D648 Leveraging AI and Technology in Strategic Communications, catalog number COMS 3400, is the three CU course in the WGU School of Business communications sequence covering the current state of artificial intelligence and its impact on the communications function. It is a course with an awkward feature: the subject changes faster than any reading list, and a submission built around specific products dates within months of being written.
Write about the function, not the product
The durable move in COMS 3400 is to anchor the analysis in what the communications function has to do rather than in which tool is currently ahead. Communications work involves research, drafting, adaptation across audiences, production, distribution, monitoring and response. Each of those has a different exposure to automation, and the reasons are structural rather than tied to any particular release.
Drafting and adaptation are highly automatable because they are transformations of existing material with clear success criteria. Monitoring at volume is automatable because it is classification. Judgment about what an organisation should say in a contested situation is not, because it requires accountability, and accountability cannot be delegated to a system. A submission organised that way stays true regardless of what shipped last week, and it reads as analysis rather than as enthusiasm.
The second scored theme is governance. Generative tools in a communications function introduce real risks: fabricated facts published under a brand name, confidential material entered into an external service, synthetic media used without disclosure, and homogenised voice across an organisation that spent years building a distinctive one. A submission that lists benefits without naming these reads as promotional, and evaluators mark it accordingly.
Turning scored aspects into a section plan
The scoring detail is in your Course of Study rather than the catalog, so count the aspects there and use them as your headings. Each is judged independently against a three point scale and each needs a 2, so an enthusiastic tools section cannot compensate for a thin governance section.
This course tempts students into describing capabilities at length. Capability description is cheap material and it consumes the words that reasoning aspects need. Decide the balance on paper before drafting.
The word budget, worked. Assume six scored aspects and about 1,700 words. Reserve 130 words to name the organisation and the communications function under discussion, and 110 for a close. That leaves near 1,460, about 240 per aspect. Then move 60 words out of each of two capability aspects and give the resulting 120 to the governance aspect and 120 to the aspect covering how the work changes for the people doing it. Those two are where an evaluator can distinguish considered work from a summary of vendor claims.
A structure that fits this deliverable
Where your directions specify a structure, follow it. Where they do not, this ordering supports the reasoning the aspects look for.
| Section | What belongs in it | How it gets read |
|---|---|---|
| The function today | The communications tasks in scope, with time and cost attached | Without a baseline, no claimed improvement can be assessed |
| Where automation fits | Task by task, what can be automated, assisted or must stay human | Task level analysis scores far better than tool level description |
| Proposed use | Specific applications with expected effect and required human checkpoints | Checkpoints are the difference between a plan and an aspiration |
| Quality control | How output is verified before publication, and by whom | Fabricated facts published under a brand are the headline risk |
| Governance and disclosure | Confidentiality rules, disclosure policy, brand voice protection | Expected; its absence is the most common weakness |
| People and skills | How roles change, what training follows, what work disappears | Honest treatment here reads as maturity |
| Measurement | How you would know the change helped rather than just felt modern | Turns advocacy into a proposal |
Keep tool names to a minimum and put them in an appendix if the directions allow. The analysis should survive a product being discontinued.
Evidence craft on a fast moving subject
Sourcing is unusually difficult here because much of the available material is marketing.
- Prefer independent sources to vendor material, and label vendor claims as vendor claims when you use them.
- Date every claim about capability. What a system could do at a given point is a fact; what it can do generally is not.
- Cite professional bodies and regulators for disclosure and ethics guidance rather than inventing a standard.
- Support efficiency claims with something measured, even a small internal trial, rather than with a published percentage from a supplier.
- Where you used these tools in producing the work, disclose it exactly as your task directions require.
- Use APA throughout, with access dates, because sources on this subject move.
Include one honest limitation you observed yourself. A specific example of an output that was confidently wrong, and what your checking process caught, is worth more than any general caution about accuracy.
What separates Competent from a submission sent back
Aspects score independently, and returns here usually land on governance and measurement.
- The analysis is organised by task rather than by product.
- Every proposed use names a human checkpoint before anything is published.
- Confidentiality and disclosure are addressed as policy, not as a caution.
- The effect on the people currently doing the work is discussed openly.
- A measure exists for whether the change achieved anything.
Performance assessment work at WGU can be revised and resubmitted without a grade penalty, so a return costs calendar rather than standing. Terms are six months at a flat rate, which makes clean first submissions worth more than polished second ones.
Six mistakes that cost time in D648
- Writing a product review. Tool comparisons age immediately and answer few aspects.
- Efficiency claims with no baseline. Saving time is unmeasurable without knowing what the task took before.
- No governance section. The risks are well known, and omitting them reads as unfamiliarity with the field.
- Ignoring brand voice. Homogenised output is a genuine strategic cost and a good discussion point.
- Treating job change as a footnote. The people effect is part of the impact the course is about.
- Undisclosed use in the submission itself. Follow your task directions exactly; this is the easiest avoidable problem in the course.
- Assuming the savings land where the work was removed. Automating drafting rarely returns time to the drafter; it usually shifts the load to whoever now has to verify a larger volume of output, and a proposal that does not follow the work to its new owner has not finished the analysis.
Designing the human checkpoint
The section that most reliably lifts a D648 submission is a concrete account of where a person intervenes and what they are checking for, because it is the part that cannot be written from a vendor page.
Distinguish three kinds of check. Factual verification asks whether every claim, figure, name and date in the output is true, and it is non negotiable for anything published externally because fabricated detail is the characteristic failure of generative systems. Voice verification asks whether the piece sounds like the organisation rather than like everything else, and it is the check most often skipped. Judgment verification asks whether saying this, now, in this way, is wise, and it is the one that has to sit with someone accountable.
Then set the checkpoint by risk. Internal first drafts might need only a light factual pass. External customer communication needs all three. Anything touching a regulator, an incident, a person's employment or a safety issue should not be automated at all, and saying so explicitly is a strength rather than a limitation on your proposal.
Finish with the failure question: if something inaccurate is published, how is it detected, how quickly can it be corrected, and who answers for it. An organisation cannot delegate that answer to a supplier, and a submission that names a role rather than a process has understood the governance aspect properly.
How support works on this course
Send the rubric from your Course of Study and the task directions. What comes back is aspect mapped: a task level analysis rather than a product tour, proposed uses with human checkpoints, a governance section covering confidentiality and disclosure, and a measurement plan. Plus a walkthrough so the position is yours to defend.
D648 is one of the lighter courses in the communications sequence but it is easy to lose time to rework caused by a missing governance section. Terms run six months at a flat rate, so a clean first pass is the whole objective.
Questions students ask about D648
Is D648 the same course as COMS 3400?
Am I allowed to use AI tools in the coursework itself?
Can you write this submission for me?
Where D648 sits in WGU's programs
The July 2026 catalog places this code in 1 current WGU program. Open a program page for the complete standard path and term positions. The live Degree Plan remains authoritative after transfer credit, substitutions, and mentor planning.
The assessments, one by one
The public catalog does not publish this course's PA/OA identity or task count. WGU Tutors publishes at most one PA manual per course and only from a WGU-controlled public rubric. Until that source exists, PA help begins from the student's real Course of Study and OA support remains preparation only.