How did an internal communications leader first find real value in using AI as a sparring partner rather than a writing tool?
Charlotte Halligan initially found AI frustrating — not because it didn't work, but because it flattened her ideas, conforming them to generic best practice and stripping out the nuance that made her work effective. Her breakthrough came when she stopped asking AI to write for her and started asking it to push back. She fed it detailed context about a difficult stakeholder and asked it to role-play as that person, challenging her strategies and content from their perspective. The result was communications so well-adapted to the likely objections that those objections rarely came up at all — something she described, plainly, as a game changer.
The shift in framing is what made the difference: from AI as a content machine to AI as a thinking partner. By simulating a specific person's perspective rather than generating a generic output, Halligan was able to stress-test her approach before presenting it to the real stakeholder. This is a meaningfully different use case — it doesn't ask AI to produce the final communication, it asks AI to make the communicator sharper. You can explore this episode and others in the series on Listenly's Unprompted page.
"It's not necessarily that AI is going to take your job, but somebody who knows AI is going to take your job. So you kind of have to get on the bus or get off the bus."
— Charlotte Halligan, Unprompted: Real AI in IC, S01 EP4About Charlotte Halligan
Charlotte Halligan
Comms Leader · Internal Communications
Charlotte Halligan brings over 20 years of experience in internal communications — long enough to have navigated multiple waves of technology change and the organisational shifts that come with them. That depth of experience matters here: her perspective on AI adoption isn't that of a technologist or an early adopter, but of a seasoned comms professional who arrived at AI reluctantly and found its real value through practice rather than theory.
By her own account, she was initially slow to personally adopt generative AI. What changed her trajectory was taking on a role with a direct mandate: rolling out generative AI tools across an enterprise, simultaneously with her own learning curve. That organisation was genuinely complex — global in scope, with multiple workforce types, differing legislation, and regional regulations to navigate. Managing all of that while forming her own views on what AI could and couldn't do gave Halligan a perspective that is both practitioner-level and strategically grounded.
Her talk at the Barn to Ballroom internal communications event — where approximately 70 practitioners were in attendance and her presentation drew sustained interest — brought these ideas to a live professional audience. On Unprompted: Real AI in IC, she translates that practical experience into concrete, replicable approaches, of which the stakeholder role-play method is among the most immediately applicable.
See also
- Pourquoi Erik Sebok déconseille-t-il de créer un seul agent IA pour tout faire ?
- Comment Erik Sebok utilise-t-il les agents IA pour maintenir une stratégie de communication vivante au quotidien ?
- Quelle est la meilleure approche pour utiliser l'IA dans le travail stratégique en communications internes selon Erik Sebok ?