In The Age Of AI, The Communications Plan Is Changing In Nature

The rise of artificial intelligence is driving six major shifts in how internal and external communications plans are designed.

The first disruption concerns intermediation. AI systems now stand between brands and their internal and external stakeholders: Algorithms select, compare, and synthesize information before audiences even see it. They are increasingly going one step further and making recommendations. And while losing access to your audiences is a problem, losing access to their decisions is a much bigger one. Communications plans must therefore address a new question: How will AI perceive and interpret the brand?

At the same time, anyone online can now generate virtually unlimited content and channels at little or no cost. As a result, the battle for attention is becoming a matter of survival for brands. When content costs (almost) nothing to produce, value shifts from content to the intent behind it. Communications plans should therefore focus less on optimizing production resources and more on governing how the organization expresses itself, both internally and externally.

Meanwhile, as synthetic content proliferates and fake humans become increasingly convincing, audiences will find it harder and harder to distinguish what is real from what is not. More fundamentally, AI threatens more than truth; it threatens our collective ability to decide what deserves to be believed. In this environment, a brand’s credibility, internally and externally, will depend less on what it claims than on what it can demonstrate. This changes the hierarchy of priorities within the communications plan: Proof must take precedence over promise.

The fourth challenge stems from AI’s ability to tailor content and channels to each individual. Yet personalization can bring a company closer to every individual while pushing every individual further away from that company. Communications plans must therefore strike a balance, internally and externally, between the temptation of extreme targeting and the imperative to create common ground – a notion embedded in the very etymology of the word “communication.”

AI also increases the risk of sameness. Because generative systems are, by nature, machines that average and recombine the content on which they are trained, they can make brand expression more generic. Communications plans must therefore protect, more deliberately than ever, what makes the brand distinctive.

Finally, AI is constantly pushing back the boundaries of what is possible; brands must define the boundaries of what is acceptable. Creative decisions are therefore becoming ethical decisions as well. Communications plans must specify not only what the brand wants to achieve, but also what it refuses to do.

Ultimately, generative AI does not make the communications plan more technological, as one might assume.

It makes it more strategic.