Certified Sovereign AI Operator — competency requirements
NGARi Corps Workforce Competency Framework v1.0 (2026-10-02)

Runs sovereign AI for a business or a community: the node, the client conversation, and the evidence that backs the claim.

A candidate meets this role when they hold the following levels against the framework. Every level is backed by evidence in the candidate's own record:

  C-SOV-1  Sovereign AI foundations — Practitioner
           Explain where the model runs, where the data goes and who can switch it off — and tell an air-gapped node apart from a dedicated tenant.
  C-OPS-1  Node operations — Practitioner
           Load a model on your own node, run a metered call, and read the audit entry it wrote.
  C-AUD-1  Audit and evidence — Practitioner
           Show a client, an auditor or a funder that a record cannot be quietly edited, and say plainly what that does and does not prove.
  C-CLI-1  The data-privacy conversation — Practitioner
           Answer "we can't put our data in the cloud" with a demonstration instead of a promise — and know which three claims you must never make.
  C-COM-1  Scope, price and support a deployment — Foundation
           Scope a small on-premises deployment, price it against the published ladder, and write down what maintenance includes.

  Credential: CSAO (Pathway A; see https://ngari.ai/corps/#credentials)

Evidence the framework accepts, per level: a timestamped attestation in the candidate's NGARi Corps record, a metered inference call on their own tenant, a paid appliance, or a NGARi-issued credential. Self-declared only, up to Practitioner; Verified requires a NGARi-issued credential.

Day to day:
  - Operate the node and keep a metered, audited record of what it did.
  - Answer the data-privacy objection on the device, not on a slide.
  - Scope and price a small deployment against the published ladder.
  - Escalate to a maintainer when hardware is the problem.

Framework and candidate verification: https://ngari.ai/corps/competencies
Machine-readable: https://ngari.ai/api/corps/competencies