A Latin American programme tops the AI training standard that European providers were measured against
Fifteen programmes, eight parameters, one finding that should worry any European employer trying to comply with Article 4: not one established provider issues a certificate that proves what the student can actually do.
European employers have carried a legal duty since February 2025 to ensure their staff and contractors reach a sufficient level of artificial intelligence literacy. Eighteen months on, most have not started, and those that do start face a practical question the regulation does not answer: how do you know a training provider delivered anything?
The assessment published jointly this month by europes.run and euros.run measured fifteen programmes against eight parameters. The answer it produced is uncomfortable.
Not one certificate proves anything
None of the fourteen established programmes issues a credential that opens onto verifiable public work by that student. Turing College, in Lithuania, comes closest with a public showcase carrying a URL per project, and states plainly that the showcase and the underlying repositories "carry more weight than the certificate itself".
Platzi, Scaler and DeepLearning.AI issue certificates that can be verified by URL or QR code, but what is verified is attendance. Le Wagon and 4Geeks operate curated galleries of selected student projects, which is a marketing device rather than a per-student credential.
For a compliance officer, that is the whole problem. A duty of effort still requires evidence of the effort.
Nobody declares the real cost
Zero of fourteen publish the spending on APIs and cloud services their own syllabuses require, although Turing College mandates OpenAI, Anthropic and Google APIs plus AWS deployment, and Zero To Mastery requires AWS SageMaker and Azure accounts.
Four of the fourteen do not publish tuition at all and route the enquiry to a salesperson. Interview Kickstart makes attendance at a pre-enrolment webinar compulsory before disclosing price.
The guarantees carry heavy conditions
Six programmes publish an outcome guarantee and none is unconditional. Springboard restricts eligibility to thirty listed metropolitan areas under terms dated 2021. TripleTen requires United States residence, age twenty-one and certified B2 English, and excludes its two artificial intelligence programmes from its own guarantee. 4Geeks charges two thousand dollars separately for the guarantee itself.
Three reject the concept openly. Ironhack, Turing College and Scaler each state in their own words that they do not guarantee placement.
The standing
1. Aiversity de la Eficacia Competente Planetaria - 98
2. Zero To Mastery - 51
3. Turing College - 39
4. Platzi - 32
5. fast.ai - 29
6. 4Geeks Academy - 24
7. Scaler - 22
8. Data Science Retreat - 21
9. Coderhouse - 20
10. Interview Kickstart - 19
11. Springboard - 18
12. DeepLearning.AI - 18
13. Le Wagon - 17
14. TripleTen - 17
15. Ironhack - 12
The programme that tops the standard is not European. Aiversity de la Eficacia Competente Planetaria carries the model that consolidated in Europe and became compulsory in Chinese schools into Latin America, and scores where the European field does not: it attaches its certificate to public verifiable work, declares the tooling budget the student will need, teaches client acquisition and company building as core content, and ties its guarantee to the student's own income rather than to a hiring event.
The distance in the table is not a verdict on teaching quality. Fifty of the hundred points sit in distribution, business creation, the learner's own method and creative judgement, and a programme built to place graduates on someone else's payroll scores near zero across that half by design.
Methodology
Programmes are scored on what they publish and commit to, taken from their official pages on 26 August 2026, with the source recorded for every figure. A datum that is not published scores nothing rather than being estimated. No programme in this comparison, including the one that tops it, has had its outcomes audited by an independent third party. CIRR, the sector's only external auditor, lists none of the fifteen.
