Common questions.

Who is this for?

Enterprises shipping AI into production. Banks, insurers, consulting and audit firms, universities, hotel groups, asset managers, government departments. Buyer roles: Head of AI, CIO, CRO, Head of L&D, Chief Innovation Officer, Provost, COO, practice partner. Cohorte trains operators inside the firm; we are not a strategy consultancy and not a content library.

What is the minimum team size for a Team Bootcamp?

Six seats. We do not run smaller cohorts because mentor 1:1 economics break under that. Maximum is fifteen, past that, capstone discipline frays. Between six and fifteen is the operating range.

Can we mix seniority levels in a Bootcamp?

Yes. The curriculum runs role-specific paths in parallel. Leaders, engineers, marketers, ops people complete the same program with different exercises and capstones. Mixed cohorts work well and surface real cross-functional issues. The senior people set the bar; the junior people set the energy.

We don't have an internal AI champion yet. Should we start?

Yes, but start with the Pilot. The Pilot (€8K, 4 weeks, fixed price) scopes one real use case with you and produces a written recommendation memo. If the right move is "you need an internal champion before a Bootcamp," the memo will say so honestly. You will not have wasted a six-figure budget to find out.

What's the difference between the Pilot, the Team Bootcamp, the Curriculum License, and the AI Readiness Program?

Pilot. €8K-€12K, 4 weeks, fixed. Scope one use case, get a written brief. The de-risker. (Handbook-only offering; not yet listed at cohorte.co/teams.)

Team Bootcamp. €4,200 per seat, 12 weeks, minimum 6 seats. Private cohort. Your team ships one real system at the end.

Curriculum License. €12,000 per year, up to 25 seats. Self-paced platform with completion dashboards. Beyond 25 seats: scoped per engagement.

AI Readiness Program. Starts at €35,000, 3-6 months. Founder-led operating-model build. Deepest commitment.

See the catalogues for the full shape of each.

How long from first call to kickoff?

Pilot: ~2 weeks (one-page agreement, NDA, kickoff). Team Bootcamp: 3-6 weeks (procurement, cohort scheduling). Curriculum License: ~2 weeks. AI Readiness Program: 4-8 weeks (longer because of the two-day on-site assessment scheduling). If you have a hard deadline we can compress, but we will not ship a worse engagement to hit a date.

What are the prices?

Pilot €8K (2 people) or €12K (3 people). Team Bootcamp €4,200 per seat (€25K to €63K for 6-15 seats). Curriculum License €12,000 per year, up to 25 seats (beyond that, scoped per engagement). AI Readiness Program starts at €35,000 for 3-6 months, three tiers. All fixed. Full pricing one-pager: teams.cohorte.co/pricing. The canonical pitch with all current rates: cohorte.co/teams.

Is Cohorte Qualiopi-certified? Can we use OPCO funding?

Qualiopi certification is in progress, with our target audit in Q3 2026. We are not Qualiopi-certified today, so direct OPCO funding through us is not yet available. Most French corporate buyers currently use their direct L&D budget. If you need OPCO routing today, we can coordinate with a Qualiopi-certified partner; email us for that path.

Can our French employees use CPF (Compte Personnel de Formation)?

Not currently. CPF eligibility requires Qualiopi, which is on the same 2026 roadmap. For now, the standard path for French corporate buyers is direct L&D budget. Individual French professionals can email us for our CPF-certified partner list.

What other funding pathways exist outside France?

We are working through registrations jurisdiction by jurisdiction. Germany: Bildungsgutschein / AZAV listing scoped for 2027. Belgium: KMO-portefeuille recognition application in progress. Netherlands: SLIM (in scoping for 2026). UK: Skills Bootcamps / Apprenticeship Levy bid in scoping. Morocco: OFPPT pathway under review. EU-wide: EDIH (applications submitted). None of these are currently active routes for direct funding through Cohorte; corporate L&D budget is the standard path today. We are honest about which mechanisms work today versus which are on the roadmap; ask on the discovery call.

Do you discount?

No. Pricing is fixed; scope is negotiable. The structural discounts are: (a) the Pilot credit, 100% of the Pilot fee credits against a follow-on engagement signed within 90 days; (b) the first-named-reference negotiation, available in verticals where Cohorte has no named customer (hospitality, healthcare, manufacturing, public sector) and negotiated in writing before kickoff.

What payment terms do you offer?

Net 30 from invoice date. For engagements over €25K, typical schedule is 50% on kickoff, 50% at midpoint, or 33/33/34 across kickoff / midpoint / close. EUR invoicing default; USD on request at the EUR/USD spot rate on invoice date. VAT-compliant invoices.

Do you sign NDAs, DPAs, MSAs? Accept POs?

Yes to all. We issue VAT-compliant invoices and accept Purchase Orders. We have standard NDA, MSA, DPA templates; we also sign your reasonable equivalents where redlines can be agreed. Our DPA is GDPR-aligned, with EU Standard Contractual Clauses (Module 2 / Module 3) incorporated for cross-border subprocessor flow.

What insurance do you carry?

Professional Indemnity €2M aggregate. Public Liability €5M. Cyber Liability €1M. Certificates available within 24 hours of NDA signature, direct from the broker on letterhead. Higher limits negotiable per engagement.

Can we talk to your references before signing?

Yes. Patrick Monteiro (CIO, PwC France & Maghreb) and Riccardo Ocleppo (CEO, OPIT) take reference calls within 5 business days of mutual NDA signature. Reference calls are 30 minutes, with the reference alone, Cohorte's founder drops off after intros so the reference can speak freely.

Where is the subprocessor list?

In the CISO & Vendor-Risk Briefing, section 9, with the right-to-object clause documented. Subprocessors are updated quarterly; you get 10 business days' written notice of any change.

How long does procurement onboarding typically take inside our firm?

Pilot: usually clears under a faster threshold (one-page agreement, sub-€15K). Team Bootcamp / Curriculum License: 14-30 days at most firms. AI Readiness Program: 30-60 days. We return SIG-Lite / CAIQ vendor questionnaires inside 5 business days, which is the main bottleneck at most security-mature buyers.

Are you ISO 27001 / SOC 2 certified?

Not currently. ISO 27001 alignment in progress (target audit 2027). SOC 2 readiness on the same roadmap. Where certification is a hard gate, we deliver a compensating-controls plan as an MSA exhibit, including documented controls and third-party audit of those controls. Where certification is preferred but not required, we are typically a fit; we are honest about the gap.

Do you teach against Microsoft Copilot M365?

Yes. Many of our enterprise engagements are Copilot M365-led. We teach the operating layer (taste, scope, verification, governance) on top of Copilot specifically: how to scope Copilot deployments, how to verify outputs that originate from Copilot, how to design governance for a Copilot rollout, how to onboard Copilot users at scale. Exercises rewrite against your Copilot tenant.

What about Anthropic Claude, Google Workspace AI, OpenAI Enterprise?

Yes. The methodology is platform-agnostic; the exercises adapt to whichever stack the cohort is shipping on. We have run engagements against Anthropic API workflows, against Google Workspace AI features, and against OpenAI Enterprise. Multi-stack cohorts (some teams on Copilot, others on Claude) work; we teach the common operating layer and then the stack-specific tradeoffs.

Do you set up dedicated Microsoft Teams or Slack channels for the cohort?

Yes. At kickoff we create a dedicated channel inside your collaboration stack (Teams, Slack, or Discord, your choice). The channel is for cohort communication, mentor-availability questions, artifact sharing, and async discussion. Cohorte's founder and the embedded mentor are members; we leave the channel intact after the engagement closes so the cohort retains it.

Where do artifacts live during the engagement?

Your stack. SharePoint, OneDrive, Google Drive, Notion, Confluence, whichever you use. Cohorte does not host a separate platform for artifacts. The artifact log is a folder structure in your environment, agreed at kickoff. Sponsor sees it directly.

Does your IT team need to provision anything for us?

Minimal. Provision: (1) guest accounts for Cohorte's founder and the embedded mentor on your collaboration stack (Teams / Slack guest, or external user), with access to the cohort channel only; (2) participant access to whatever AI tools your firm provides (Copilot, Anthropic, etc.); (3) shared folder for the artifact log. No special infrastructure, no separate environment, no admin access to your tenant required.

SSO, firewall, DLP, anything special?

No special SSO requirements. Cohorte's founder and mentor use your standard external-user flow (guest accounts). No firewall changes needed; everything runs over your normal collaboration stack. DLP: standard data-handling applies; participants do the applied work on your data inside your tenant, never in a Cohorte environment.

Do you access our production data?

No. Cohorte never extracts, copies, or retains client production data. Period. Participants do applied work on your data inside your tenant; Cohorte's founder and mentor review the resulting artifacts (briefs, verification designs, operating briefs) which can be anonymised or scoped to non-sensitive data at your discretion. The contractual restriction is in every MSA and DPA.

Do we need a sandbox environment for the applied work?

Not necessarily. Most cohorts work against existing dev or staging environments. For regulated workflows (FS underwriting, audit working papers) where applied work touches sensitive data, your team typically sets up a sandbox with synthetic or de-identified data. We do not provide infrastructure; the sandbox is yours.

What does a participant do, Monday through Friday?

See the day-by-day walkthrough on the engagement page. Briefly: one 90-minute live session per week, one 30-minute mentor 1:1, and 3-5 hours of applied work between sessions. Total commitment: 5-8 hours per week per participant.

What if a participant falls behind?

The mentor catches it in the weekly 1:1. If a participant misses a week, we run a catch-up session (recorded sessions + a 30-min mentor sync). If a participant falls behind two weeks consecutively without a defensible reason, we flag it to the sponsor honestly. Cohorte does not push participants out, but we will not pretend completion happened when it didn't.

Can a participant be substituted mid-engagement?

Yes, within the first three weeks at no charge. After week three, the substitution is harder because the new participant has to catch up on the LUMEN brief and verification design. We will discuss it case by case.

How do you measure that learning actually happened?

Three measurements: (1) artifacts shipped, LUMEN brief, verification design, operating brief, capstone system, all named and demonstrable; (2) operating-model adoption, whether the playbook is in use 90 days after engagement close; (3) the customer's business outcome, defined in scoping (named, measurable). We do not measure attendance or quiz scores. We measure whether the team ships.

Do you provide certification?

Each graduate receives a Cohorte Practitioner certificate at the close of the Bootcamp. It carries the founder's signature and the engagement date. It is not an accredited certification (no third-party recognition body); it is a signal to peers that the participant completed the operating-layer training. Many graduates list it on LinkedIn.

What if the capstone doesn't ship at week 12?

If the slip is Cohorte-driven, we run an additional two weeks at no charge to get the capstone to ship. If the slip is sponsor-driven (priority change at the buyer's end), we agree a revised ship date in writing and the engagement closes on that date. In 18 months of Bootcamps, the few slips have been sponsor-driven and under two weeks.

What happens after the engagement closes?

Three things travel out: (1) the shipped system, owned by you, on your stack, Cohorte does not retain it; (2) the operating brief and governance log, licensed to your firm for internal use indefinitely; (3) 12 months of Engine Room community access per graduate. Optional ongoing advisory retainer (€2K-€5K/month) if you want continued founder availability post-engagement.

Do you offer custom development engagements, build something with us?

Yes, in limited cases. We are a training firm first, but we have run hybrid engagements where Cohorte's founder works alongside your engineering team on the build for one specific system (typically the first verification gate or the first AI Operating Model). Pricing is custom; engagement length 4-12 weeks. Email us with the use case and we will say whether it fits.

Can you do tailored / one-off programs for very specific use cases?

Yes. The AI Readiness Program is the natural shape for this, it is scoped per engagement. Outside that, we run tailored 2-day or 5-day intensives on specific topics (verification, governance, AI Act preparation, model risk extension for LLM) for €15K-€30K. Email with the topic and audience size.

Do you offer train-the-trainer programs?

Yes, as a layer on top of the AI Readiness Program. After the Playbook is delivered, we run a 2-week train-the-trainer engagement (€20K, fixed) where Cohorte's founder trains your internal L&D or AI team to run the methodology themselves. The license to use Cohorte's curriculum internally afterwards is included.

Advisory retainers, what's available?

€2K-€5K per month, 6 or 12-month commitment. Monthly 2-hour advisory call with Charafeddine. Quarterly written check-in. Used by AI Readiness graduates who want continued founder availability for emerging use cases, governance questions, or board-facing AI reporting. About 70% of AI Readiness clients sign a retainer at close.

Executive workshops, board briefings, partner offsites?

Yes. Half-day or full-day on-site sessions for executive teams, partner committees, or boards. Pricing €8K-€20K depending on prep depth and audience size. Topics: the operating-layer thesis, AI Act readiness, model risk for LLM systems, the cost of AI adoption done wrong, what the next 18 months look like for enterprise AI. Charafeddine delivers personally.

Speaking engagements, podcast, content collaborations?

Limited availability. Subject line "Press · [outlet]" to charafeddine@cohorte.co. Response within 5 business days. Topics covered: enterprise AI, verification, AI Act / ISO 42001, the PwC AI Factory engagement, the OPIT engagement.