Faster at What?

Let’s rip off the band-aid: AI can write a mediocre news release faster, cheaper and better than any of us.

Same goes for the briefing note. The newsletter copy. The key messages that will be skimmed by eight people and actioned by none.

I’ve written about the enshittification of organizational communications and the AI slop flooding our channels. But here’s the plot twist: the machine is getting good.

So the question isn’t whether AI will make us faster. It will. The question is: faster at what?

When everything changes, people reach for the familiar. The default will be the same work, just quicker. More content. More noise, at industrial scale. A faster machine – and a function that’s easier than ever to automate away.

If your value proposition is production, you’re now competing with a tool that works for pennies and never sleeps. That’s not a fight. That’s a countdown.

But organizations aren’t starving for content. They’re drowning in it. What they can’t find anywhere is meaning: sense-making in the fog, context that connects the dots, coherence that turns a cacophony of messages into a signal people can trust.

That’s not production work. It’s leadership work. And no machine can take it from you – unless you keep defining your job as the part it can.

I don’t know about you, but I want AI to empty my dishwasher, not take over my craft. Communication is quintessentially human work. It runs on judgment, empathy and trust. That’s where I want to be, and I suspect it’s why you got into this profession in the first place.

AI won’t make us strategic. It will only reveal whether we were ever clear about our real value. Which is why I keep saying that AI may just be the gift we need to finally elevate communications.

This is the conversation I want to have with you. Join me on September 15 at noon EDT for a free lunch-hour webinar, Reimagining Communications in the Age of AI, hosted by the University of Ottawa’s Professional Development Institute. It’s a taste of the ideas at the heart of the Leadership Development Program for Communicators, the cohort program I direct for communicators ready to stop managing messages and start redefining the function.

The machine is coming for the mediocre work. Good riddance. Let’s talk about what we do with the time it gives back.

If you want to move your communications team from being transactional to becoming transformational, check out these customized training and facilitation workshops.