Answer extracted from the Unprompted: Real AI in IC podcast — listen to the full episode below.
How can internal communicators use AI beyond basic email writing to elevate strategic work?
Move AI from basic automation to intelligent partnership by creating custom AI personas that act as specialized thinking partners—an internal comms expert, a marketing strategist, an engineer—brainstorming together on real strategic challenges. Pair this with an AI-powered chief-of-staff agent that monitors your email, Slack, and Teams channels to flag urgent and overdue items, letting you focus your mental energy on high-impact decisions rather than triage.
Using AI as a collaborative thought partner
The shift from tool to partner starts with how you configure your AI. Instead of using ChatGPT or ChatGPT Enterprise only for one-off tasks, create distinct personas that represent different expertise domains. As Adele McIntosh explains in the Unprompted episode, she sets up personas like an internal comms expert, a marketing expert, and an engineering expert, then runs them through collaborative brainstorms on real strategic questions.
This approach surfaces cross-functional perspectives without requiring lengthy meetings. You get rapid iteration on messaging, audience strategy, or organizational challenges by prompting each persona with the same prompt and comparing their distinct angles. It's simultaneous thinking from multiple disciplines, compressed into minutes.
Automating awareness without losing human judgment
Beyond brainstorming, McIntosh created a chief-of-staff agent that monitors her communications in real-time across email, Slack, and Teams. This agent flags urgent items, reminds her of overdue follow-ups, and surfaces context she might have missed in the constant flow of messages and requests.
The goal is not time savings—it's decision clarity. Strategic work in internal communications demands that you know what's actually urgent versus what feels urgent, what stakeholders are waiting on, and where organizational friction exists. An AI agent handling this triage means you spend your cognitive energy on judgment calls and strategy, not on manually scanning messages.
"You have to put time aside and put time in to learn and experiment and read and do the training and experiment again and that does take time there's no kind of shortcut to it really."
Adele McIntosh — VP of Internal Communications and Community at Arm. With over eight years at Arm, a semiconductor company of approximately 10,000 employees, McIntosh leads internal communications and manages the strategic alignment of messaging across a large, distributed organization where engineering, marketing, and business functions operate under competing priorities and timelines.
This quote underscores a critical truth often missed in AI adoption: the tool is only as effective as your willingness to invest in learning it. McIntosh details her own experimentation process with ChatGPT Enterprise at Arm, rolled out in early 2025, emphasizing that shortcuts do not exist for deep AI fluency. You must practice, fail, refine, and practice again.
Reframing AI impact: quality over speed
According to Microsoft's 2026 Work Trend Index, 58% of AI users report producing work they could not have created a year ago—a statistic that matters far more than time-saving metrics. This is the actual value at stake: not "I finish my emails 30 minutes earlier," but "I can now model three different crisis communication scenarios before the leadership call, or stress-test a message across personas I never would have had time to consult."
Strategic work in internal communications requires this shift in thinking. The personas and monitoring agents are not shortcuts; they are force multipliers for judgment, creativity, and stakeholder understanding.
Key takeaways
- Set up multiple AI personas representing different expertise areas (internal comms, marketing, engineering) to run simultaneous collaborative brainstorms on strategic questions.
- Deploy an AI chief-of-staff agent to monitor email, Slack, and Teams in real time, flagging urgent and overdue items so your focus shifts to judgment and strategy.
- Invest genuine time in learning and experimenting with AI—there are no shortcuts to developing fluency that translates to higher-quality output.
- Measure AI impact by the quality and novelty of work produced, not by time saved; 58% of AI users report creating work they could not have a year ago.
See also
What framework does Amanda recommend for internal communicators learning about AI?
Amanda recommends the Anthropic AI Fluency course, which is free and features a framework with four Ds: direction, diligence, delegation, and discernment—a practical structure for building AI literacy from first principles.
What is the relationship between AI productivity gains and strategic work in internal communications?
Amanda cautions against the assumption that AI time savings automatically free you for strategy. If you struggle to find time for strategic work now, simply gaining time through automation will not solve the problem without intentional practice and mindset shifts.
How can internal communicators practically capture and synthesize organizational insights using AI?
Amanda uses a personal Slack channel where she captures ideas, voice notes, videos, forwarded emails, and files throughout her day. She then synthesizes these inputs using AI to spot patterns and generate insights that inform her strategic decisions.