“We have a policy, approved tools, and rules on how to use it. We are communicators; authenticity and trust govern everything we do, and if you over-rely on a tool versus your own brain, skills, and lived experience, then you’ve lost the plot. Our job is to build relationships, trust, and connect with the audience and that will always come from your humanity.”
I was quoted in a recent Inc. Magazine article about how leaders are managing AI in the workplace, and I was pretty shocked, no, scared that more CEOs don’t have policies or guardrails in place.
As communicators, authenticity and trust govern everything we do; it is the foundation of every relationship we build, every message we craft, and every strategy we develop. When you strip away the tactics and the platforms and the endless stream of new tools, what remains is the human connection between a brand and its audience, and if you lose sight of this, nothing else matters…not to sound like a broken record, but people buy from people, not logos.
AI is a tool, and like any tool, it can be used well or not so well. The problem isn’t AI; it’s the temptation to let it replace the very thing making you valuable…your brain, your skills, your story. When you start outsourcing your thinking, you’ve lost the plot. AI doesn’t know your client’s history, doesn’t understand the political dynamics of your industry, and it certainly can’t interpret human emotion or empathy. You, the human, develop these skills through years of navigating actual human problems, and no prompt is sophisticated enough to replicate them.
I’ve watched AI-generated content flood LinkedIn and email inboxes over the past year, and you can spot it immediately. The hollow enthusiasm, the generic insights, the phrases sounding smart but dissolving the second you look at them closely — it all reads the same because it is the same. People are developing immunity to this kind of content, and they should, because when everything sounds identical, nothing sounds like anything at all.
The companies and communicators who will stand out are the ones who sound unmistakably themselves. You cannot automate authenticity or prompt your way into trust. People know when they’re being spoken to by a human who understands them versus a bot, the issue is you seem to think everyone is too dumb to figure it out.
Our job is to build relationships, earn trust, and connect with audiences in ways moving them to action, and this will always come from our humanity. Use AI where it makes sense, but never forget what you’re actually selling – it isn’t content, it’s connection.
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