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Mel: We've talked about it on the podcast before, and you've probably heard the same thing in recent times too, and that is, what does the surge of AI mean for our jobs as professional communicators? The reality is we are seeing a lot of layoffs around the world, ostensibly due to AI replacing roles, although under the surface it might really be about diverting funds to AI projects, basically robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Whatever it is, there's no denying that we are in a new era for communications, and it's not like we haven't been through significant shifts before. I mean, think about a time before TV or before the internet, before social media, before smartphones. We've faced big leaps before. But AI is quite unlike any of those previous leaps in that we're not just talking about a tool anymore.

We are talking about an entire capability or an entire stakeholder in and of itself, and that necessitates a big shift in how we work as communicators if [00:01:00] we want to stay relevant. Gone are the days of the copywriting monkey. If your whole job tends to circle around drafting emails, social media posts, website content, et cetera, then there's a good chance you'll be highly impacted.

AI is even creating presentations for people and videos now. It's not great, but it's only going to get better. Basically, those tasks that used to be our bread and butter are fast fading into the abyss, and for communicators working in places where your value is only seen in those terms, you are going to have a hard time showing the C-suite that you belong with them.

So how do we pivot, and what does that look like? That's what today's episode is all about.

Hello, friend, and welcome to another episode of Less Chatter, More Matter, the communications podcast. I'm your host Mel Loy, and I'm recording this episode on the lands of the Yuggera and Turrbal people here in Meanjin, Brisbane. And [00:02:00] I'm talking about this topic today for a few reasons. Firstly, based on the conversations I've had in the last few weeks, it really is top of mind for so many people.

Secondly, I was hoping to actually run a joint workshop on this topic in a couple of weeks but, alas, those plans have been laid to rest for now, so I thought why not give you the headlines anyway? And thirdly, things are moving so, so, so fast, we need to get on top of this right now. So I will caveat this episode today with saying that this is, as per usual, the world according to Mel.

And now, as usual, I have done some research behind the scenes, and I'm always talking to a bunch of people from around the comms world. But this is my consolidation of those conversations and research pieces. So you might not agree with everything, and that's totally okay. It really is, because none of us have a crystal ball, but I'm gonna take a good stab at it.

So let's get into it. I've developed a bit of a framework for this, so let me paint a picture for you. Smack bang in the middle [00:03:00] is the core of what I think our future looks like, which is trust builders and guides. Now, that might sound a bit wanky, but hear me out. As professional communicators, we have always been in the business of trust, building trust in brands, in leaders, products, services, et cetera, through our communication efforts.

Whether that's stakeholder engagement, crisis response, issues management, employee comms, or anything in between, we work to build trust in order to help organisations meet their strategic objectives. Think about it. If there's no trust, you won't be able to sell products or services. The competitors who do have that bank of trust built up will do much better.

You won't be able to retain or attract great people. You will find it really challenging to make change happen in your organisation. Your stakeholders will become roadblocks, and so much more. So rather than looking at our work from the perspective of spitting out tons of copy and prettying up PowerPoints, we need to look at it from the perspective of building [00:04:00] trust in order to achieve strategic goals.

Now, there's five parts to this central theme that do overlap quite a bit, and these are the things I'm going to talk through now, and I will post an image of this on my LinkedIn, uh, in a couple weeks so that this will make a lot more sense. But the first part is we need to be reputation architects, and we talked about this with Bonnie Caver on last week's episode.

So if you missed that, I highly recommend you go back and listen to it. But this is the idea that it's not about being reactive and responding when something goes wrong. It's about being proactive and building the architecture that helps a business build a bank of trust that they can then dip into when the crises and issues do occur, because they will happen.

So this is things like keeping an eye on those potential risks and opportunities, helping to mitigate or take advantage of those, as well as foundational stuff like making sure their crisis comms plan's ready, et cetera. But this architecture is what sets you up for success [00:05:00] as a business because, like I said, if people don't trust your business to begin with, they won't do business with you So let's look at a company like Apple, for example.

They have a great reputation, which they work on every day. Just go into any Apple store and you can see how they do that through so many different touchpoints. They also seem to genuinely care about the quality of their product. So even if an iPhone blew up in someone's hand, they would likely weather that storm because, A, people have enough trust in the product and the brand con- to consider that an anomaly, and B, there's so much trust that people will probably keep buying anyway.

Now, you compare that with a brand that might be an unknown in the market or have a bad reputation already for multiple issues. For that brand, a phone blowing up in someone's hand would certainly cause massive financial issues, if not sound the death knell for the company. So building the reputation architecture now is an imperative for [00:06:00] achieving business objectives.

The second part of our new identity is being risk and opportunity identifiers. So similar to reputation architecture, but this is really about putting your risk hat on and looking at the broader trends in your industry that could cause an issue as much as the potential risks within your own business.

But it's also about monitoring those trends and looking for patterns to identify opportunities. So for example, you might find that more and more people are complaining about AI-written job ads. Well, there's an opportunity to differentiate the business by making sure the ads that you put out are really written by humans, and then talk about that.

Shout it from the rooftops. That could be very attractive to potential candidates. Or you might notice that there's a trend away from a particular product or service that your company provides, or how cost of living issues are impacting people's purchasing decisions, et cetera, et cetera. As the communications professional, you have a role [00:07:00] to monitor for those trends and patterns and be at the leadership table raising them and outlining the potential business impacts and benefits.

So that's the second part of our new identity is risk and opportunity identifiers Stakeholder engages. That is our third part, and this is core of what we tend to do anyway, which is identifying, monitoring, and engaging with stakeholders to understand and anticipate their needs and identify potential trends among particular stakeholder groups that could help drive the direction of the business.

Now, this obviously depends on the business and what you do, but your stakeholder groups need to be mapped, and we need to deeply understand them, what they need, what worries them, what the best way to engage them is and on what topics, what they're saying about your brand and your leaders when you're not around, et cetera, et cetera.

It's that real audience-centric approach that drives our communication strategies, but it [00:08:00] also provides really great intel to leaders as they go about their own engagement activities. And as much as AI can be really a helpful tool here, there is nothing like face-to-face personal engagement because AI will just be making assumptions about your stakeholders, which can be a good place to start, but you do need to test those assumptions.

And as Bonnie mentioned last week, we should also consider AI as a stakeholder because AI is where so many people are now going to search for information. So what is it saying about you there, and how can you work to make sure the genuine, authentic story is shining through when people use tools like Google Gemini or ChatGPT or Claude to find out about something that your business does?

So that's number three, stakeholder engagers. Number four, human connectors. At the end of the day, humans are the most social creatures on the planet, and we love feeling a sense of belonging to our tribes, building connections with others. [00:09:00] It's part of what has helped the human species in all its forms survive for so long, because we tend to look out for each other, for our tribe.

So as professional communicators, we have a responsibility to make sure that human voices are amplified above the AI slop and the AI-generated voices. We need to make sure their experiences are tapped into to provide the insights we can use, that humans feel valued, heard, and seen, or they won't buy from us and they will not work for us.

And we need to make sure people feel supported even in times of uncertainty and disruption. And that human support is something AI really can't replicate. But it's also something that's often far from leaders' minds, especially when they are overwhelmed, busy, or just purely focused on business objectives.

We need to raise the human voices and help leaders see the connection between our relationships with humans and how that helps to drive a healthy bottom line and, of course, a [00:10:00] healthy reputation. So that's number four. We need to be human connectors. And number five, really important, we need to be both leaders and leadership coaches.

Now, as communicators, we have to position ourselves as leaders in a world where trust is falling and polarisation is rising. We are in the best positions to lead here. And as trust builders and guides, we are going to help steer organisations through a sea of distrust and cynicism, which is not just coming from outside the organisation, but from within many organisations.

This means we need to not only take on that leadership role, but also coach other leaders in doing the same. They need to connect with their people more effectively, help drive change, and build confidence when there are challenging and uncertain times. Now, like I've said before on the poddy, the challenge for many leaders is that they're often elevated to a leadership role without any training or mentoring, and then left to fend for themselves, so they don't know what they [00:11:00] don't know.

But also, middle managers and team leaders in particular are often incredibly overwhelmed. They could have huge teams of direct reports they're trying to support, a massive workload of their own, and more and more directives being fed down from the top. They are flooded with requests. So another area where we will show value is through leadership coaching and putting in place the structures and supports they need to connect better with their stakeholders.

So that's number five of our pivot. It's leadership and leadership coaches. Now, so they're the five roles we're going to be pl- be playing in order to be seen as trust builders and guides, which is totally valuable to every business, and that will help elevate us up that ladder to the leadership table.

But here's the caveat. These things only happen if we build the right capabilities. So what are they? And again, this is the world according to Mel. The first one for me is adaptability. This is not [00:12:00] resilience. This is the ability to problem solve quickly, pivot when something changes unexpectedly, or update our skills and knowledge as the world around us changes.

So this does include getting yourself across and embracing AI because that is the world we now live in. Sticking our heads in the sand is no longer going to cut it, especially if you want leaders to come to you for strategic advice, and especially if you're going to be in a position where you can confidently raise the risks and issues associated with AI.

If you are not adapting and you are not open to change or being flexible on the run, then you are going to find this new world very challenging. The second skill is creativity. So this is kind of similar to adaptability, but it's more like innovation. It's about looking at the world differently and wondering, what if?

What if we did this or tried this instead of this? Or what if we thought about it this way instead of that way? So it's not artistic ability. That's not creative thinking. It's about a thinking process and a [00:13:00] mindset. And again, it's about identifying opportunities or experiments to put in place and learn from.

And it's definitely about that continuous learning so that then you can try new things and try them in different contexts as well and see what sticks. The third skill is business acumen. Now, this is about understanding how your business works, how business works in general, and being able to speak the language of business.

So this can be things like looking at what others in the sector are doing, monitoring issues that competitors are having, looking at potential financial impacts of economic issues, and ultimately taking what you do back to the goals the business wants to achieve.

You don't need to know how to read a balance sheet, so don't fret. You need to know how to understand what a business spends money on, how they try to save money, how susceptible they are to economic forces, and so on. And when you can speak that business language, then you can speak with authority and confidence to senior leaders [00:14:00] in the organisation.

That's the language they're using. The fourth skill that we need to develop is a strategic mindset. So this is about getting out of the doing and into the thinking. Many people have a bad habit of jumping straight to tactics when they're tasked with a project or a change that they need to be a part of.

But tactics mean nothing if they're not linked to a cohesive strategy. So this is about being able to develop an overall approach to solve a problem or deliver on outcomes or objectives. It's about being able to have that helicopter view and see how all the pieces fit together, where there might be some overlap, where the potential roadblocks are, and so forth.

It is not about how many emails you'll write or town halls you're going to host. Those are tactics, and they're only useful if they help to deliver your strategy And the fifth skill that we need to really hone in on if you're not already is relationship building. This is key to everything, because if you can build good relationships [00:15:00] in the business, it's going to make it so much easier to get stuff done.

It'll cut down the ridiculous reviews and approvals processes, and it'll mean more to people who start to trust you and not just listen to your advice, but proactively seek it as well. Now, this can take some practice and courage, especially if you work in a very hierarchical culture, or you've had poor experiences at work, or you're just not sure how to approach a conversation where you need to give feedback or push back on feedback.

I'm getting some feedback right now from my cat. But practice makes progress, as the saying goes, and I'd also suggest that if you are in this position to seek out a good mentor or coach who can help. All right, so we're at that point of the episode where we go back and do a bit of a recap of what we covered.

So today, we talked about the five parts of our identity that are going to shift in order to be relevant in a new world of AI, and this is about building our reputations and our value as trust builders and guides. So [00:16:00] the first one was reputation architects, so building the systems and processes that help to create a bank of goodwill, good reputation in a business, so it can weather the storm.

It's about being risk and opportunity identifiers, so putting on that risk hat, putting on the opportunity hat, looking at what's out there, seeing what the trends are and how you might be able to identify some patterns that you can raise to the business. Stakeholder engagers. As I said, it's core to what we do anyway, but it really is about delving deeply into the minds of our stakeholders, understanding what their needs are, preempting them, but doing this in a way that is very human.

Which brings us to the fourth part of our identity shift, which is human connectors. At the end of the day, most people wanna talk to people, not robots, especially when there's something that's going wrong, so we need to make sure that human voices are elevated above the AI voices. And number five, we need to be both leaders and leadership coaches so that we can help businesses navigate a world [00:17:00] where there is limited trust and high polarisation. To achieve these five roles, we are going to need to build some specific capabilities, and many of you will already be well on the way to this anyway.

But like anything, it takes continuous learning. So the first skill is adaptability, the ability to pivot quickly, solve problems on the go, and be able to confidently and calmly navigate uncertainty, because that's the world we're in. The second is creativity, being innovative, looking at things differently, taking different perspectives, and experimenting with things.

The third is business acumen, being able to speak the language of business to senior leaders and understand how your business works, how businesses work in general, and what that means for the advice that you can give. The fourth is a strategic mindset, getting yourself above the tactical doing and into the strategic thinking.

And the fifth is relationship building, building trusted relationships that [00:18:00] help you get work done and position you as that strategic advisor. All right, team, that's all we have time for today. Thank you for tuning in to today's episode. And as always, if this episode was meaningful to you in some way, I'd love to hear about it.

Maybe you could pass it on to somebody else who you think might also be useful or might be useful too. And of course, I always love ratings and reviews. They help me to know that I'm on the right track here, but also help the show to be seen by more people in more ways. So if you haven't yet, I'd appreciate you taking just 20 seconds to rate and review the show on your app of choice.

Otherwise, that's it for now. Keep doing amazing things, and bye for now.