How should internal communicators approach using AI for writing and content creation?

Amanda recommends not using AI to start from scratch for writing, as that tends to produce poor results. Instead, she uses AI to scale her writing by enhancing existing drafts.

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 monitoring and correcting AI outputs before use.

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 essential to the role.

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What is a concrete strategic use case for AI in internal communications?

1 September 2026 Unprompted: Real AI in IC · Amanda Atkinson

Use AI to bridge the gap between how employees feel about an event and whether your strategic messages actually landed. Amanda Atkinson combined post-event feedback data with original event objectives, then asked AI to identify gaps between emotional response and message absorption—revealing that while cultural connection was strong, key messaging around strategy and ways of working had not been fully absorbed.

Turning Event Data into Strategic Insight

When the Science Based Targets Initiative held its first all-staff off-site in years in Amsterdam, Amanda saw an opportunity to test a real strategic application of AI. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive—employees felt energized and connected. But "positive" doesn't always mean "strategically effective." She took the raw feedback data and combined it with the original session objectives and desired outcomes for each part of the event.

The next step was direct: Amanda fed both the feedback and the objectives to AI and asked it to identify gaps between what people felt emotionally and whether the strategic messages had truly been absorbed. This isn't AI replacing judgment—it's AI enhancing the analysis that Amanda herself would have to manually piece together, but faster and more systematically.

What the Data Revealed

The results told a clear story: cultural connection was strong, but key messaging around strategy and ways of working had not fully landed with the audience. That gap would have been harder to articulate without the structured AI analysis. Amanda now had a data-backed narrative for stakeholders—not just "people loved it," but "people felt connected, and here's where we need to reinforce strategy messaging next time."

As Amanda explains in the episode, this kind of analysis starts with her own work: "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." She brought the human strategic thinking first, then let AI accelerate the pattern-matching.

"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 and Internal Comms Person at Science Based Targets Initiative. Amanda has spent seven years at Salesforce leading internal comms for EMEA, where she developed a tech-driven approach to communications. She is also founder of Create Connect and describes herself as an AI intrepid explorer, balancing enthusiasm for emerging AI applications with honest acknowledgment of the learning curve ahead.

If you want to hear how Amanda handled the specific challenge of analyzing feedback at scale without losing the human context, the full episode dives deeper into her toolkit and the unexpected obstacles she encountered.