Stop asking AI for ideas-use it to do the work around the work

"The work around the work": What AI can really do for communicators

AI isn't your writer. It's your operations engine. As Carolyn Clark, vice president of communications and employee experience at Simpplr, put it: "We need AI to do the work around the work, not do the writing for us or idea generating. I've never met a comms person who did not have a million ideas."

If you're in PR and communications, the leverage sits in everything that happens before and after the message: research, planning, QA, distribution, and measurement. That's where AI pays off-consistently and quietly.

Where AI actually moves the needle for internal comms

• Audience intel at speed: Summarize survey comments, help desk tickets, and town hall transcripts into themes, concerns, and questions. Use it to spot key segments and sentiment, not to write the memo.
• Briefs and alignment: Turn long decks, project docs, or policies into tight creative briefs, message maps, and FAQs. You write the narrative-AI keeps everyone aligned.
• QA and consistency: Run tone, clarity, reading level, inclusive language, and policy checks across drafts. Catch contradictions before they escape your inbox.
• Meeting-to-action: Convert transcripts into decisions, owners, and deadlines. Push action items into your task system so follow-through isn't a memory test.
• Channel ops: Create distribution checklists, calendar reminders, and posting sequences for email, intranet, Slack/Teams, and leadership toolkits.
• Personalization at scale: Generate versioned intros, subject lines, and summaries based on audience role or site-then you finalize voice and nuance.
• Measurement and insight: Roll up open-text feedback into themes, compare message recall across groups, and create "so what" summaries for executives.

Practical workflows you can launch this week

• Meeting ➝ Memo ➝ Actions: Record the meeting, get a transcript, ask AI for decisions, risks, and owners, then publish a one-page recap you edit and approve.
• Policy refresh ➝ Brief ➝ FAQ: Feed AI a policy update and past FAQs. Ask for a creative brief, a risk/impact section, and a 10-question FAQ. You write the final announcement.
• Draft QA pass: Paste your draft and ask for a reading-level check, jargon flags, plain-language rewrites for any sentences over 25 words, and an inclusivity review. Keep or discard suggestions.
• Channel plan assist: Provide audience segments and channels. Ask for a distribution sequence with timing, owner, and "proof of understanding" ideas (quick polls, manager talking points).
• Sentiment sweep: Feed in comments from Slack/Teams, intranet posts, and surveys. Ask for top 5 themes, quotes that illustrate each, and what leaders should say next.

Guardrails that keep you out of trouble

• Human owns the message: Use AI for prep, QA, and reporting. Humans write the story and make the call.
• Privacy and security: Don't paste sensitive data into consumer tools. Prefer enterprise solutions with data protections, logging, and admin controls. See the NIST AI Risk Management Framework for a baseline.
• Source and verify: Ask AI to show sources or citations when summarizing. Spot-check anything that could affect reputation or compliance.
• Team norms: Define where AI is used (and not used), approval points, and how outputs are stored for audits.

Metrics that prove value

• Cycle time: Time from input to approved brief, from meeting to recap, from draft to final.
• Quality: Fewer rework rounds, fewer errors, higher clarity scores, and better message recall.
• Reach and relevance: Read rates by segment, completion of required actions, manager cascade speed.
• Capacity: Hours saved on transcription, formatting, and reporting-reinvested in stakeholder time and storytelling.

30-60-90 day rollout

• Days 1-30: Pilot two workflows: meeting-to-action and draft QA. Document prompts, edge cases, and time saved.
• Days 31-60: Add channel planning and sentiment sweep. Build a lightweight governance doc: tools, data rules, approval steps.
• Days 61-90: Standardize prompts, create templates, set up dashboards, and train managers to request comms with AI-ready intake forms.

Prompts that support the "work around the work"

• "Summarize this 45-minute transcript into decisions, risks, owners, and deadlines. Output as a checklist."
• "From this 8-page policy, create a one-page brief with goals, audiences, key messages, do/don't guidance, and a 10-question FAQ."
• "Run a clarity, reading-level, and inclusive-language check on this draft. Flag sentences over 25 words and suggest shorter options."
• "Given these segments and channels, propose a distribution plan with timing, owner, and a confirmation-of-understanding step for each audience."
• "Group these 300 comments into 5-7 themes. Provide two representative quotes per theme and a 'what leaders should say next' note."
• "Compare this new announcement to last quarter's. Identify duplicates, contradictions, and missing updates."

Tool tips

• Use enterprise AI inside your productivity suite (Microsoft 365, Google Workspace) for transcripts, summaries, and document checks.
• Leverage your intranet's AI features for FAQ generation, content findability, and audience targeting. Keep editorial control with final human edits.

The mindset shift

Let AI take the grunt work so you can spend your time on context, relationships, and voice. The ideas were never the problem. The bottleneck is everything around them-now you have a way to clear it.

Want more practical playbooks and prompts for comms teams? Explore AI for PR & Communications.