AI Can’t Read the Room
We’ve all been there, rolling our eyes at the latest prediction emerging, suggesting that AI is about to make communications professionals obsolete. The logic is usually straightforward enough. If a machine can draft a press release, write social media content, produce briefing notes and summarise lengthy reports in seconds, then surely it is only a matter of time before organisations start questioning whether they need people to do those things at all.
I understand why that argument is appealing. Looking purely at outputs, AI is already capable of producing work that would have taken a communications team hours to complete only a few years ago. The technology is improving at an astonishing pace and there is little reason to believe that progress will slow down. Yet every time I hear someone suggest that AI is coming for our jobs, I find myself thinking that they have misunderstood what communications actually is.
The mistake is assuming that communications is primarily about content.
Of course content matters. Reports need writing, statements need drafting and social media channels need feeding. But content is ultimately the product of communications, not the purpose of it. The purpose is helping organisations communicate effectively with the people they serve, employ, regulate, fund or represent. That requires something much more complicated than simply generating words on a page.
When I look back at the moments that have mattered most in my own career, very few involved sitting at a keyboard. They involved difficult conversations about trust and reputation. They involved helping leaders think through how an announcement might be received, identifying risks that had not yet been considered, or asking uncomfortable questions before somebody else asked them publicly. Sometimes the most valuable contribution a communications professional can make is not writing a message at all, but advising against sending one.
That is why I suspect AI will enhance communications far more than it replaces it.
For years, many communications teams have found themselves overwhelmed by administrative and production work. Hours disappear producing first versions of reports, preparing FAQs, formatting documents and responding to endless requests for content. Most of those tasks are important, but few represent the highest value contribution a communications professional can make. They are necessary parts of the job, but they are not the reason organisations seek communications advice in the first place.
What AI offers is the possibility of removing some of that friction. A first draft that once took an hour might take ten minutes. A report that required an afternoon to summarise might be condensed in seconds. Research that previously consumed days can often be completed in a fraction of the time. Used well, that creates something increasingly rare within modern organisations: space to think.
Thinking is where communications earns its place.
No matter how sophisticated AI becomes, it cannot sit in a room and sense that a leadership team is becoming disconnected from the reality experienced by its staff. It cannot recognise that a decision which appears sensible internally is likely to provoke anger externally. It cannot build relationships with journalists, community leaders, stakeholders or staff groups. Most importantly, it cannot carry responsibility. When an organisation faces criticism, controversy or crisis. Accountability still belongs to people.
In many ways, communications has always been less about writing than it has been about judgement. The best communicators understand people, not just platforms. They recognise that trust is rarely won through a perfectly crafted statement and almost always earned through consistent behaviour over time. They understand that reputation is shaped by decisions long before it is shaped by messaging. Those skills are deeply human and remain stubbornly resistant to automation.
Perhaps the greatest irony is that AI may end up pushing communications professionals back towards the parts of the profession that matter most. If technology can take care of more routine production work, communicators have an opportunity to spend more time advising leaders, understanding audiences and helping organisations navigate uncertainty. In other words, they can spend less time creating communications and more time practising it.
For that reason, I remain far more optimistic than anxious about the rise of artificial intelligence. Not because the technology is unimportant, and certainly not because it will leave our profession untouched. It will change communications in profound ways, just as every major technological shift has done before it. But change is not the same as replacement. The organisations that benefit most from AI are unlikely to be those that eliminate expertise. They will be those that use technology to strengthen it.
The future communications professional may well spend less time staring at a blank document and more time helping organisations make better decisions. If that proves to be the case, it will not diminish the profession.
It might actually return it to what it was supposed to be all along.
