Ask a generative AI tool such as ChatGPT or Claude to develop a strategic communication plan and you’ll probably have one in seconds. Give it a few lines about an organisational change, a new strategy, a restructure or a product launch and it’ll happily produce objectives, audiences, key messages, channels, tactics, measures and maybe even a timeline of activity.
Depending on what you give it, the result might be very good. It’ll probably be well structured and use the language we expect to see in a strategy. There’ll be mention of alignment, engagement, behaviour change and measurable outcomes. If you handed it to someone who wasn’t particularly experienced in strategic communication, they might think it was excellent.
And maybe it is. But maybe it just looks like it is.
That’s one of the things I find most interesting about AI and our profession. AI is getting very good at producing the things communication professionals have traditionally produced. It can write the plan, draft the messages, build the content, suggest the channels and give you a set of measures. What it can’t do is turn a poorly understood problem into a good strategy just because the finished document looks impressive.
We’ve always had this problem and now, AI has made it much easier to hide.
A plan can look strategic without being strategic
Imagine your organisation is about to introduce a new operating model. You open ChatGPT, Claude or another AI tool and type:
Develop a strategic communication plan to communicate our new operating model to employees. Include objectives, audiences, key messages, channels, tactics and measures.
There’s a good chance you’ll get something perfectly usable on the surface. But think about everything the tool doesn’t know.
Why is the operating model changing? What organisational problem is it meant to solve? What’s happening now that needs to be different? What do employees already know and understand? What do they believe about the change? What are they expected to do differently? What could get in the way? What have leaders already said or done? What evidence do you have about the people affected?
And most importantly, where does communication have a role to play?
If you haven’t worked those things out yourself, AI hasn’t suddenly made your work strategic. It’s produced a communication plan from an incomplete brief.
We’re getting better at using AI
AI is now part of everyday communication work.
The 2026 Reimagining Tomorrow study surveyed 536 communication professionals across six regions. The research was led by the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management in partnership with the Centre for Strategic Communication Excellence (CSCE) and Reputation Lighthouse.
The findings show just how quickly AI use has grown across the profession. Some 95.9 per cent of respondents work in organisations where AI use is permitted, while 42.2 per cent say AI is a regular part of their workflow for specific tasks.
Confidence is growing as well. In 2025, 26.2 per cent of respondents said they were very confident in their ability to evaluate the ethical implications of AI. In 2026 that had risen to 38.8 per cent.
That’s good news. Communication professionals need AI literacy. We need to understand the tools, know where they can help us and recognise where they can create risk. But knowing how to use AI isn’t the same as knowing how to use it strategically.
AI literacy isn’t strategic capability
One of the findings from Reimagining Tomorrow that caught my attention was the profession’s priorities for the next two years. AI literacy and workforce upskilling came first, identified by 35.5 per cent of respondents, followed by responsible AI and ethics at 22.3 per cent. The report makes the point that while we’re still building foundational capability, knowing how to use AI doesn’t automatically make us more strategic.
We can see that in the leadership data too. Communication professionals are becoming more involved in AI-related activities, which is encouraging, but only 12.2 per cent report leading AI strategic alignment and only 8.6 per cent lead AI governance structures.
For me, this raises a bigger question about where our value comes from as AI gets better at many of the tasks we’ve traditionally done ourselves.
If technology can produce a first draft of a plan, write an article, generate messages, summarise research, develop a content calendar or create a set of stakeholder FAQs in a fraction of the time it once took us, being good at producing those things is no longer enough.
Our value has to come from understanding why we’re doing them.
Change the question you ask AI
This is where I think we can use AI much more effectively. A lot of our prompts still begin with words such as “write”, “draft”, “develop”, “create” or “summarise”. There’s nothing wrong with that of course. I use AI for those things too. But that puts AI at the production end of our work.
Try bringing it in much earlier. Instead of immediately asking it to develop your communication plan, you might try something like this:
Here’s the organisational objective, the communication challenge as I currently understand it and the evidence I have. Challenge my assumptions. What am I treating as fact that may only be an assumption? Where might communication not be the answer? What information is missing? What else would you want to understand before recommending a communication response? Don’t give me tactics yet.
Now you’re having a very different conversation with the tool because you’re asking it to challenge the way you’re looking at the problem before you start solving it. You’re using it to explore what you know, what you don’t know and where your own thinking may be incomplete.
And I’ve deliberately included “don’t give me tactics yet.” AI loves getting to the answer quickly and so do organisations. So, frankly, do communication professionals sometimes.
Before long we’ve got the CEO email, the video, the town hall, the intranet story and the toolkit. The activity is underway before anyone has properly established what needs to change.
Sometimes communication isn’t the answer
You might discover that people already know exactly what’s expected of them but the process makes it impossible. They may understand a change perfectly well but not trust the people leading it. A manager may be rewarding one behaviour while the organisation is communicating another. Employees might understand the new strategy but have no idea how their own work contributes to it.
Those aren’t all communication problems.
A communication professional who understands their organisation and the people within it can recognise that. They can advise leaders where communication has a role to play and where something else needs to change first.
AI can help us interrogate the issue by asking questions we haven’t considered, challenging assumptions, helping us examine evidence or exploring a problem from the perspective of different stakeholders. What it can’t do is know the organisation for us or take responsibility for the advice we give. That still belongs to us.
Responsibility has to travel with capability
As AI becomes more useful, responsible use needs to become part of our professional practice. Reimagining Tomorrow 2026 found that only 47 per cent of respondents work in organisations with a responsible AI guideline, policy or framework. In other words, more than half still don’t.
The research also found that a quarter of organisations using AI don’t disclose that use to employees, clients or the public, while only 20.9 per cent disclose both internally and externally.
For communication professionals, there’s an added responsibility because we work with information, reputation, trust and relationships every day. Using AI well isn’t only about getting a better output. It’s about knowing what information we should put into a tool, questioning what comes back, understanding the risks and remaining accountable for what we ultimately recommend or produce.
The technology can assist us, but it doesn’t take responsibility for our work.
The hard part hasn’t changed
The opportunity with AI isn’t only in what it can produce. It’s also in how we use it before we get to that point.
But none of that removes the need to understand strategic communication. If anything, it makes that capability even more important.
AI has made it remarkably easy to produce something that looks strategic. The harder part is still understanding what you’re trying to achieve, why communication has a role to play and what needs to change as a result.
It’s also what we explore in my AI-powered Strategic Communication workshop. Rather than treating AI as a faster way to produce communication, we look at how it can support the strategic communication planning process, the questions we should be asking along the way and how to use it responsibly while keeping the professional firmly accountable for the work.
I’ll be running the next workshop on 24 November.
Learning how to prompt AI is one thing. Knowing why you’re prompting in the first place is another.
