AI can give everyone at your organization the ability to put a message together. But it can’t give them the necessary judgment to make it the best it can be.
During the closing keynote fireside discussion at Ragan’s Internal Communications Conference yesterday, Hillary Omdal, senior director of communications at SAP Autonomous Suite at SAP, said that it’s up to comms pros to keep their skills and minds sharp.
“If you are outsourcing your unique point of view to AI, stop it,” Omdal said. “You can use the tools, learn the tools, embrace the tools, but don’t outsource your judgment, because your judgment is uniquely yours. Everything AI knows is because a human has already thought it.”
Allison Houston, director of internal communications at The Gates Foundation, told the audience that communicators have a clear lane to help employees make sense of how their companies are implementing AI as companies adopt new automated tools.
“Technology allows an organization to go faster, but communicators allow an organization to go together,” Houston said. “So it’s really important to put communications at the center of how technology is driving employee experience outcomes. There’s no enterprise that’s not doing something with technology.”
Moving from order taking to strategic partnerships
Rae Moss, senior director of communications and external engagement at Fermilab, recalled stressed the strategic nature of the comms role.
“We are not order takers,” Moss said. “When I started at Fermilab, it was very much, ‘Quick, we need to send this out. Quick, we need to send this out.’ The team would sometimes jump, because they had been taught to do that.”
Houston added that communicators have to push back on that expectation from leadership and instead lean into a communicator’s value as a translator and strategic partner.
“Our value is not just delivering messages,” Houston said. “It is the strategic input, the critical thinking and the connective tissue. Demand to be in the room ahead of and when business decisions happen, because that’s when we really have value.”
Omdal got a reminder of why that matters the week before the conference, when an employee she’d never met sent her a seemingly finished rollout package to send out the next day. It became clear that the message needed a communicator’s touch.
“Sure, it was grammatically sound, but that’s where the judgment comes into play,” Omdal said. “There was a lot of alarming content in it.”
She added that simply sending the message as written would have upset several of the groups receiving it, and she used her judgment as a comms leader to send the message back. But she also said that the process wasn’t all negative and formed a learning experience.
“So we were going back to the drawing board,” Omdal said. “But now they know who I am, and they’ll work with me earlier next time.”
What’s going to matter for communicators in the years ahead
As the discussion drew to a close, each panelist was asked to name the one skill that will set successful communicators apart three to five years from now.
“I’m going to say it’s judgment,” Moss said. “It’s knowing the audience, knowing the value of trust and it’s knowing how to leverage technology to make that faster. But it goes much deeper.”
She added that deeper layer shows up when employees are asked to change the way they work, especially with AI adoption in the equation.
“If we’re telling people, ‘You need to do this’ or ‘We want you to do this,’ they’re not just going to blindly do it. That’s really uncomfortable for people,” she said. “But if we can help them know why they need to do it, I think that makes such a difference.”
Omdal said communicators should find their strength in the part of their work that no tool can ever replicate.
“I would say to just lean into your humanity,” Omdal said. “You are uniquely you. The thoughts you have going through your head right now have not been had before, so keep having them.”
Houston concluded the conversation by calling back to the people communicators work alongside every day. She noted that leaders often aren’t aligned on a business decision by the time it reaches the comms team and that always needs to be a consideration even as tech advances.
“Stakeholder management,” Houston said. “It is core to being successful, and the higher up you want to go, the more important it’s going to be because the cats get harder to herd. There’s a lot of negotiation to try and get people to the right place where you need to land. Technology is not going to change that.”
Stay tuned to Ragan.com for more updates from our Internal Communications Conference this week.
Sean Devlin is the internal communications editor at Ragan. You can connect with him on LinkedIn here.
