The building blocks of better comms AI prompts

At Ragan’s AI Horizons Conference earlier this month, Sarah Whitty, internal communications strategy hub manager at Google DeepMind, told the audience that deep and layered prompts aren’t optional for internal communicators — they’re a must.

“You can get an output, but if you don’t give your prompts context, like where the company is at, what you’re prompting for and what the sentiment from employees is, your AI can spit out just anything,” Whitty said. “It might give you a good internal communication strategy, but it’s not going to really understand the nuances of your organization or where employees are at.”

The panelists also agreed that AI performs best when it knows who it’s supposed to emulate. Internal communicators operate in a unique lane, and prompts that don’t specify that perspective can produce generic and sometimes misaligned output.