Editorial
Once upon a time, internal communicators would agonize over the perfect subject line. We’d sweat every verb, fight for plain English, and spend an hour debating whether to call dismal Q3 results ‘modest gains’ or ‘poised for scale.’ We’ve been writers, editors, brand guardians and occasionally therapists. But that world is shifting under our feet — because the message doesn't stay the message anymore.
Thanks to the creeping integration of AI into intranets, chat platforms and employee apps, your lovingly crafted update is now just raw material. It’ll be dissected, reformatted, auto-summarized, translated, paraphrased and pushed to people when the algorithm decides it’s relevant. And if that sounds like a loss of control ... well, it is.
But it’s also an opportunity. The rise of AI-assisted intranets doesn’t spell the end of internal comms. It just means the job is changing. Dramatically. Instead of being the broadcaster-in-chief, you now must become the systems thinker, the content strategist, the orchestrator of messages in motion.
This isn’t just about swapping pen for prompt. It’s about rethinking the role of internal comms entirely — and helping your organization do the same.
The Shift From Creator to Curator
Internal comms was once a craft. But now the thing you wrote might never appear in the form you intended.
The intranet pulls your update into a carousel card. A chatbot rephrases it as an answer. Viva or Workvivo reformats it into a push notification with the subtlety of a toddler with a drum kit. Generative AI takes your 400 words and summarizes them in 40 — give or take accuracy, nuance or basic context.
This is the new reality: AI is now co-writing, reformatting and distributing your content, often without you pressing publish. And once it’s out there, it might look more like a headline in a widget than the masterpiece you agonized over.
So we need to get comfortable with letting go. That doesn’t mean giving up on clarity, tone of voice or purpose — it means learning how to shape content that’s designed to be repurposed. It means thinking in modular chunks, not essays. It means writing like someone else — or something else — is going to reuse your content in ways you can’t fully predict.
The question isn’t how to stop it. It’s how to shape it.
The Rise of Orchestration
Our process used to be linear: write the thing, send the thing, measure how many people opened the thing. Easy enough. But with AI in the mix — and messages surfacing across intranets, apps, Teams and digital signage — that tidy pipeline has become a spider’s web.
This is where orchestration comes in. Your job is now designing how messages move through the system. Which channels get what version. What triggers a follow-up. Who sees it when, and in what format. You’ve graduated from communicator to traffic controller, systems thinker and campaign strategist with access to an invisible robot army.
Let’s say you need to let people know about a new policy. In the old world: write some copy, navigate 64 sign-offs, slap it on the intranet, job done. In the AI-assisted world:
- The policy announcement is atomized into a news article, a push notification, a chatbot Q&A and a training reminder — all generated or reformatted by different tools.
- Targeting rules determine who gets what based on role, location or behavior.
- AI-generated summaries appear in a weekly digest or show up when someone asks a chatbot “What’s our current hybrid work policy?”
IC now sets the rules, maps the flows, aligns with other teams — and makes sure the outputs don't sound utterly deranged.
Which, let’s be honest, is a far cry from debating whether “Update” or “Announcement” will make your headline more authoritative.
The platforms are catching up to this new reality. Viva Amplify, Staffbase Journeys, Workvivo Campaigns — they’re all moving toward campaign orchestration. But tooling alone doesn’t get you there. You need comms professionals who can think across systems, time zones, audiences and outcomes. Who understand when to send a push, when to wait, and when to not say anything at all.
New Skills, New Mindsets
Part of the shift involves unlearning some of the old habits we’ve clung to like a lifebuoy in a roaring sea of Teams notifications.
Take perfectionism, the communicator's go-to answer to the interview question "what's your greatest weakness?" Obsessing over sentence structure when AI is reformatting your content is like rearranging deckchairs on a ship that’s already been repackaged into three different formats and sent to three different ports.
Instead, we need to think modular. Atomic. Content that machines can read, rearrange and repurpose without losing the plot — or the point.
No one is more personally shaken by this shift than I am, a person who has easily logged my 10,000 hours on Twitter perfecting the art of the perfect bon mot, only to now be told my clever sentence will be chopped into a push notification and rephrased by a bot that can't parse sarcasm.
That means writing with structure and metadata in mind. Defining tone and voice guidelines that AI tools can follow. Creating templates and prompts. Tagging content properly. Knowing the difference between valuable content and a paragraph that’s been through five rounds of edits and still says nothing.
It also means developing entirely new muscles:
- Prompt Literacy: Knowing how to get the best from generative AI without ending up with copy that sounds like a chatbot having an existential crisis.
- Content Architecture: Structuring information so it works across formats, channels and attention spans.
- Channel Choreography: Understanding how messages flow through multiple systems, and where automation can help (or hurt).
As Dan Selinger, head of communications and engagement for professional services at the University of Oxford told me, “Internal comms professionals increasingly need a broad skill set — project management, data understanding, digital governance — as well as traditional communication skills.”
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And we need to help leaders evolve too. Many still think internal comms is about “sending an all-staff email,” like it’s 2008 and they’ve just discovered Outlook. But in this new environment, messages move differently. The CEO’s message might appear as an email, a digest card, a chatbot summary and a screen on a warehouse wall — all generated from the same source.
Getting buy-in for that approach takes storytelling, diplomacy and just enough performative wizardry to make the stakeholders think it was their idea all along. If we want our comms to work, we need to start loudly selling the future (even if that future looks suspiciously like structured content in a well-governed CMS).
Risks and Responsibilities
Smarter systems don’t magically fix stupid mistakes. They just make them faster, at scale. The AI-powered intranet may be more assistive, more personalized, more “intelligent” — but it can also be confidently, consistently wrong.
There’s a real risk in assuming that AI knows best. Left unchecked, it can happily hallucinate policy details, surface outdated content or paraphrase something sensitive into a tone that’s one push notification away from a lawsuit. Tone of voice becomes tone of beige, especially when the model doesn’t understand your context, culture or the fact that sarcasm is not, in fact, universal.
And if you’ve ever seen a generative summary try to explain a benefits update, you’ll know it has the nuance of Succession’s Logan Roy on a bad day.
Then there’s targeting. AI can help messages reach the right people — but only if your metadata, segmentation and governance are up to scratch. Otherwise, you’re just automating the chaos.
This is where comms needs to stay in the loop. We don’t have to write every word, but we do need to set the rules. Define the tone. Vet the outputs. Check for bias. That means working with IT, HR and the AI vendors to establish the right safeguards, and knowing when to hit pause.
The Opportunity: Scaling Relevance
For all the risks and rough edges, there’s a reason so many comms teams are leaning into AI: because when it works, it really works.
When it’s trained, tamed and given clear instructions, an AI-assisted intranet can turn a generic all-staff broadcast into something smarter. The warehouse worker gets a two-line push. The sales team sees it in their CRM. Office staff find it in the intranet digest. Same message, tailored by channel, timing and tone — without five manual rewrites. That’s not just efficient; it’s what comms has long promised but rarely delivered.
And when personalization clicks, things get interesting:
- A new starter only sees onboarding content that’s relevant to their role, location and language.
- A frontline manager gets nudged with a one-click summary of what their team needs to know this week.
- The comms team sees what landed, what didn’t and can tweak the journey in real time — not three months later in a “lessons learned” doc no one reads.
That’s not some AI fever dream. It’s already happening in organizations brave enough to stop treating the intranet like a filing cabinet and start using it to help people get work done.
Ironically, AI can make comms feel more human — more relevant, more respectful of people’s time. But only if you let go of the idea that control equals quality, and start designing for fluidity, responsiveness and scale.
Redefining the Role of Internal Comms
So let's pour one out for the old IC job description. We’re not just writing messages anymore — we’re designing systems, training AI assistants, managing campaign logic and re-explaining, through gritted teeth, why “just send an all-staff” is how we got into this mess in the first place.
That means stepping out from behind the content calendar and into the bigger conversation — about data, design, platforms, automation, governance and how people actually experience work.
It also means bringing others along for the ride. Explaining to senior leaders why their lovingly drafted message needs to be modular, tagged and machine-readable. Why the beautiful PDF no one opened isn’t a strategy. Why this new world needs communicators who can orchestrate, not just output.
And yes, that can feel disorienting. Especially for those of us who came into comms because we liked words more than workflows. But our role isn’t disappearing — it’s evolving. The value of internal comms isn’t in writing more content. It’s in making content work: across channels, roles, devices and time zones. And at scale.
Because in the age of the assistive intranet, we’re not the content team. We’re the people who make sure the right things reach the right people in the right way. And if we don’t claim that role, someone else will. Probably someone with a dashboard and no clue what tone of voice even means.
You’re not being automated out — you’re being invited to step up. Just don’t miss the invitation.
Editor's Note: Read more about the changing world of internal comms below:
- Internal Communications Is the Glue That Binds Hybrid Work — Effective internal comms keeps employees informed, included and engaged, no matter where they work. So design communication strategies for today’s reality.
- The Neuroscience of High-Impact, Lower Noise Internal Communications — How brain-based communication strategies drive business results in an era of information overload.
- AI Safety in Internal Comms: Ensuring Data Integrity and Security — The path to GAI adoption at organizations is ill-defined, but there are ways for internal communicators to tap into the capabilities with more assurance.
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