Track A — Functional AI

AI for HR

Build two working AI assistants for your HR team with your own hands — no coding, no cost, and nothing that stays in the classroom.

Alba · The American College of GreeceTwo live sessions (eight hours total) plus a graded take-home lab between them. Class 1 runs foundations then building; Class 2 runs build, evaluate, govern. Each session alternates short concept blocks with hands-on labs in Dify. All builds run on Gemini 2.5 Flash — the free tier covers everything.Starts Aug 15, 2026Enrollment closes in 24 days
$499
Taught by faculty atAlba — The American College of GreeceUC Santa Cruz Extension20+ years teaching · thousands of students trained
What this class is

A hands-on, no-code course that takes HR professionals from AI-curious to AI-capable in two sessions. You build a personal AI Recruiter that screens and ranks candidates for one recruiter — and learn why one flat knowledge base silently fails, and how purpose-built ones fix it — then a team HR Generalist that answers policy questions, looks up records, and files tickets for the whole HR function, with a guardrail on every capability. You measure your agent with a balanced eval set, and you learn the EU AI Act and GDPR rules that make every guardrail a legal requirement. Everything is grounded in a complete fictional company corpus, and everything used is free and runs in your browser.

Who it's for — HR professionals, HRBPs, talent acquisition partners, and HR leaders who want to use AI to do their actual job better — no coding background required.

In class you work on a synthetic company corpus — a fictional business modeled on real-world challenges, so you practice on realistic, messy data, not toy examples.

What you'll be able to do
  • Explain how AI models work, why they hallucinate, and what HR must do about it — in your own words, to your CEO or board
  • Put the three data-privacy questions to any AI vendor — training, storage, accountability — and pick the tier allowed to touch HR data
  • Map your HR processes to where retrieval, agents, and human review actually belong — and where they don't
  • Build an AI Recruiter end-to-end in Dify: draft a JD against real skill gaps, screen and rank real résumés with cited evidence, cross-check interview minutes
  • Structure knowledge so agents answer completely: see a flat knowledge base silently drop candidates, then fix it with purpose-built KBs
  • Build a team HR Generalist: cited policy answers, gated record lookups, and tickets that never file without human confirmation
  • Run a balanced eval set against your agent — and keep running it on every prompt, policy, or model change
  • Apply EU AI Act and GDPR rules to AI in HR — know what's high-risk, what triggers Article 22, and your deployer obligations
The AI agents you'll build

You leave with Two working HR assistants — a personal recruiter for one role-owner and a team generalist for the whole HR function.

These aren't demos — they're working agents you build hands-on and tailor to your own role, data, and custom spec.

AI Recruiter

A personal screening agent that drafts the job description from your actual skill gaps, ranks candidates with cited evidence, and flags discrepancies between what candidates claim and what the interviews show — always pausing for human review before anyone is contacted.

HR Generalist

A team agent that answers policy questions with citations, looks up records with access gated by who is asking, and drafts HR tickets that only file once a human approves — it routes, it never approves.

The path

How you build them, class by class

1How AI works and where it goes wrong, prompting, your knowledge base, and the AI Recruiter

Foundations, and Your First AI Assistant for HR

  • How LLMs generate text, why they hallucinate — and the data-privacy questions to ask before HR data goes anywhere
  • Prompt design as a guardrail: build one job-description prompt from weak to strong, technique by technique
  • Be the retrieval engine yourself first, then build a knowledge base over a realistic HR corpus and prove it answers with citations
  • Build the AI Recruiter: draft the JD, screen and rank candidates with evidence, cross-check claims against interview minutes
  • Watch a flat knowledge base fail honestly — a confident, incomplete shortlist — and rebuild on purpose-built KBs so ranking works
2The team agent with a guardrail on every capability, continuous evals, and the law

Build the HR Generalist, Then Measure and Govern It

  • One personal agent, one team agent: the Generalist serves everyone, with access decided by who is asking
  • Build the Generalist on its guidebook: cited policy answers, record lookups that apply the policy on top, and tickets routed to a human — never auto-approved
  • Live data over MCP: RAG is memory, MCP is reach — and the four failure modes every system prompt must cover
  • Run a balanced ten-question eval — coverage, diversity, criticality — and treat it as a standing check, not a launch gate
  • EU AI Act and GDPR: risk tiers and the timeline, deployer obligations, the red lines, the penalties — and the frontier debate on identity and logging
The tools that matter

The names the whole industry runs on.

01

Dify

One of the most popular open-source platforms for building AI agents — you assemble your recruiter and generalist visually, no code required.

02

Gemini 2.5 Flash

Google's fast, low-cost model and the backbone of every assistant you build — its free tier covers the entire course.

03

MCP (Model Context Protocol)

The fast-emerging open standard for connecting AI to live data and actions — how an agent fetches a current balance instead of guessing from a stale file.

Plus the rest of the working stack — Dify · Gemini 2.5 Flash · text-embedding-004 · Claude · ChatGPT · Gemini · MCP (Model Context Protocol) · A corpus-driven eval-set generator.

Your capstone

Your hands-on capstone: two working AI assistants — the personal AI Recruiter and the team HR Generalist — plus a graded take-home screening of a full requisition and an eval run proving how good your agent actually is. The work is grounded in a realistic company corpus throughout. This is what your certificate is based on — not attendance.

Your certificate is based on what you build — not attendance.

Ready to build your AI agent?

A small, high-quality cohort for professionals — fully online, hands-on from minute one.