Anthropic's newest course. Built for the owners wearing five hats. 54 minutes of video. One AI use policy you walk out with.
This is the newest course in the Anthropic Academy. They built it because small business is where the AI value is real.
Big companies have AI committees, vendor evaluations, six layers of legal review, and an IT team to integrate everything. By the time their AI policy gets approved, the small business owner across the street has already used Claude to draft this quarter's vendor contracts, sort the customer inbox, and rough out the new pricing sheet for Monday.
Small business owners do not have a tech team. They do not have a chief of staff. They wear five hats on a normal day. They need AI to give them hours back without forcing them to become engineers.
Anthropic built this course in partnership with PayPal, a Brooklyn butcher shop called Prospect Butcher Company, and an automotive power-module rebuilder called MAKS TIPM Rebuilders. The course follows two real small businesses through real workflows. Not a marketing demo. Real shops, real owners, real money.
Free. Under an hour of video. Certificate at the end. Hosted on Anthropic's official learning platform.
GO TO THE COURSE →Four sections. Nine lectures. One quiz. Certificate at the end. Under an hour of video, which means most owners can finish this on a Sunday afternoon before the week starts.
Defines AI Fluency and introduces the Four D's adapted for small business: Delegation, Description, Discernment, Diligence. Sets the values, goals, and constraints so every future AI interaction starts from the right context.
Builds a working mental model of what today's AI can and cannot do reliably. Includes an interactive next-token simulator so you understand why the limits matter for how you put AI to work in your business.
The hands-on core. The Description-Discernment loop applied to research. The Delegation-Diligence loop applied to working with customer data. Context-rich prompting, critical evaluation, and responsible data handling on the kinds of tasks you face every day.
A repeatable AI-augmented workflow and a short, honest AI use policy that fits your business and your team. Plus your next steps and your certificate of completion.
Source: anthropic.skilljar.com/ai-fluency-for-small-businesses, verified 2026-05-25. Anthropic recommends taking the AI Fluency: Framework & Foundations course first; this course covers the foundations only lightly.
The course teaches two practical loops that come out of the Four D's. These are the moves you make every day as an owner. Once you have them in your head, every AI workflow gets faster and safer.
You describe what you want clearly enough that AI can act on it. AI gives you output. You evaluate the output critically before you ship it. Then you iterate.
You do not have a marketing team, an editor, or a legal department checking your work before it goes out. The Description-Discernment loop is your in-house QA.
You are doing research on a new supplier. Description: tell Claude what kind of supplier, your price range, the certifications you need, the geography. Discernment: read the output. Verify the supplier names are real. Check the certifications against the real registry. Then act.
This loop is the cheapest way to upgrade your output quality. Slow down on the description. Slow down on the discernment. The hour you spend doing both well is worth ten hours of cleanup later.
You decide what to hand to AI in the first place (delegation). Then you carry the responsibility for what AI produced (diligence). Your name is on the output regardless of who or what wrote it.
Customer data, financial data, contracts, and vendor agreements pass through your business every week. Delegating those tasks to AI without diligence is how owners get into legal and reputation trouble. Done right, this loop saves hours. Done wrong, it costs your business.
You delegate customer-data summarization to Claude for a weekly review. Diligence means: redact personally identifying information before it goes into the prompt, verify the summary against the source data, and keep a record of what you did and why. The course shows you how the partner businesses handle this.
The Diligence half of this loop is what separates owners who use AI well from owners who get embarrassed by it. Build the habit early. Every time. Even on the small stuff.
Most AI courses for small business owners are taught by people who have never run a small business. This one is built differently. Anthropic built it with three real partners whose stories run through every section.
Used in the course to walk through vendor and billing workflows. Owner Corey Hammond shows how the shop uses AI to handle the back-office work that used to eat his evenings.
Owner Mak Cabessa shows how a hands-on, technical small business deploys AI without losing the craftsmanship and customer trust that built the company.
Jordan Medina from PayPal contributed the small-business knowledge that grounds the course in real owner concerns: data, security, customer experience.
These are not case studies. These are real shops the course actively walks through, with real workflows you can copy.
The course ends with you writing a short, honest AI use policy for your business. Not a corporate document. Not legal boilerplate. One page that tells you and your team what you do with AI, what you do not do with AI, and where the lines are.
The policy is the artifact you keep. The course is the teacher. A year from now, the model you use will be different, the features will be different, but the policy you wrote will still apply. It is the most durable thing you walk out with.
If you write nothing else this year, write this. One page. Print it. Put it on the wall behind your desk. Every owner who has gotten AI right has some version of this written down. The ones who get burned do not.
Four things, concretely.
Under an hour of video. Plan for two hours of total time so you can do the exercises, not just watch them.
Big companies will spend the next six months in committee deciding what their AI policy should look like. You can write yours this week. Take the course. Write the policy. Print it. Stick it on the wall. Use AI like an owner who knows what they are doing.
Open the course. Block the calendar. Earn the certificate.