The Standard · Working with AI
Reading the AI landscape
Knows what today's AI can and cannot do, and tells a real capability from a demo.
You compare AI tools, deployments, and demonstrations to judge what works now. You identify adoption opportunities and quality risks for your own work. An AI assistant organises evidence, but may present polished claims, outdated examples, or impressive demonstrations as proven capability.
The exam for Reading the AI landscape 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 Reading the AI landscape, 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 real examples to reveal reader needs, alternative uses, and capability gaps beyond a polished demonstration.
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 audience, comparison purpose, evidence, and required form for distinguishing capability from demonstration.
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 reply into a grounded landscape judgement, linking adoption evidence, capability limits, opportunities, and risks.
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 each capability claim against working evidence, implementation context, and reported outcomes before calling the capability real.
Checking the assistant's claims, figures and assumptions against the source before the work is used.
- Safety and confidentiality
You keep confidential organisational details out of landscape comparisons and decline requests to expose personal or restricted adoption evidence.
Handling confidential and personal data, seeing compliance, ethical and reputational risk, and declining unsafe requests.
- Knowing what to delegate
You decide which capability judgements the assistant may explore and which adoption or investment decisions remain with a person.
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 capability comparison from a real AI demonstration, implementation evidence, and stated limitations.
- 02
An adoption map from current examples, tool categories, and measurable outcomes across a chosen field.
- 03
An opportunity-and-risk note from comparing AI adoption with a service's present practice.
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 reading the AI landscape. They briefed the assistant with sector examples, caught unsupported capability claims, and delivered an opportunity-and-risk comparison.
You earn it in one exam, never by finishing a course.
- Name on the certificate
- Applied AI Badge: Reading the AI landscape
- Who it is for
- Designers, content creators, analysts, managers, and professionals who need grounded AI adoption judgement.
- 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.
- Choosing where AI belongs
Decides which tasks to hand to AI, which to keep human, and why.
- Finding AI leverage in your work
Breaks a working week into tasks and spots where AI saves time without adding risk.
- 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.