My company is putting on a seminar this fall, AI for Speechwriting and Executive Communication. It is intended for speechwriters, and communication professionals, who might understand communication well enough to use AI to make it better. It is not for their clients, many of whom think like LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky, who recently said he uses AI to communicate with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella: “Every time, before I send him an email, I hit the Copilot button to make sure that I sound Satya-smart.”
Uh huh.
There is no artificial replacement for a genuinely intelligent, culturally literate person who has devoted a life to human communication. But there might be only one way to prove that: the hard way.
I got some rousing support for that view on a couple Zoom calls this month with speechwriters, each of which contained rousing, even truculent defenses by speechwriters of the primacy of human beings in the leadership communication equation.
My favorite of these was a veritable rant by a normally mild-mannered independent speechwriter, who was approached by a client who had spent three weeks trying to get AI to put together an important internal address at a crucial moment in his organization.
The script looked okay. It sounded all right. But something was wrong with it, the client sensed.
Finally he turned to our speechwriter and asked her if she could maybe figure out what was missing.
Ummm, his story was missing. The whole context of the moment was missing. The strategic purpose of the gathering was missing. The fucking leadership was missing. Because what does ChatGPT know about that?
The speechwriter spoke with the guy for about 10 minutes and ascertained all of the above and worked up the perfect speech to create understanding, reinforce shared values, galvanize the group and set them on their mission, together.
“But what a waste of time!” the speechwriter said in exasperation. “Three weeks, he fooled around with ChatGPT, when he and I could have pulled this message together in a day!”
The old saying went that, to be successful, a writer had to be faster than writers who were better than them, and better than writers who were faster than them.
I love a story that shows writers being both better, and faster, than ChatGPT.
I also hope this speechwriter’s client learned his lesson here.
Unfortunately, I think lots of leaders might have to learn it for themselves—maybe, by doing without speechwriters for awhile and coming back sadder and wiser.
Rather than fearing for their jobs, maybe speechwriters should be looking forward to a short sabbatical—and then a return, with a nice raise.
I love this David. It chimes with conversations I’ve had with clients about public speaking, media interviews etc. AI can give you ‘notes’ but it can’t reproduce the connection that a speaker has with their material that only comes from going through the pain of working out what really matters.
This resonates with me. I’m a firm believer than when a CEO speaks, you should learn something new – a new insight or perspective that you can only get from the CEO. AI can do the grunt work, but it can’t give you something new. It can only tell you what is known. So often if I’m sitting down to write something that should be visionary, I’ll put it into AI and see what it spits out, so I know that’s NOT what I’m going to write. There’s certainly a lot to learn about how to work with AI, but I don’t think it replaces a human perspective that can bring insight, depth, nuance, context, story, connection, etc. If you want to sound like a bot, get a bot to write for you. If you want to sound like a leader, you need a human.