Writing Boots

We’re all scraping, scratching, clawing, for some use of AI that doesn’t make us shrug, spiritually.

Fortune profiled a tech-industry freelance ghostwriter named David Johnson-Igra. According to the story, he lost all his tech clients about a year ago right after the Claude 3 Opus model came out—and then got ’em all back again by figuring out how to serve them better through AI. You should try to read the whole story, but here are the operative Fortune paragraphs, in ital, and my response to them, in Roman.

Ghostwriters commonly create a guide for every executive they work with, noting characteristics of their tone, voice, and how they’d speak on different topics. In his revamped business, Johnson-Igra is transforming the classic voice guide—previously just a reference for the ghostwriters themselves—from a static document into an AI-powered system that continuously learns, makes connections, and surfaces insights. And he’s selling that system to the client.

Actually, there is no such thing as a “classic voice guide,” because ghostwriters don’t create a voice guide, in the first place—unless I’ve missed this, in three decades of convening speechwriters and executive communication pros. In fact, if a speechwriter came to me and said she or he had created a “voice guide” for a principal, I’d ask to see it in hopes I could invite them to the 2026 World Conference of the Professional Speechwriters Association, to share it with the others. But okay. Let’s pretend.

Johnson-Igra’s business, Scribes Consulting, creates what he calls a “second brain” system for each executive by combining a knowledge graph, which organizes data points in a way that maps the relationships among them, with an LLM of their choice. He inputs all the information relevant to the executive’s writing—interviews they’ve given, past content, performance metrics on that content, notes on what they want to say in their writing, etc.—to form the knowledge graph. Then when it’s time to write a new piece of content, he can use the system to get strategic inspiration and get the draft going.

Or to put it another way, Johnson-Igra feeds all the shit execs have ever said or written into an LLM, that he relies on to crap out a first draft. Which must excite the living daylights out of the audiences that exec is about to address.

For example, if an executive wants to write about a certain topic, this system can pull up every mention of that topic in past content, surface how they spoke about it, and also how the post performed. Then the model can create the first draft, which he then edits. “It’s not just about efficiency,” says Johnson-Igra. The benefit, as he sees it, is that these AI tools draw connections deeper than he might have noticed on his own.

What self-respecting writer would concede that? Also: We’ve all consumed a lot of executive communications. This isn’t Joyce’s Ulysses. There are no “deeper connections.” We all know it, including anyone who writes for Fortune, one would hope. But then, she’s scraping, scratching and clawing, too.

Overall, this amounts to a total shift in his offerings. Instead of selling content deliverables, he’s selling a custom system with an expert running it. The client owns the system, but Johnson-Igra still does the work and applies his expertise. … “Now those outputs are a means to an end,” he said. “The end is the system.”

Wait. The end of Johnson-Igra’s executive communication offerings isn’t the executive communication, it’s the system that churns the executive communication out? Again, what fun this portends for the audience at CES next year! “Hear the latest outputs from the CEO’s ‘second brain’ system!”

All of it would have been impossible for him not too long ago, but he’s staffing his revitalized business accordingly. While previously Johnson-Igra hired writers to help him scale by increasing how much writing work he could take on, he’s now tapping technical help, such as a systems engineer, to broaden what he can offer. He’s also diving headfirst into these tools himself, and that’s what he’s crediting his second act to so far. … “I don’t know that much,” he said. “And the only advantage that I have right now is that I keep trying to learn more.”

Honest question, David: What are you trying to achieve, aside from convincing Fortune writers and clients—surely for the very short term—that you’re a great AI innovator? What are you trying to achieve with your work? Are you a communicator, or an overseer of systems engineers creating AI-powered Rube Goldberg devices to help CEOs more effortlessly and thoughtlessly regurgitate more of what they’ve been saying all these years?

Look: More and more, I’m seeing exec comms pros finding handy and useful applications for AI, on the front and back ends of speeches and other exec comms compositions: research, editing, editorial tire-kicking, message stress-testing, briefing-doc making, self-serve presentation creators, murder-board makers—even executive communication agents who with the discerning guidance of a human speechwriter, can make ghostwritten messages sound more, not less, like the executive.

As our Speechwriting School’s dean Eric Schnure remarked during yesterday’s course, “These are no small things.” Which is why my organization is even helping communicators find more of such uses, through a custom webinar, AI for Leadership Communication, which is designed to get whole teams working on this productively, together. (As opposed to scraping, scratching and crawling, on their own.)

But “the end,” in the leadership communication business, can never be the “system” by which communication gets made. In fact, “the end” can’t be the “output” of that system, either. “The end” must remain communication, which has nothing to do with systems engineers or “knowledge graphs.” And everything to do with what human leaders can make human audiences hear, feel, think and do, in the end.

The end.

This June 2024 post is a prelude to a fresh one I’m writing tomorrow. Since I wrote this, I’ve seen exec comms pros find handy uses for AI, on the front and back ends of speeches and other exec comms compositions: research, editing, editorial tire-kicking, briefing-doc making, murder-board generating, and so on. My organization is even helping them find more of such uses, through a custom webinar, AI for Leadership Communication, designed to get whole teams working on this productively, together. And yet, for the big things in exec comms—well, I still stand by what you read below. And tomorrow, I’ll evaluate one self-described ghostwriter’s bold claim to the contrary. —DM

***

Talked with a tech person this week on Zoom. If she wants to identify herself in whatever conversation results from this post, that’d be great; if not, also fine. 

Anyway, she was trying to get me excited about ways that AI could make executive communication a more powerful strategic force for organizations.

How did I respond? Well, on more than one occasion, she said she appreciated my “passion.”

When it was my turn to say polite things, I acknowledged that there might be limitations to my vision about what tech can achieve.

I’m not exactly technology oriented, I acknowledged. I actually told her to look at my office surroundings, on her Zoom screen. A typewriter. Old books. Tons of old work boots, for some reason. Mike Royko, Studs Terkel and Hunter S. Thompson to the left of me, Pete Seeger to the right, here I am.

As a human guy and not a tech guy, I told her she was trying to get tech to solve human problems. I compared the notion to getting AI to do marriage counseling. I told her what I told an AI/exec comms proponent last week: that the exec comms problems I worry about—helping institutional leaders connect genuinely and convincingly with other human beings about ideas that matter mutually—don’t lend themselves to tech solutions. They demand human solutions: emotional ingenuity, intellectual insight, subtle social sense.

I further told her that, lest she think I’m resistant to AI because it’s a new idea: Actually, I’m always desperately grasping for new ideas to introduce to veteran speechwriters and exec comms people. I’m always terrified that there are no new ideas under the sun, and one day people will conclude that Murray and his crew have pretty much told us everything they know, and everything we need to know. 

I said that the moment I see even one immediately practical and significant application of AI to exec comms, I’ll be that application’s most enthusiastic proponent. I’ll build a conference session around it. Or a whole conference. And I’ll be rich! I helped organize a conference on the Internet in the mid-90s for a publishing company. We expected a couple hundred people. More than a thousand communicators showed up, all terrified of being left on the shoulder of the Information Superhighway. (Why? Because our conference brochures read, “Don’t be left on the shoulder of the Information Superhighway!”) 

I’m not into scaring my customers, I’m into serving them—helping them solve the problems they actually have. And there isn’t an app for that.

Maybe my new friend will develop it.

She and I politely agreed that we see the same future: A world where the human element of exec comms will only further stand apart from other corporate communications—which have always, after all, read like they written by ChatGPT.

And we said we’d stay in touch.

P.S. Studs Terkel, who habitually referred to blogs as “bloogs,” also said he figured that if a hardware store carried hammers and nails, a software store must be stocked with pillows and blankets.