AI Can Write the Brief. It Can't Walk Into the Room.

AI Can Write the brief but it Can't Walk into the Room. The future belongs to those who can do both.

The debate about AI in communications is focused on the wrong question.

The question I regularly hear is: "What is AI going to replace". But the question we actually we need to ask is whether you are actually using AI and are the people around you using it?

Because we are in the middle of a skills revolution and those who are not adopting are going to left behind fast and it won't wait for you to feel ready.

I have been in communications for over forty years. I've watched the industry absorb the fax machine, couriers, email, internet, social media, the 24-hour news cycle. Each time, the fundamentals held. This time the disruption is bigger and faster. But the good news is that the fundamentals of good communication and the skills of good communicators are more valuable than ever.

Understanding why is where the real opportunity sits.

This Is Not a Productivity Upgrade

AI is not a tool that makes existing work a bit faster. It is changing the economics of communications work at a structural level, and it is doing so now, not in five years.

The volume work that has filled internal and agency teams for decades — content production, drafting, media monitoring, report after report — is being automated at a fraction of the cost and time. Some of it is gone already. Teams that have built their model around that throughput are facing hard questions, and the window for a comfortable answer is closing.

For heads of communications and internal comms leaders, the issue is sharper. AI can produce a messaging framework, a stakeholder map, a communications plan — quickly, cheaply, and to a standard that will satisfy many people in the room. So the question becomes: if that's what your function is for, what happens next?

The answer is that the function needs to move up. And that is genuinely good news, because the work that sits above the automated layer — the strategic thinking, the judgement calls, the credibility in the room — was always where the real value was. Now it is the only place that matters.

The Best Junior You've Ever Had

The most useful way I've found to think about AI in communications is this: it is the best junior you've ever had. Fast, tireless, available at any hour, and capable of producing structure, research and first drafts at a pace no team could match.

I've used it to build a full communications strategy in the time it once took to clear my desk. A risk dashboard that would have taken days, done in an afternoon. The quality, used well, is remarkable.

But a junior needs a brief. They need direction. They need someone to look at the work and say — sometimes bluntly — that's not right, here's what we actually need. The quality of that review depends entirely on the experience behind it.

Without that, AI output is polished and strategically hollow. Organisations are already finding this out. The plan that looks comprehensive and falls apart when a real issue breaks.

The messaging that is technically coherent and misses the room entirely. The crisis response that follows the right template and gets the tone completely wrong.

The more AI produces, the more valuable it becomes to have someone who knows the difference. That's the opportunity — not the threat.

What Doesn't Change

When a board is divided on how to respond to a reputational crisis, they don't need a framework. They need someone they trust to tell them what to do. That trust is built over years, through difficult situations handled well and hard advice given honestly. No prompt produces it.

When a journalist is about to run a damaging story, the judgement call in that moment — what to say, what not to say, and how to say it — draws on pattern recognition that comes only from experience. AI can generate options. It cannot make that call.

When a communications leader needs to push back on a CEO who wants to say the wrong thing, what gets them heard is credibility, not a well-structured document.

These things have always been the core of the profession. They remain so now. The difference is that with AI handling the production layer, experienced communicators have more time for exactly this kind of work — if they choose to claim it.

The Risk Worth Naming

The one thing that concerns me is organisations mistaking the ease of AI output for the presence of a communications strategy.

AI makes it straightforward to produce polished-looking plans, strategies and frameworks quickly and cheaply. Senior leaders can come to equate this with being well prepared. They are not. A communications strategy that isn't grounded in a clear understanding of the business, the stakeholder landscape and the real reputational risks the organisation faces is a content plan with good formatting.

When something goes wrong — and it will — that distinction matters enormously. The organisations best placed to deal with it will be those that have invested in experienced strategic counsel alongside their AI capability, not instead of it.

Our Time Is Now

For experienced communications professionals, this moment is an opportunity. The tools available now mean that senior expertise can be deployed faster, across more ground, with better outputs than was ever possible before. The case for bringing in experienced outside counsel — someone who has seen the situations before, who carries the relationships and the credibility — is stronger than it has ever been.

For organisations building or reviewing their communications function, the question is not whether to adopt AI. It is whether you have the strategic experience to direct it properly and to know when the plan it has produced will hold and when it won't.

The tools have changed. The need for experienced judgement to sit behind them has not — and right now, that judgement is worth more than it has ever been.