The Standard · Working with AI
Finding AI leverage in your work
Breaks a working week into tasks and spots where AI saves time without adding risk.
You break a working week into tasks and identify where AI could reduce effort, improve coverage or expose gaps. You use an assistant to compare opportunities, but it can overstate savings, miss dependencies or suggest unsafe uses.
The exam for Finding AI leverage in your work is not open yet. A skill opens once its questions are approved and tested.
What it measures
Whatever the skill, the exam rates your work in the same six areas of the Standard. Three are for the value you get from the assistant, and three for the control you keep. Each area gets one of 4 ratings (Emerging, Developing, Proficient, Accomplished). For Finding AI leverage in your work, a strong performance looks like this. What each area includes and excludes.
Value
What you get from the assistant: how far it takes the work, how well you brief it, and the piece you hand in.
- Reaching further
You use the assistant to uncover overlooked tasks, alternatives and gaps where AI could extend what your week achieves.
Using the assistant to produce work beyond what you could have produced alone, rather than the same work faster.
- Briefing the assistant
You give the assistant your task sequence, purpose, source information, constraints and required format for a useful leverage map.
Giving the assistant the reader, purpose and source facts the work depends on, and the form, length and contents you need back.
- The finished piece
You turn the assistant's opportunities into a prioritised work plan that colleagues can apply to real tasks.
Turning the assistant's output into something a colleague could use: editing it, combining it and adding original thinking.
Control
What you keep in hand: checking its work, keeping information safe, and deciding what stays with a person.
- Checking its work
You check claimed savings, dependencies and risks against your actual workflow before adopting an AI opportunity.
Checking the assistant's claims, figures and assumptions against the source before the work is used.
- Safety and confidentiality
You keep personal, confidential and restricted work out of opportunity mapping and its resulting recommendations.
Handling confidential and personal data, seeing compliance, ethical and reputational risk, and declining unsafe requests.
- Knowing what to delegate
You decide which tasks deserve AI support, which stay with people, and who approves high-stakes changes.
Deciding what to hand to the assistant and what to keep, and at what stakes, before any output exists.
What you do in the exam
Every skill of the Standard is examined the same way, at the same pass mark, in the Applied AI Badge. Two tasks with the assistant and two sets of questions, over 15 minutes. You do real work with an AI assistant beside you, hand in what you would send, then answer follow-up questions about your own work.
- 01
A weekly task map from recurring work, showing suitable AI support and human ownership.
- 02
A prioritised leverage list from a workflow audit, with estimated time savings and risks.
- 03
A work audit that ranks routine tasks for AI support by effort, value and risk.
These are the kinds of task the exam sets. Your exam draws its own from a bank the Examination Board has approved.
- Exam
- Applied AI Badge
- Price
- US$19
- Length
- 15 minutes
- Attempts
- One for each purchase, then a 7-day wait
What the badge certifies
What an employer reads
Passed an Institute exam in finding AI leverage in your work. They briefed the assistant with workflow evidence, caught unsupported savings claims, and delivered a prioritised AI-use map.
You earn it in one exam, never by finishing a course.
- Name on the certificate
- Applied AI Badge: Finding AI leverage in your work
- Who it is for
- Professionals, managers and team leads who want to identify useful, safe AI support across their work.
- Valid for
- 2 years, then renew
- Verification
- Every badge has a public verification page an employer can open, and a place in the public register if you choose it.
- Marked by
- An AI examiner marks your work against a marking guide and quotes your own words as evidence. A person checks anything borderline.
Near it in the Standard
This skill applies to any job, so it sits in the Standard's core rather than in one function.
- Reading the AI landscape
Knows what today's AI can and cannot do, and tells a real capability from a demo.
- Choosing where AI belongs
Decides which tasks to hand to AI, which to keep human, and why.
- Briefing an AI assistant
Gives an assistant the context, constraints and format that get usable output first time, and iterates when it does not.
- Checking AI output before it ships
Catches fabricated facts, missing steps and confident errors against the source before anything goes out.
- Using AI safely and responsibly
Keeps confidential and personal data out of the tool, declines unsafe requests and stays accountable for the result.
- Managing AI risk in your field
Recognises the compliance, ethical and reputational risks of AI in a specific profession and acts on them.
Practise it before you pay for it
Practice is free (up to 50 sessions a day) and shaped like the exam, with a coach that tells you what to change. It never counts towards a credential, and an exercise you practised is kept out of your exam.
Want to learn it first? AI+ At Work: Foundations covers this skill. No book is required to pass.