Artificial intelligence is moving into the control systems that run Canada’s essential services, and the country has no occupation that certifies the people who put it there. Utilities, water authorities, manufacturers, pipelines, mines and ports are installing AI for forecasting, anomaly detection, predictive maintenance and process optimization. AISIT, pronounced ‘ACE-it’, is the proposed trade for that work.
Industrial data networks and communications, OT cybersecurity fundamentals, OT threat detection and response, AI integration for industrial systems, applied AI for operations and analytics, and automation and PLC/SCADA fundamentals. Delivered as part of the CAST year, or standalone.
Process data engineering, historians and quality. Deploying and integrating models at the edge and in the control room. The OT/IT boundary and industrial protocols.
Model evaluation, monitoring and drift control against process reality. Human-in-the-loop design and the decisions a model may never make. Functional-safety interaction.
ISA/IEC 62443 applied to AI-enabled systems. Zero-trust and segmentation for model endpoints and data paths. Adversarial machine learning, data poisoning and prompt injection. Incident response in OT, and the certifying capstone.
You do not send an electrical engineer to wire a hospital; you send an electrician. The engineer builds the model. The technician makes it work safely on a real plant and keeps it working.
Running AI inside a plant is, at bottom, a measurement-and-control problem: data in, automated decisions out, over a network, calibrated, monitored and kept safe. That is what instrument mechanics have always done. AISIT is the Automation and Instrumentation Technician trade (447A) extended into the AI era.
CAST is the recommended entrance and foundation, because it supplies the operational-technology grounding that safe integration depends on. A prior-learning assessment, or a qualifying instrumentation, electrical or control credential, establishes the same foundation for an experienced tradesperson.
Level 1 is defined and published as a 290-hour standard. Levels 2 to 4 are framed and remain to be built, and the trade-recognition pathway is in development. The proposal asks for recognition of the trade as a priority to accelerate and for support to complete its development.