How AI is changing communications, and where your human skills come in

AI is changing the way communications work gets done. It can draft an email, create a social media post, develop a presentation or turn a few ideas into a communication plan in seconds. For organisations under pressure to do more with less, that is understandably appealing.

Though there’s an important distinction that often gets lost in the conversation about AI replacing communications roles: creating communication is not the same as knowing how to communicate.

AI can produce the words, sure, but the value of a communications professional is often in knowing which words are needed in the first place, who needs to hear them, what they might think when they do, and what needs to happen next. 

AI can create content, but communication is more than content

There’s a tendency to assume that if a tool can produce something, the expertise required to produce it is no longer necessary -  but the existence of Canva didn’t suddenly make everyone a designer, just as spell-check didn’t turn everyone into a writer. The same applies to generative AI, in fact, maybe more so because gee, we’re all a bit sick of seeing the same AI posters, right?

AI can produce a communication plan, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the person using it understands the audience, the organisational context, the risks or what will actually happen when the message lands. A communications professional isn’t valuable simply because they can put words on a page. They’re valuable because they can work out what needs to be said, why it matters, how it should be said and what the audience needs to do with that information. That is a very different skill from content production.

Good communication starts before the writing

Some of the hardest communications work happens before anyone writes a word. It’s asking the questions that uncover the real issue. What are we actually trying to achieve? What does this audience already know? What are they worried about? What do they need from us? What might they push back on? What information are we missing? What happens if they misunderstand the message?

AI can help answer some of those questions if you give it enough useful information, but it can’t magically provide the organisational knowledge, relationships and context that sit behind them. If you don’t know what you’re trying to say, who you’re saying it to or why it matters, AI can produce something that looks complete without actually being useful. That’s one of the traps of generative AI because it can make a poor idea look remarkably polished.

Experience gives communicators an important advantage

A good communications professional can often look at a message and know that something isn’t quite right. The information might technically be correct, but the tone could be wrong. A leader might be trying to reassure people but accidentally make the situation sound more serious, or a change announcement might explain what is happening without giving people any reason to care.

Sometimes you can explain exactly why something isn’t working and other times it comes down to experience and pattern recognition. Like, you’ve seen a similar situation before or you’ve watched a particular approach fail. You know how a particular audience tends to respond, or you know that a particular phrase will immediately put people on the defensive.

That experience is difficult to replicate simply by giving an AI tool more prompts. AI can generate alternatives, but a communicator still needs to decide whether those alternatives are appropriate.

Communication is fundamentally about people

This is perhaps the biggest reason human communication skills will continue to matter in the age of AI. People don’t simply receive information, they interpret it through their own experiences, relationships, expectations and emotions. Meaning: the same message can land very differently with two different audiences.

Consider an organisation that has been through several restructures… A perfectly reasonable announcement about another organisational change may be received very differently by that workforce than it would be by people who have never experienced organisational uncertainty. The words might be identical, but the context isn’t.

Understanding that context is part of communications work just as building relationships with leaders, asking difficult questions, challenging a brief, understanding organisational dynamics and knowing when people need information versus when they actually need a conversation is, too. AI can help with communication, but it doesn’t replace the relationship behind it.

AI may actually change what we value in communicators

Rather than asking whether AI will replace communications professionals, it may be more useful to ask which parts of communications work humans should be focusing on. As AI takes on more of the production work, skills such as strategy, audience insight, judgement, counselling leaders, understanding risk, building trust and making sense of complexity become increasingly important.

The ability to find the real story, to challenge an assumption, to understand what an audience is likely to think, feel and do all matters. Perhaps most importantly, the ability to explain why a particular communication approach is needed matters. That is where communications professionals can move beyond being the people who produce the newsletter, write the announcement or build the presentation. They become the people helping organisations make better communication decisions.

AI can make communicators more efficient

None of this means communications professionals should reject AI, though, it’s actually quite the opposite. AI can be incredibly useful for getting started, exploring ideas, restructuring information, generating options, checking work and taking care of some of the more repetitive production tasks. The opportunity, however, is to use it deliberately.

If AI can take care of some of the grunt work, communicators can spend more time on the work that requires judgement, experience and human understanding. The danger is not necessarily that AI will produce poor content but that people will assume that because AI can produce something, it must be good enough.  There is a difference between technically correct and actually effective.

The future of communications may involve less writing

AI could ultimately mean that good communicators spend less time writing and more time thinking… which could be a good thing. If the technology takes care of more of the production work, communications professionals have an opportunity to spend more time understanding people, challenging assumptions, advising leaders, navigating complexity and making sure communication actually achieves something.

The question isn’t whether AI can write an email… of course it can. The more important question is whether it understands why that email needs to exist, what the recipient needs from it, what they might do when they read it and what happens if they don’t respond in the way you expect.