Professional Communication
Communicates across channels with AI-assisted drafts that stay accurate, on tone and on record.
You draft emails, workplace messages, memos, and reports for different readers, purposes, channels, and levels of formality. The assistant helps structure and adapt them, but can invent facts, flatten your voice, or miss sensitive details.
The exam for Professional Communication 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 Professional Communication, 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 reply to anticipate reader questions, compare channels, and close communication gaps in the finished message.
Using the assistant to produce work beyond what you could have produced alone, rather than the same work faster.
- Briefing the assistant
You brief the assistant with the reader, purpose, source facts, channel, format, length, and required contents.
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 draft into clear communication, adapting structure and register for its audience and channel.
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 names, dates, claims, figures, and commitments in the draft against supplied records before sending.
Checking the assistant's claims, figures and assumptions against the source before the work is used.
- Safety and confidentiality
You keep personal, confidential, and identifying details out of the brief and communication, and decline unsafe requests.
Handling confidential and personal data, seeing compliance, ethical and reputational risk, and declining unsafe requests.
- Knowing what to delegate
You decide which communication the assistant may draft, what you retain, and who approves high-stakes wording.
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 status update from source notes, adapted into an email and workplace message.
- 02
An internal memo from confirmed facts, with decisions, actions, and open points clearly separated.
- 03
A sensitive external letter from anonymised case details, checked for tone, claims, and confidentiality.
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 professional communication. They briefed the assistant with audience, channel and source facts, caught invented claims, and delivered a workplace communication.
You earn it in one exam, never by finishing a course.
- Name on the certificate
- Applied AI Badge: Professional Communication
- Who it is for
- Communications managers, team leaders, consultants, and professionals who write across workplace channels.
- 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
- Business Writing
Produces clear, correct business documents with AI and owns every claim in them.
Practice only
- Report Writing
Turns data and notes into a report with AI, with every figure traced to its source.
Practice only
- Presentations
Builds a presentation with AI that says one thing per slide and nothing the speaker cannot defend.
- Speaking & Pitching
Prepares and sharpens a pitch or talk with AI, then delivers it as their own.
- Facilitation
Designs and runs a session with AI's help and keeps the room, not the tool, in charge.
- Difficult Conversations
Prepares for a hard conversation with AI, without letting it script away the human judgement.
- Email & Correspondence
Drafts, checks and sends professional correspondence with AI, and owns every line of it.
Practice only
- Cross-Cultural Communication
Adapts messages across cultures and languages with AI, and catches what the tool gets wrong.
Everything in Communications, including the level exams that name the whole function.
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+ Professional Communication covers this skill. No book is required to pass.