can't be transferred, sold or exchanged for money.
  5. If your scholarship request is refused and you are accepted, you may take the course by paying the fee. If you pay while a request is still being decided, the request is withdrawn.

(i) The FDE App year. The course includes a personal, one-time code for FDE App: a year of access to FDE App for the two case companies, Oakline and Halvern. It doesn't cover any other company you use FDE App for. Only you may use it, within 90 days of when it is issued. FDE App's own terms apply to your use of FDE App, including what happens when the year ends. The code can't be exchanged for money. It ends if your fee is refunded or your scholarship is void.

3. Your account

(a) Each account is for one named person. Give us accurate, complete information and keep it up to date. Keep your password and any access tokens secret.

(b) You are responsible for what happens under your account and with your tokens. Tell us right away at michael@3rdbrain.co if you think someone else has used them.

4. Applying

(a) By applying or taking part, you agree that we may consider your application, your submissions, your course record and your conduct in the course when deciding whether to accept you and whether to certify you.

(b) Your application includes a personality assessment, examples of past work, a background video and a live interview. People at DOI and 3rd Brain review applications and make every decision. We may use software, including AI tools, to help organize and summarize what you submit, as the Privacy Policy describes.

(c) The interview may be recorded and transcribed. We will tell you at the start of the call.

(d) The course is training. It is not employment, and you are not paid for it. The case work is fictional: you do no work for 3rd Brain or its clients during the course. Any work with 3rd Brain needs a separate written agreement.

(e) If you need an accommodation to take the assessment, record the video, do the interview or take part in the course, tell us at michael@3rdbrain.co and we will work with you.

5. What you may not do

You will not, and will not help or let anyone else:

(a) break section 7 (the Course NDA);

(b) share your account, password or tokens, let another person use your account, or create more than one account;

(c) reach the course through scripts, bots, scrapers or bulk requests, other than through tools we offer for your AI assistant, used for your own coursework;

(d) try to make the personas or any AI in the course reveal what they are built to hold back, other than by asking the questions the case expects;

(e) hand in work that is not your own, or have someone else do your exercises, projects, assessment or interview. Using AI tools is part of the course; doing and understanding the work is still on you;

(f) give false information, or pretend to be someone else;

(g) probe, scan or test the course's security, work around any limit or protection in it, or use it in a way that harms the course, us or other trainees;

(h) harass or abuse other trainees, staff, or anyone you meet through the course; or

(i) use the course to break the law or anyone's rights.

6. How we protect the course

(a) Marks. Course Materials, including your downloads such as the reference pack, may carry a line naming the account they are licensed to and a reference code, and may carry small formatting marks unique to your account. They don't change what the material says. They let us trace a copy back to the account it came from.

(b) Records. We record what you open, download and request, including each download and its reference code: which account, which item, and when. We use these records to run and protect the course, as the Privacy Policy describes.

(c) Limits. If an account pulls material quickly without doing the coursework, we may pause its access for a while.

(d) Pausing or ending access. If we believe an account is copying or sharing Course Materials, or otherwise breaking these terms, we may pause or end its access, and withhold or revoke its certificate, without notice, and keep the records that support our view.

(e) Copies found elsewhere. A copy of Course Materials that carries your account's marks, found anywhere outside the course, is evidence that it came from your account.

7. Confidentiality and trade secrets (the Course NDA)

This section is the Course Non-Disclosure Agreement.

(a) What is confidential. "Confidential Information" means all non-public information we disclose or make available to you, in any form, during the application or the course, including:

  1. the Course Materials;
  2. the case files: every case company (such as Halvern), its people and personas, facts, data, documents, messages, releases and scripts, and which questions unlock which facts;
  3. FDE App material you see during the course, including what FDE App serves to your AI assistant;
  4. how we design, sequence, run and assess the course, including review criteria, scoring, and what we look for in applicants;
  5. information about other applicants and trainees, and about 3rd Brain's clients, staff and business, that you learn through the course; and
  6. any notes, summaries, recordings, screenshots, transcripts or other material, including your AI assistant's output, to the extent they contain or reflect any of the above.

(b) Trade secrets. The Course Materials, the case files and FDE App come from years of 3rd Brain's client work. DOI and 3rd Brain treat them as trade secrets: we limit access to accepted applicants who have paid or hold a scholarship and to invited trainees, require this agreement, mark served material, and log access. We sell access to the course, and you agree that the Course Materials and case files are valuable because they are not public.

(c) What is not confidential. Information that: (1) is public when you receive it; (2) becomes public later, other than through a breach of these terms; (3) you already had, as shown by your records, and did not get from us; (4) you receive from someone else who did not get it in breach of a confidentiality duty; or (5) you develop independently, without using or referring to Confidential Information. Your own submissions are not our Confidential Information, except for any Confidential Information they contain.

(d) Your skills stay yours. This section does not stop you using the general skills, knowledge and experience you gain in the course in your own work. It stops you taking, copying or sharing the Course Materials and case files themselves.

(e) Use and disclosure. Use Confidential Information only to take part in the application and the course, and protect it with at least reasonable care. Do not disclose it to anyone except: (1) other current trainees, inside the course and the channels we give you; (2) our staff; and (3) your lawyers and accountants, under a duty of confidentiality. You are responsible for anyone you disclose it to. If the law, a regulator or a court requires you to disclose Confidential Information, disclose only what is required, after telling us promptly where the law allows.

(f) In particular, you will not:

  1. post, publish, stream or share any Course Materials or case files, including on social media, blogs, forums, video sites, code repositories, course-sharing or note-sharing sites, or in a portfolio;
  2. copy, download, screenshot, record, scrape or export them, beyond the downloads the course gives you and what you need for your own exercises;
  3. use them to create, teach or sell a course, training, certification, playbook, template pack, method or AI product, or help anyone else do so; or
  4. publish or share exercise or project work that contains case files or Course Materials, including in a portfolio or job application, unless we agree in writing. You may list your certificate, and describe what you learned in general terms.

(g) AI tools. You may use Course Materials with the AI assistant you use for the course (for example Claude Code, Codex, Claude or ChatGPT) and with FDE App, for your coursework, only with model training on your conversations turned off in that assistant, or on a plan that doesn't train on them. Do not put Confidential Information into any other AI tool, model or service. Do not use it to train, fine-tune, evaluate or improve any AI model, or to build or improve anything that competes with the course, DOI, 3rd Brain or FDE App. What stays in your assistant's conversation history as a normal result of doing your coursework is not a breach, as long as you do not extract, reuse or share it.

(h) When you finish or leave. When the course or your access ends, or when we ask, stop using Confidential Information and delete what you hold, including downloads, the starter kit and any copies in your workspace or repositories, and confirm in writing if asked. You may keep your own submissions for your personal reference, and they stay confidential to the extent they contain Confidential Information. Copies in routine backups may stay until the backups are overwritten in the normal course, and stay confidential until then.

(i) How long. Your duties under this section continue for five years after your access to the course ends, and, for Confidential Information that is a trade secret, for as long as it remains a trade secret.

(j) Your protected rights. Nothing in these terms stops you from reporting a possible violation of law to a government agency, regulator or law enforcement, or taking part in their investigation, without telling us; testifying truthfully; disclosing information about unlawful acts such as harassment or discrimination; or using any right you have under labor law. Notice under 18 U.S.C. §1833(b): an individual is not held criminally or civilly liable under any federal or state trade secret law for disclosing a trade secret (1) in confidence to a federal, state or local government official, directly or indirectly, or to an attorney, solely to report or investigate a suspected violation of law, or (2) in a complaint or other document filed under seal in a lawsuit or other proceeding. An individual who sues an employer for retaliation for reporting a suspected violation of law may disclose the trade secret to their attorney and use it in the court proceeding, if they file any document containing it under seal and do not disclose it except under court order.

(k) Remedies. A breach of this section could harm us in ways money cannot fix. We may ask any court for an order to stop an actual or threatened breach, without posting a bond where the law allows, as well as any other remedy, including any profits you or others made from the breach. If we have to enforce this section, you will pay our reasonable attorneys' fees and costs. The limits in section 16 do not apply to a breach of this section.

(l) Agreed damages. Each person who gets Course Materials or case files through your breach of this section, for example from a copy you shared or through your account, is a sale we lose, and that loss is hard to measure. For each such person, you will pay us the course fee in effect at the time, as agreed damages and not as a penalty. This doesn't limit 7(k), but we won't recover both agreed damages and other damages for the same loss.

8. Your submissions

(a) You own them. You keep ownership of your submissions.

(b) What you let us do with them. You give DOI and 3rd Brain a worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, transferable licence, which we may sublicense, to host, copy, store, analyze, adapt, translate, display, publish and make derivative works from your submissions, for any purpose connected with our businesses, including to:

  1. run, review and assess the course, and decide on certification;
  2. improve the course and build new courses, products, services and features, including by training and evaluating AI models on them; and
  3. use them as examples in courses, case studies and marketing, without your name, or with it where section 10 allows.

This licence continues after these terms end and after your account is deleted.

(c) Moral rights. To the extent the law allows, you waive, and agree not to assert, any moral rights in your submissions against us or those we license.

(d) Your promises. Your submissions are your own work and you have the right to submit them. They do not include anyone else's confidential information or trade secrets, such as a current or former employer's or client's, or personal information about other people that you are not allowed to share. Remove or redact these before you submit. Anyone who appears in a video or recording you submit knows and agrees. We may delete any submission we believe breaks this section.

(e) Keep your own copies. We don't have to keep, review or return your submissions.

9. Usage data and learning analytics

(a) What we record. We record how you use the application, the course and any tools we offer for your AI assistant, including: which pages, lessons and steps you open and when; how long you spend on each, including active time and idle time (for example when the tab is in the background or there has been no input for a while); your progress, answers and attempts; your hand-ins and their status; your downloads; what your AI assistant requests through any tools we offer for it; and your device and browser. This is "usage data".

(b) It is ours. Usage data, and anything we derive from it, is ours. We may use it for any purpose, including to run, assess, protect and improve the course, to build new products and features (including AI models), and to market DOI, 3rd Brain and FDE App, as the Privacy Policy describes.

(c) Who sees it, and how it is used. Our staff can see your usage data alongside your submissions. We may consider your course record, including your progress and engagement, in certification.

(d) Cookies and email. You agree to our use of cookies and similar technologies, and to receive our emails, including marketing emails from DOI, 3rd Brain and FDE App, as the Privacy Policy describes. You can unsubscribe from marketing emails at any time.

10. Your name and publicity

(a) We may name you as a trainee or graduate; list your name, certificate and date on our sites; confirm your certificate to anyone who asks; and use your name with quotes from your feedback and your non-confidential work samples in our marketing. Tell us at michael@3rdbrain.co and we'll stop, except for confirming your certificate.

(b) We use your background video, your voice and your personality assessment results in marketing only with your separate permission.

11. Feedback

You don't have to give us feedback. If you do (ideas, suggestions, comments on lessons, bug reports), we may use it for any purpose without paying or crediting you.

12. AI and other services in the course

(a) The course uses AI models, including the persona chats. Their output can be wrong, incomplete or made up. The case companies and personas are fictional; any resemblance to real people or companies is coincidence.

(b) You reach the course through an AI assistant you choose, and you use FDE App for some exercises. Your assistant is provided by others (for example Anthropic or OpenAI). FDE App is provided by DOI under the FDE App Terms of Use. What your assistant reads or writes through the course also passes through its provider, under your own agreement with them. We don't control how they handle it.

(c) FDE App material you see in the course is Confidential Information under both these terms and the FDE App terms. Where the two differ, whichever protects it more applies.

13. The certificate

(a) The AI Implementer Certification, its certificate and the "Certified AI Implementer" name are ours. We set the criteria and decide whether you meet them.

(b) The certificate is not a licence, an accreditation or academic credit. Describe it accurately, and use our name and badge only as we provide them.

(c) We may withhold or revoke a certificate obtained through a breach of these terms, false information, or work that was not your own.

14. Ending

(a) You can stop taking part at any time, and ask us to delete your account. Sections 8(b), 9(b) and the Privacy Policy say what we keep.

(b) We may end your access, withdraw your acceptance into the course, or end the course, at any time, for any reason, without notice.

(c) Sections 2(h)(3), 4(a), 6(b), 6(e), 7, 8, 9(b), 10, 11, 13(c), and 14 to 18 continue after these terms end.

(d) The fee when access ends. If you leave, or we end the course or your access, the fee is not refunded, except where the law requires a refund (2(g)).

15. No warranties

(a) The course is provided "as is" and "as available". To the extent the law allows, we disclaim every warranty, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title and non-infringement.

(b) The course is new. Expect errors, downtime and changes. Keep your own copies of your work.

(c) The course is not legal, financial, tax or other professional advice.

16. Limits on liability

(a) To the extent the law allows, neither of us is liable to the other for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, revenue, data or goodwill.

(b) Our total liability under these terms is limited to the greater of the fees you paid us for the course in the 12 months before the claim, and USD 100.

(c) You will defend us against, and cover our losses from, claims by others that arise from your submissions or from your breach of section 5, 7 or 8(d).

(d) These limits do not apply to your breach of section 5, 7 or 8(d), to section 16(c), or to either side's fraud or willful misconduct.

17. Disputes

(a) Law. Missouri law governs these terms, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules.

(b) Arbitration. Any dispute about these terms or the course will be settled by binding individual arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association under its Consumer Arbitration Rules, held in St. Louis County, Missouri, or by video. Either of us may instead bring an individual claim in small-claims court.

(c) No class actions. Each of us may bring claims only individually, not as a plaintiff or class member in any class, collective or representative proceeding. To the extent the law allows, we both waive a jury trial.

(d) Court orders. Either of us may go to the state or federal courts in St. Louis County, Missouri, for an order to protect intellectual property or Confidential Information, and both of us consent to those courts.

(e) Opting out. You can opt out of (b) and (c) by emailing michael@3rdbrain.co within 30 days of first accepting these terms. Then disputes go to the courts in (d).

(f) Where you live. If you are a consumer in a country whose law gives you the right to bring a claim in your own courts, or protections that an agreement can't remove, nothing in these terms takes those away.

18. General terms

(a) Changes. We may change these terms by posting the new version with its date. If a change is material, we will tell you by email or in the app before it takes effect, and we may ask you to accept it in the app. Using the course after a change takes effect means you accept it; if you don't agree, stop taking part. A change to the fee doesn't affect a fee you have already paid.

(b) Notices. We send notices to the email address on your account or in the app; you send them to michael@3rdbrain.co.

(c) Transfer. You may not transfer these terms. We may transfer them, including to an affiliate or as part of a sale or reorganization of our business.

(d) Whole agreement. These terms (including the Course NDA) and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement about the course. If a court finds any part unenforceable, it should enforce that part to the greatest extent the law allows, and the rest stands. Not enforcing a term is not a waiver of it.

(e) Language. These terms are written in English. Any translation is for convenience; if they differ, the English version applies, unless the law where you live says otherwise.

(f) Other. We are independent parties; neither is the other's agent, partner or employer. No one else has rights under these terms, except that 3rd Brain may enforce sections 7 and 8 directly, as a third-party beneficiary. Neither of us is responsible for delays caused by events outside reasonable control. Ticking the box and clicking "I agree" is your electronic signature on these terms.

Structure adapted in part from the Common Paper Pilot Agreement v1.1 / CC BY 4.0, via the AI Ops Cloud (now FDE App) Terms of Use.