AI systems are built on language, steered by language and increasingly speak on an organisation's behalf. That makes communication part of how the technology behaves, and hands comms a job nobody else in the building is trained for.
A lot of AI output feels generic, and one reason is that the model has no idea what your organisation has already said, approved or decided. Here is where a durable memory can live, ten practices that keep it trustworthy, and three things you can do today.
Hundreds of AI agents attacked Hugging Face without once asking a human for help. Ethan Mollick's response points at a future that needs exactly the skills comms people already have.
The problem is not that comms professionals are using AI badly. It is that most of them are using one layer of it and assuming that is all there is.
What is the communications function now for, and will communicators rebuild it before the answer is decided for them?
AI's leading voices are losing the communications war because they are fighting a publicity war instead. They are spending on the message and neglecting the fundamentals.
Ask a room of communications professionals what stops them getting value from AI and you tend to hear the same one or two answers: it makes things up, or the lawyers will not allow it. Both are real. Neither is the whole picture.
A little over a year ago, I began the Applied / Comms With AI newsletter began with a simple promise: to experiment, fail, learn, and share everything along the way. Twelve months, two dozen-plus experiments, tool tests and practitioner interviews later – as well as a couple of recent awards wins
Three months ago I documented building Comms With AI with Claude Code. On 18 June it won Gold at the inaugural AI Comms Awards, and I was named AI Communications Leader of the Year.
Most AI initiatives in communications do not fail because the tools fail. They fade because nobody owned the change. This final article in the series is about the difference between a clever pilot and a capability that lasts.
Most monitoring tells comms teams what happened after the moment to act has passed. The Monitor phase asks a sharper question: how quickly can your team detect, interpret and respond to what is happening now?
Ben Verinder has researched AI in public relations for eight years. In this Applied Comms AI Leader Interview, he explains why the policy gap everyone talks about sits on top of a deeper one: an honesty gap between teams, agencies and the people they serve.