The Standard · Marketing and Content
Storytelling
Shapes a story with AI and keeps the facts, the audience and the message straight.
You shape brand stories, pitches, reports and case studies from facts, events or data. You use the assistant to explore arcs and voice, but it can flatten experience, invent details or blur meaning.
The exam for Storytelling 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 Storytelling, 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 reveal audience needs, meaningful alternatives and gaps that strengthen the story's effect.
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, message, source facts, narrative purpose, arc and required form.
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 a shaped narrative with a coherent arc, recognisable voice and audience-relevant effect.
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 story claims, figures, assumptions and revelations against source material before publication.
Checking the assistant's claims, figures and assumptions against the source before the work is used.
- Safety and confidentiality
You keep private identities, sensitive events and unsafe narrative requests out of the brief and finished story.
Handling confidential and personal data, seeing compliance, ethical and reputational risk, and declining unsafe requests.
- Knowing what to delegate
You delegate idea generation while keeping authorship, factual choices and sensitive representation decisions with named approvers.
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 brand narrative from product facts, audience needs and approved messaging.
- 02
A case-study story from interview notes, outcomes and verified figures.
- 03
A pitch narrative from a proposal, audience needs and supporting evidence.
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 storytelling. They briefed the assistant with audience, message and source facts, caught flattened turning points, delivered shaped narrative.
You earn it in one exam, never by finishing a course.
- Name on the certificate
- Applied AI Badge: Storytelling
- Who it is for
- Marketers, content writers, communicators, journalists and creative professionals who shape factual or persuasive narratives.
- 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
- Creative Writing
Uses AI as a creative collaborator and delivers work that is distinctly theirs.
- Scriptwriting
Writes scripts with AI, then edits for voice, accuracy and rights.
- Personal Branding
Builds a personal brand with AI-assisted content that is authentic and true.
- Social & Professional Content
Produces social and professional content with AI that is accurate, on brand and safe to publish.
Everything in Marketing and Content, 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+ Storytelling covers this skill, and AI+ Pro teaches it as a course. Neither is required to pass.