From Mission to Market: Building AI Carrel (Internal)

Students who successfully complete the course will be awarded a certificate that identifies members who are proficient in providing related consulting services.

Internal and confidential. This course prepares Broadband Institute Foundation (BIF) staff and recruits to understand — and, if the board approves, to help build — AI Carrel: private AI that a small or midsize law firm owns instead of rents.

It starts with the relationship between BIF and the proposed, newly formed public benefit corporation that would build and sell AI Carrel. It then works through the technical design drawn from the AI Carrel source document: sovereign AI, the small-firm architecture, economics, open-weight models, hardware, retrieval, deployment, lawyers’ duties, governance, daily workflows and go-to-market. It closes with employee ownership, the 12-month plan and your confidentiality obligations.

Every lesson has three parts after the reading: Suggested readings, a Homework assignment (uploaded for review), and a Knowledge check (multiple choice, 80% to pass). A final assessment closes the course.

Two ground rules for every lab and homework: use only public or synthetic documents — never client or confidential material — and treat every statement about the new company as a proposal, not a decision.

Learning outcomes

1. Explain how BIF relates to the proposed, newly formed public benefit corporation and why it is distinct from the existing podCOINai S corporation.
2. Describe each proposed term and the approvals it still requires, and name the four conflict-of-interest guardrails.
3. Define sovereign AI and place deployment options on a sovereignty spectrum.
4. Map the enterprise six-layer blueprint to the small-firm architecture and AI Carrel’s five components.
5. Build an honest three-year total-cost-of-ownership comparison.
6. Select, size and evaluate open-weight models and appliance hardware.
7. Explain and test a retrieval-augmented generation pipeline and a hardened Ollama/Open WebUI deployment.
8. Apply lawyers’ professional duties and the AI Carrel product charter to product claims.
9. Strengthen a data-governance policy and run day-one workflows with verifiable outputs.
10. Describe the Assess-Implement-Adopt offer, the evidence gates, employee-ownership intent and your confidentiality obligations.

Prerequisites: A signed team NDA on file and membership in the BIF Staff group.
Estimated time: 18-22 hours including homework
Progression: Linear
Passing: 80% on each knowledge check and on the final assessment

Confidential draft — subject to board and legal review. Not an offer of securities. Not legal, tax or investment advice.