Before Week 1 · Opening

Welcome

A fourteen-week professional course in AI-enabled communication

Welcome to the AI-Impact.Co Intensive, a fourteen-week professional course in AI-enabled communication for high-stakes contexts.

This orientation sets out why this course exists, what the fourteen weeks will produce, how AI shows up across the course, who you will meet inside it, and three small things to do before Week 1 opens. It takes about twenty-five minutes to read.

The course is built for people whose communication work matters. That covers a lot of ground: public health teams running screening campaigns, crisis communicators responding in real time, government communicators rebuilding trust after a failure of public administration, NGO and humanitarian teams advocating for vulnerable communities across multiple countries, financial services teams explaining a breach or a remediation, regulator and procurement teams reviewing AI-enabled services, and behaviour change practitioners working on hard, slow problems.

AI is now in this work whether you have planned for it or not. It is drafting your content, summarising your evidence, segmenting your audiences, generating images and voiceovers, mediating how your messages get found and read, and increasingly making decisions about who sees what. The question is no longer whether AI is part of high-stakes communication. The question is whether your team is using it well, governing it properly, and producing work that holds up to scrutiny.

This course is about that work. It teaches you the AI Impact Communications Model, the AI-ICM, an evidence-informed framework that turns broad principles about responsible AI into operational specifications you can build, run, and defend.

Who this course is for

Calibrated for senior practitioners and team leads

The course is calibrated for senior practitioners and team leads working in high-stakes communication. If your work touches audiences whose trust matters and whose treatment is bound by frameworks that audit your specifications, the course is calibrated to your position.

You will get the most from the course if you are operating in one or more of these contexts:

Public health and clinical-adjacent communication
Crisis, incident, and emergency communication
Government, regulator, and public sector communication
NGO, advocacy, humanitarian, and social impact communication
Financial services and regulated industry customer communication
Behaviour change, social marketing, and public information campaigns
Corporate leadership communication where trust is the asset at risk
AI governance roles supporting communication functions

Newer to AI?

If your interest in AI is at the tools-and-prompts level, the shorter AI-Impact.Co Essentials course is a better starting point. This fourteen-week course assumes you are past the tools layer and operating where governance, audit, and specification matter.

In plain terms

Eight words this course uses a lot

The course keeps its language plain, but a few working terms carry precise meanings. Here is what they mean whenever you meet them.

Specification: The exact, checkable rules for how something works. Precise enough that a vendor could build from it and an auditor could test against it.
The operational middle: The layer between principles and tools, where broad commitments become documented rules someone can act on.
Construct: One of the nine building blocks of the AI-ICM. Each is one part of the service you write rules for.
The six non-negotiables: The minimum standard every AI-enabled communication service must meet. The floor, not the ceiling.
Artefact: A finished, usable document a week's work produces. Each one becomes a component of your AI Communications Plan.
Governed: Run under named rules, with records kept and a person accountable for how it behaves.
Auditable: Able to show its working. Records that let an outside reviewer check what happened and why.
Drift: The slow, unnoticed change in a running service after launch. What continuous review exists to catch.

Meet an unfamiliar term later in the course? The full glossary lives at ai-impact.co/glossary.