How to turn your comms team into AI builders
Comms teams are at risk of being left behind. Here are four moves to make now.
Stephanie Nivinskus is principal at Ragan’s Center for AI Strategy.
AI does not threaten comms. It expands what the function can do.
That’s the argument Cognizant CCO Jeff DeMarrais made, adding that the real risk sits in the velocity gap between how fast AI tools evolve and how slowly the skills, systems and governance around them adapt.
DeMarrais got the problem right. Turning his argument into action inside your team takes four specific moves.
- Audit before you build.
Ragan’s Center for AI Strategy surveyed comms teams this year and found fewer than 20% have AI integrated into workflow and organizational strategy. Many teams have applied AI to content production and light research, and fewer use it for audience analysis, stakeholder targeting or crisis preparation. Before a team can scale AI, it needs to know exactly where AI already lives in its workflow.
Run a one-week audit sprint before adding anything new. Document where AI is already being used, then determine where it could add value next. The audit shows you where to prototype next instead of suggesting you buy another tool.
- Prototype one workflow, not 10.
A single, well-chosen prototype teaches a team more about accuracy, governance and adoption than a company-wide rollout, because it exposes real failure points instead of theoretical ones. When teams try to fix everything at once, they get nowhere fast.
Pick one recurring deliverable and rebuild it. A monthly executive update or a media monitoring digest works well, since the team already knows what a strong version looks like. Review the AI-assisted version alongside the last three drafts, then decide what stays.
- Put a review date on every build before it ships.
AI-assisted workflows need regular review. Otherwise, they can keep running for months after the audience, process or underlying assumptions have changed, often before anyone realizes the results are no longer reliable.
Set a review date before any build goes live and treat it as a hard stop, not a suggestion. Put 90 days on the calendar, then confirm the workflow still fits before it continues running.
- Brief the team before you scale it.
Invite the people expected to use a new workflow into its rollout. Otherwise, you risk building something that works technically but never gets adopted by the team.
DeMarrais argued that the core of comms work, including crafting narratives, building trust and navigating complexity, cannot be reduced to an algorithm. Preserving human judgment requires people to understand what changed, why it changed and how the new workflow supports their work.
Walk the affected team through the change before it becomes standard practice. Explain what the workflow does, what it does not do and where human judgment still applies.
Next steps
- Map where AI already shows up in your work before you add anything new.
- Redesign a single recurring deliverable end to end with AI assistance.
- Attach a concrete review date to every AI-enabled workflow you put into production.
- Explain the change to the affected team before the workflow becomes standard practice.
DeMarrais urged comms professionals to become AI builders instead of passive bystanders. That shift requires turning broad support for AI into practical, well-governed workflows.
