NBOP National Board of Operations Professionals

Endorsements

AI and Automation Operations

You decide which work is automated, you own the result when it fails, and you are accountable for what happens to the roles the automation displaced or altered.

This is an endorsement on NBOP-CP, not a credential of its own. It requires a current NBOP-CP and expires with it. NBOP does not sell preparation for it and does not require any.

$195

Once, on issue, on a current NBOP-CP. It expires when the credential does.

3 of 5

Domains of the standard you have to hold personally, alongside the credential.

Only

It sits on a current NBOP-CP and cannot be bought on its own.

3 yr

Term, inherited from the credential, so there is one renewal date rather than two.

What it assesses

  • Deciding what to automate on operational grounds rather than on novelty, including what should stay manual.
  • Ownership and failure modes: who is paged, what the fallback is, and how a silent wrong answer is caught.
  • Human in the loop design, and where review is real rather than ceremonial, including whether the reviewer could still perform the work themselves and remains in enough practice to do so.
  • Role and capacity consequences: what the people whose work changed are now accountable for.
  • Data, access and audit boundaries for systems that act rather than only report.

The gate, published in full

Personal accountability in at least 3 of these 5 domains of the standard, plus a current NBOP-CP:

Domain 07

Systems and tooling

Selecting, implementing and retiring the tools an operation runs on.

Domain 01

Process architecture

How work is designed, documented and kept current as practice changes.

Domain 08

Change and adoption

Getting other people to actually work differently.

Domain 05

Role design and accountability

Who owns what, in a way that survives growth and turnover.

Domain 04

Capacity and resourcing

Where the constraint sits, and sequencing work so the constraint moves deliberately.

Claiming a domain means the decision is yours to make, not that you influence it or execute against it. That distinction is the whole assessment, so it is worth being strict with yourself here.

Who should not bother

  • You build automations to a spec someone else set. This assesses the deciding, not the building.
  • You have deployed tools but do not own what happens when they are wrong.
  • You have automated work that nobody remaining in the organization could perform themselves.

Check yourself against both gates

Nothing here is stored, there is no account and no email field. Both gates are shown separately, because being ineligible for the core credential and being a poor fit for this particular endorsement are different problems with different answers.

How long have you held accountability for how work gets done?
5 years
02520120
Are you in that role now?
Which of these are yours to decide?

Loading the domains this endorsement draws on.

Core criteria for NBOP-CP: checking

This endorsement: checking

What holding it does for you

It appears on your public record, and employers can filter the register by it. A specialism an employer cannot search for is a line on a résumé; one they can search for is how they find you.

What it costs

$195, once, on issue. Certification itself is $695, once, on acceptance, and this sits on top of it. The endorsement expires when your credential does, so there is one renewal date rather than two.

Principles of Practice, Volume VI is AI and Automation Operations. It is not required in order to sit this assessment and confers no advantage.

This endorsement sits on the core credential

It cannot be bought first, and it does not replace NBOP-CP.

The core credential asserts the general practice across all eight domains. This endorsement asserts that the practice was applied inside one function. You need the first before the second.