A Level 4 apprenticeship in AI and automation: 15 months of training while your employee stays in post, then an end-point assessment of about three months, so around 18 months in total. Delivered remotely and funded from the apprenticeship levy.
Enquire about the programme What it involvesArtificial Intelligence and Automation Practitioner. Approved by Skills England, 10 December 2025.
The people who understand an internal process well enough to change it are the same people occupied running it, and the capacity to do both rarely exists. External advisers relieve the first constraint without touching the second: the analysis is delivered, the improvement is made once, and the understanding leaves with the supplier.
This programme gives one existing employee 15 months of structured time and formal training in post, followed by an independent end-point assessment of about three months, directed at a single process in their own function. What the business holds at the end is a rebuilt process with its cost measured before and after, and a colleague who can repeat the exercise on the next one without further procurement.
They take one recurring process in their own function — not a case study — and work on it for the length of the programme.
Find. The learner and their manager agree which process to take apart, and measure what the current version costs in time and error. Everything later is judged against this number.
Build. The first automation goes onto live work. A visible improvement should be running by around week six.
Break. The build is stress-tested against real edge cases, so its failure modes are documented rather than discovered in production.
Fix. What the testing found is fixed, and the build is written up and handed to the wider team to use day to day.
Assure. Data handling, risk and workforce governance are addressed and signed off through your own approval route.
Prove. Impact is measured against the month-two baseline and taken to gateway.
End-point assessment. About three months with an independent assessment organisation, so around 18 months in total.
Teaching runs as scheduled sessions across the 15 months of training rather than as a course taken separately from the job.
Each apprentice has one named coach for the whole programme, and reviews bring the apprentice, their manager and the coach together.
The work is deliberately low-code. Apprentices build with tools such as Copilot and Copilot Studio, Power Automate, Zapier or n8n rather than by writing software. No programming background is needed or expected.
Training and assessment fees.
| Your position | What you pay | How |
|---|---|---|
| Levy payer, pay bill over £3m | Nothing new | £18,000 drawn from the levy account you already fund through payroll. |
| Non-levy, apprentice under 25 | £0 | Training and assessment funded in full by government. |
| Non-levy, apprentice 25 or over | £0 | The fee is met in full via levy transfer. |
Since 1 August 2026, Levy funds expire twelve months after they enter your account, rather than twenty-four. For levy payers with an unspent balance, the practical question is not whether to spend it, but on what.
The standard is written for operational roles. In practice, the strongest candidates are the people within a team who already know where the awkward exceptions are: a finance analyst, an operations coordinator, a project support officer, someone in planning or compliance.
There is no fixed qualification threshold. The role and the candidate's prior learning are assessed before enrolment, and the test is whether the programme delivers substantial new skills.
The apprentice must be in a genuine role with enough real work in it to meet the standard.
End-point assessment is carried out by an independent assessment organisation, not by the training provider. There are two components: a project assessment taken around two-thirds of the way through, and a showcase towards the end in which the apprentice presents and defends what they built and what it changed.
The useful first conversation is not about the apprenticeship. It is about which process in your operation you would fix first, and whether you already employ the person to fix it. Thirty minutes is usually enough to establish both.
Seven short questions. No obligation, and we will tell you whether it fits before we tell you anything else.