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
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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.
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