What does constant urgency do to the quality of communication? A report that took hours to work through can now be summarised in minutes. Ideas arrive quickly, so do headlines and content plans. There is something obviously useful in the speed that AI brings, especially for teams with more work than their time and resources can allow. But what happens when communication becomes easy to produce? 

We produce more of it.

Organisations are publishing into an environment where almost everyone else has also found ways to say more, more often. As much as the amount of information we consume is growing, human attention remains human. We still have the same number of hours in a day and there is only so much we can read, watch, remember or extend our sensitivities to.

A communication strategy should help organisations decide what deserves attention

A modern communication strategy should respond to this by becoming more selective. This may sound strange at a time when organisations are under pressure to maintain a presence across several platforms. Yet a strategy should help an organisation decide what deserves to be communicated. We keep trying to improve our ability to produce when the harder work may be giving people a reason to pay attention.

AI can reproduce sameness in thinking, not only in language

A 2025 study comparing 2,200 college admissions essays found that human writers continued to introduce a wider range of new ideas across the essays than GPT-4. The researchers tested different prompts and model settings; and the same pattern remained. I find this more interesting than the usual concerns about AI language. Most of us can now recognise certain words and sentence structures. We remove them and try to make the writing more human. But research suggests something deeper is happening – as the sameness can recreate itself in our thinking.

This means organisations need to be careful about using AI in ways that outsource the part of communication that most needs human attention. AI can be more useful after people have done the thinking work on their own.

Communication teams need to be involved while organisations are still making sense of what they know

This requires a different relationship between communication teams and the organisations they work within. Communicators should not only be brought in when something needs to be announced or amplified. They need access to the conversations when people are still ideating and sensemaking.

Communications teams should explore what projects are learning rather than simply collecting updates. Engagement should be studied for patterns. Reports should be read for the findings that challenge existing assumptions. This is also why listening needs to become more specific. Organisations often say they listen to their audiences because they conduct surveys or monitor comments. The real value lies in what happens after something unexpected is heard. Does it change the explanation? Does it reveal that the organisation has been answering a different question from the one people are actually asking? Does it require the organisation to learn more before it communicates again?

Trust depends partly on whether people can understand how an organisation knows what it claims to know

The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer surveyed more than 33,000 people across 28 countries and found continued strain in trust towards government, business, the media and NGOs. The Reuters Institute has also documented low trust in news and declining engagement with it. And now AI introduces a new uncertainty into what we read or see.

Organisations should be able to explain where information came from, what evidence informed a conclusion and what remains unclear. This gives people something against which they can judge what they are being told. This supports connection too.

Start with what people are trying to understand

Information should aim to explain experiences people have never been able to name, change how people understand a decision that affects them, answer a question someone has been contemplating for some time. Maybe communication strategies should put more effort into describing what audiences are trying to understand or make sense of. The more important work is making sure there was thought before an output was produced, and a reason for the communication to exist at all.