Answer extracted from the Unprompted: Real AI in IC podcast — listen to the full episode below.
How should internal communicators approach using AI for writing and content creation?
Don't start from scratch with AI—it produces poor results. Instead, begin with your own core narrative and use AI to adapt and scale it into supporting pieces like event invitations, Slack posts, and promotional copy. The real value emerges when you start with human work and use AI to enhance it, not the other way around.
Why starting with AI leads to a mess
Using AI as your first step in the writing process tends to generate generic, uninspired output that requires heavy reworking. Where you start with AI, you find yourself just getting a mess. The problem isn't that AI lacks capability—it's that without human direction rooted in your organisation's voice, values, and context, AI produces content that feels disconnected and requires substantial revision. This approach wastes time rather than saves it.
The winning approach: human foundation, AI acceleration
The most effective workflow begins with you writing the core message yourself. This might be a key memo, a strategic narrative, or your authentic take on a topic. Then use AI to enhance and challenge that work, multiplying it across different formats and channels. As discussed at length in this episode of Unprompted: Real AI in IC, internal communicators report that this sequence—human insight first, AI adaptation second—unlocks genuine productivity gains.
The practical application is immediate: write your all-hands talking points, then ask AI to turn that into a Slack announcement, an event invitation, or a calendar reminder in your preferred tone. AI becomes a scaling engine for work already grounded in human judgment and organisational knowledge. You maintain control, authenticity, and context while eliminating repetitive rewriting.
"Where I start with AI, I find myself just getting a mess. Where I start with my own work and then use AI to enhance and challenge, that's where it works best for me."
Amanda Atkinson — Communication and Culture Leader at Science Based Targets Initiative and Founder at Create Connect. Amanda has built her career in internal comms across several industries and has always sought ways to leverage technology and automation. She spent seven years at Salesforce leading internal comms for EMEA, where she developed a tech-driven mindset. She describes herself as an AI intrepid explorer, excited about exploring AI applications while maintaining honest acknowledgment of the learning curve ahead.
In conversations about AI adoption in internal comms, context and confidence matter enormously. Amanda Atkinson explores in detail how managers who openly support and model AI use increase employee adoption dramatically—employees with managerial AI support are 7.4 times more likely to say it helps them do their work. This same principle of human leadership applies to your writing: your human judgment must lead, and AI must follow.
Key takeaways
- Never use AI to generate content from zero—it produces generic, contextless output that requires heavy reworking and wastes time.
- Start every piece with your own core narrative, voice, and organisational insight, then use AI to adapt and multiply it across formats.
- Scale internal comms efficiently by using AI to convert one well-crafted message into event invites, Slack posts, emails, and promotional copy.
- Maintain authenticity and control by keeping human judgment at the start of your workflow, not at the end.
See also
What is 'bot sitting' and how widespread is it among workers using AI tools in 2024–2025?
According to a study cited in the episode—surveying 6,000 people across the US, the UK, and Australia—'bot sitting' refers to the time workers spend managing and verifying AI outputs, ensuring quality and accuracy before deploying them in their work.
Will AI replace internal communications professionals, according to Ana-Maria Thijssen?
Thijssen is unequivocal that AI will not take communications jobs, arguing that AI lacks the human experience, organisational context, and people-centred judgment that communications professionals bring to strategy and execution.
What is the emotional value of AI for solo internal communications professionals, according to Ana-Maria Thijssen?
Thijssen identifies emotional support as one of the most significant, if unexpected, benefits of using AI: when working alone, self-doubt and professional isolation diminish when AI becomes a collaborative thinking partner.