Professional domain 6 · Stakeholder communication and lifecycle management

14% of the Professional exam · Last checked: 30 September 2026

• Discovery: the problem, the users, today's process and its baseline numbers, what success means, and the constraints (data, regulation, budget, latency, skills). Agree them before designing.
• Communicating decisions: put trade-offs in business terms (cost per task, time saved, error rate, risk), offer options with a recommendation, and record the decision and why, for example in an architecture decision record.
• Expectations and SLAs: agree measurable targets such as p95 latency, availability, accuracy on an agreed evaluation set, and a cost ceiling. Be clear that outputs are probabilistic, so error rates and human review are part of the agreement. Keep a regular feedback loop with stakeholders.
• Documentation and handoff: architecture and data flows, prompts and their versions, evaluation sets and thresholds, runbooks, monitoring and escalation. Train the team that will run it.
• Lifecycle: discovery → design → handoff → monitoring → iteration. Re-evaluate when the model, the data or the requirements change, and run the evaluation set before switching models.

See also: Professional domain 1 · From business problem to design, Professional domain 3 · Accuracy, latency and cost, Professional domain 4 · Evaluation, testing and optimisation and Professional domain 5 · Human in the loop.

Docs: Success criteria and evaluationsCertification page