How comms can play a bigger role in organizational AI strategy

According to Ragan’s 2025 Communications Benchmark Report, 53% of communicators say they are either unsure of or uninvolved in their company’s AI strategy.

Being on the outside looking in at arguably the most significant workplace disruption ever is not a good place to be — comms teams at Amazon, Microsoft and more are already bearing the brunt of company-wide AI-induced job cuts.

Communicators will not out-tech the tech teams, so they should take control of what they’re good at—the narrative.

“As communicators, we can educate key groups about our workflows and areas of our portfolios that can be augmented by AI – which can help drive the strategy around what AI tools and policies look like for a company,” said Rowan Toffoli, innovation and technology communications manager and gen AI lead at Lockheed Martin.

Toffoli leads Lockheed Martin’s Comms AI group, a cross-functional team that supports the company’s global communicators with hands-on AI resources and training.

“Our approach is people first,” Toffoli said. “We want to understand how our team members feel about adopting AI and provide resources tailored to their functions, deliverables, skillsets and needs.”

Own the Data

Positioning comms as a strategic business partner in AI strategy comes down to having data and a plan for how comms can help, according to Toffoli.

“Comms needs to guide how policy and strategy are effectively communicated, and we need to objectively show – through sharing data, such as content performance – how our deliverables perform and drive AI adoption,” she said. “Data helps validate that we’re the experts in our field and that we don’t only communicate, but we communicate effectively.”

Some data points Toffoli focuses on when highlighting AI adoption include:

• Time saved: Get anecdotal information from employees – or compare to similar past projects – about how much time is saved when a workflow is augmented with AI. For example, Lockheed Martin’s Rotary and Mission Systems (RMS) team used AI to generate mood boards for a video. By coming to Vis Comms with mood boards, they were able to communicate their vision for the video more effectively and efficiently and reduced pre-production hours by more than 180% when compared to similar products.
• Dollars saved: Compare AI-augmented workflows to manual workflows to estimate cost savings. When compared to similar projects, video production costs for the mood board use case came in nearly 30% under budget.
• Adoption rates: Toffoli’s group tracks the percentage of tactics that use AI so it can see where, when and how often communicators use AI. “My goal for this year is to have 25% of our tracked tactics leveraging gen AI and we’re on track to deliver,” she said.

Create an AI resource hub

At many organizations, AI is being adopted in fits and starts by groups using different tools and embarking on separate journeys. Communications can be the glue that brings those disparate efforts together by developing a centralized resource of tools, best practices and updates on what each department is doing.

For Toffoli’s team, that includes,

• AI communications playbook: Dos and don’ts, guidance on commonly used tools, and a section on “AI in Action” with prompt examples and use cases.
• Prompt library: Crowdsourced content for shared resources such as a Prompt Library, including templates and use cases, contributed by communicators around the business.
• Newsletter: The gen AI team publishes a newsletter, called AI Messenger, about once a month that highlights best practices from across Lockheed Martin communications and external sources.
• AI art contest: Each month, the gen AI team hosts an AI art contest where communicators are encouraged to experiment with visual generation tools like AI, Gemini and others.

“Not only is this a fun way to see how our team members are creatively pushing these tools; it’s helping us learn how to prompt them effectively and understand how we can augment our workflows with visual AI – without compromising the authenticity, quality, or accuracy of our final deliverables,” said Toffoli.

Members of Ragan’s Communications Leadership Council have exclusive access to research data on AI usage in communications as well as additional resources to guide implementation.