How communicators can make AI messaging a people-first pursuit

Explaining how AI will impact workers is as important as the tech itself. As employees have more questions about how automation will impact their roles, internal communicators must be prepared to discuss the implications of AI.

At Ragan’s AI Horizons Conference, taking place February 2-4 in Fort Lauderdale, Daniel Hebert, special AI advisor to the director general of communications for the Canada Revenue Agency, will discuss how comms leaders can expand their roles to fit into the rise of AI.

Hebert said that a good starting point for rethinking AI comms begins with confronting the fear about the technology among employees.

“I was speaking to somebody just yesterday who tried AI for the first time,” Hebert said. “She said, ‘This does everything I can do, 100 times faster.’ And her immediate response wasn’t excitement. It was, ‘What’s going to happen to me?’ That kind of reaction tells you this isn’t a technical problem. It’s a human one.”

Hebert sees creating messaging about the human implications of generative AI as one of the major responsibilities of comms leaders. Failure to take that critical step can be the difference between an internal comms push about AI that resonates with employees and one that falls flat.

“When people react to AI with fear, that’s not something you can solve with a technical explanation,” Hebert said. “That’s a signal that you need to slow things down, think about how the message is landing and decide how much context people need before they hear anything from leadership. If we don’t take ownership of that moment as communicators, the narrative gets shaped by anxiety instead of clarity.”

Effective AI communication succeeds with human-focused framing

Hebert made it clear that AI isn’t a driver of innovation on its own — it instead helps reinforce the skills the people using it have already built.

“It’s trained on the past, on what already exists,” Hebert said of AI. “If we want to be innovative, if we want to stay cutting-edge, we can’t just rely on that.”

He added that while AI output is backward-looking, employee questions about the technology are not. They’re focused on the future of their roles and their organizations as they relate to AI, and internal communicators need to be prepared to address these concerns.

Here are a few ways internal communicators can keep their AI-comms centered on the people concerned about the technology and avoid allowing uncertainty to shape the narrative.

• Communicate AI as a skill that sharpens work rather than one that replaces it. AI’s quick generation capabilities can spark big concerns among employees about where their role stands. Internal communicators can help bridge this gap by making the message a skills conversation as opposed to one about AI capabilities. Hebert said that at the CRA, there are employee groups who discuss how AI can augment their skills, and that internal comms applies the lessons learned in those groups to reinforce messaging. ”The idea is to normalize the use of AI on the job, or at least to have employees be able to think about whether AI can be a tool in a specific scenario,” Hebert said. “This allows people to dive in slowly while sharpening their skills.”
• Sequence your AI messaging to not overwhelm the employee audience. To help with adoption, consider ordering your AI-related messaging in a way that helps employees organically make sense of how automation processes impact them. Hebert said that a consistent push from internal comms can take AI messages from conceptual to real and human-centric. “People don’t get comfortable with this overnight,” Hebert told Ragan. “They need time to understand it, experiment with it and figure out where it fits into their work. That doesn’t happen all at once.”
• Prep managers to answer the hard questions from employees. Internal communicators should work with managers to address employee concerns about AI. As the closest touchpoint to leadership that most employees have, managers can help break down AI messaging into team-specific messages.   This makes it critical for communicators to equip leaders and managers to address questions about roles, expectations and uncertainties as they arise. “We’ve found that it is at the manager layer where you can be more prescriptive about AI,” Hebert said. “This requires some investment in upskilling managers to understand the possibilities that AI can have in their business.”

Hebert told Ragan that it’s the responsibility of internal communicators to shape their AI communication in a way that builds trust.

“As AI becomes more common, that responsibility doesn’t go away — it becomes more important,” he said.

To register for our AI Horizons Conference, click here.

Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications.