How AI can streamline your communications process but you still need a human spark to make it land

Everyone in marketing and communications is talking about AI right now. Some are excited. Some are anxious. Most are doing what they have always done… trying to work out what actually matters versus what is noise.

Here is my honest take after almost two decades in the industry and a year of working AI tools into my daily practice.

AI is genuinely useful. And it is genuinely limited. The teams getting the most from it are the ones who understand both sides of that equation.

Where AI adds real value in communications

AI is excellent at tasks that benefit from speed and scale. Drafting first versions of content. Transcribing and summarising research. Generating social copy variations for testing. Building content calendars. Analysing coverage data. Pulling out themes from media monitoring. Processing large volumes of audience insight quickly.

All of those things used to take hours. With the right AI tools and prompts, they take minutes. That is not a small efficiency gain. For communications teams under pressure to produce more content across more channels with the same resource, it is genuinely transformative.

I use AI to streamline the parts of the process that do not require creative judgement. It handles the first draft. It summarises the research. It gives me a starting point I can build from rather than a blank page I have to fill.

Where AI falls flat

It cannot find the angle that no one else has spotted. It cannot feel the cultural moment that makes a story land in one week and fall flat the next. It cannot tell you which journalist will care about your story, or how to pitch them, or how to read a room when a crisis is starting to unfold.

AI produces content that is adequate. What wins coverage, shifts perception and builds brands is content that is distinctive. That distinctiveness comes from human judgement, experience and instinct. It comes from knowing not just what to say but how to say it, when to say it and who to say it to.

I have seen AI-generated press releases. They are grammatically correct, well structured and completely forgettable. No journalist is going to stop scrolling for a press release that reads like it was written by a machine. They stop for a story, a genuine hook and a voice that sounds like a real person with a real perspective.

The spark AI cannot replicate

The best communications work I have been involved in has always started with a question that felt too simple. What does this audience actually care about? What would make this story impossible to ignore? What would happen if we said the thing nobody else is willing to say?

Those questions require human curiosity, human empathy and human courage. AI can help you build the machine that delivers the answer. It cannot ask the question.

The teams that will win over the next five years are not the ones who replace human judgement with AI. They are the ones who use AI to free up their best people to do more of the thinking that actually matters; the strategy, the creative instinct, the editorial judgement that makes a brand stand out rather than blend in.

Use AI to go faster. Use humans to go further. And make sure there is always someone in the room whose job it is to ask whether the work has a spark, because if it does not, no amount of efficiency will make it land.

See how I applied this in practice at Chemist4U.

If you are looking for senior communications expertise that combines strategic instinct with smart use of AI, get in touch to discuss how I work.