Each week I answer a question from a reader. This week’s question is about AI and the leadership demand we all dread to hear, “do more with less” (I winced writing that). Our reader says:
"Our leadership keep mentioning AI in every conversation about resourcing like it's the answer to us not having enough people, and their mantra this year seems to be “do more with less”. I want to do as much as I can but I honestly don't know what 'using AI well' actually looks like in practice and I’m not clear on what I should focus on versus what I could reliably outsource to an AI tool. Any tips?"
This is one of many questions I've had about AI this month. It seems lots of you are hearing similar things from your leaders and are looking for some practical advice and ideas. So instead of me just answering this in a newsletter, I thought: why not do this properly? This requires time for discussion and space to explore ideas in depth.
Join me for a live discussion about AI
Good news: I have an invitation for you. I'm partnering with my friends at Workvivo for a free live session where I'll share how comms teams are actually using AI right now. This will be a practical, honest conversation about what I’m seeing, what you could be using AI for, how I’m experimenting with AI myself right now.
This event will be a live conversation with myself and Colum Nugent from Workvivo. Now you can’t tell from the photo above but Colum is also a redhead so you can expect a feisty discussion with this line-up, haha.
In this event, I want to share the fruits of my nosiness with you. You all know by now I’m deeply, very, extremely professionally curious and I’ve been speaking with hundreds of comms pros over the last few months to find out how they feel about AI and how they’re using it. I want to share that with you in this event.
We'll talk about what’s actually working for comms teams who are using AI successfully. What tools are they using, what kind of tasks are they outsourcing to AI, what kind of benefits are they seeing?
We’ll also explore how you can use AI without losing the human touch, and what parts of the job you should keep firmly to yourself and not outsource to a robot. Because your AI tool will never have the nuanced understanding, the empathy, the judgment that you will have and not everything should be sent to AI.
And importantly, this isn’t a conversation about replacing people, getting rid of comms teams, cutting corners or diluting the quality of your work. It's about freeing up your time for the work that actually needs you. And hopefully giving you something concrete to say next time AI comes up in a resourcing conversation with your leadership.
What to expect
Here’s what you can expect to walk away with after this event:
- Real examples of AI saving time and increasing output without increasing headcount
- How to move beyond one-off prompts and build AI into repeatable workflows
- How to keep your communications credible and not sounding robotic
- How to turn your early experiments into something that actually scales
Can AI do your grocery shopping?
BTW I also want to share with you the absolute BEST AI workflow I’ve built this year; my husband and I have connected a few AI tools together to do our Tesco grocery shopping online for us. Honestly this is where AI can really shine – take a boring, routine, mundane tasks that you absolutely dread and let AI do the work for you. This took a wee bit of time to set up but it’s magical and I want to show you!
It might inspire you to think about the boring, routine, mundane tasks you do in your own job and how you could use a few AI tools to do them for you.
[Next step, can AI please do my laundry and clean my windows?!]
Join me for this event:
📅 16th April
🕐 3pm GMT
💰 Free to attend
And of course there will be plenty of time for your questions on the day, so bring your curiosity and your enthusiasm and I’ll do my best to answer as many as I can. See you there!
Thanks for reading and stay curious,
Joanna
PS Can't make it live? Register anyway and you'll get the recording afterwards. Grab your spot here.
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Want to work together?
- Join The Curious Tribe. This is my membership community for ambitious, curious communicators who want to achieve more in their roles and have fun at the same time. Membership allows you to work directly with me for 12 months, make deep connections with other communication pros who 'get it' and improve your skills through training and learning. More info here.
- Ready to review your channels and content but don't know where to start? Download my practical Internal Comms Audit Playbook to guide you through a DIY audit - no expensive consultant needed. This has ready-to-use templates and checklists to give you a systematic way to do your own audit which you can repeat every single year. Get it here.
- Take a shortcut. I've developed a collection of tried-and-tested templates, checklists and how-to guides for the key processes you'll need in your role as an internal communicator. You can download my Internal Comms Cheat Sheets here.