Which AI tools should I use?
What is the role of communications when AI sits between you and everyone else?
I work with communications leaders on what AI changes in the function's role, influence and budget, and on repositioning it before finance's logic defines it
Elif Güvençer
Let's talk
Where this comes from
Your CEO asks what AI is saying about the company.
Finance questions why the agency budget hasn't come down.While you are busy answering these, the ground is already moving
The challenge
The basis of value for communications is changing. The function needs to keep up
- 01
Most teams will use AI to do the same work faster, not to rethink what the work should be
- 02
The advice on offer is almost entirely tactical: content tools, monitoring dashboards, answer engine optimisation
- 03
It misses what is structurally changing for the function or how leaders need to reposition
The move is to identify what AI has changed in how people find information and perceive companies, and from there decide what communications needs to become, before someone else decides it
The stakes
The seat gets lost, one missed invitation at a time
A committee convenes on AI adoption. The CCO finds out after the first meeting
A paper on AI risk goes from the Chief AI Officer to the board with no communications input, because nobody thought to ask
The CEO drafts his own quotes and sends them over for a look. The function that governed executive voice is now copy-editing it
None of these is a crisis on its own. Together, they read as structural demotion
The approach
Stop chasing the technology. Follow the value instead
- What is the role of communications when AI sits between you and everyone else?This is where you need to start
- Which communications tasks hold their meaning, and which lose it?
- What does AI break? This is where new communications work emerges
- What skills do we need to deliver that new work, and how do we get them?
- Which AI tools should we use?Most AI programmes start here
Most AI programmes start at the last question. That is why so few create lasting value: they skip the first four questions that decide what the tools are for
Ways I can help
The questions I hear most and my answers
Find your question. The answer next to it is what I deliver. Most work starts as one of these and gets shaped around you.
Not sure what you need? That's usually the first conversation.
How I work
Each answer comes at the depth you need
You can work with me at any one depth on its own. Start at Orient, Decide or Build, whichever fits where you are.
Orient
You leave knowing where you stand
Decide
You leave with a clear plan of what to do
Build
You leave with something we build together, that runs without me
Beyond the answers
Other ways to work with me
The standing day
A day a month or a day a fortnight, held in your calendar, spent on whatever the function is working on that month. It does not require a prior project.
Fractional support
For an organisation building the function, holding it between hires, or building an AI capability with nobody senior to own it yet.
The clinic
Half a day with your leadership team. Questions come in beforehand. You leave with a direction of travel and next steps.
A simpler ask: speaking
A board that wants to understand what AI is doing to reputation. A communications team that knows things are changing but does not know how to respond yet.
The method behind every answer
The Two Clocks Framework™
For leaders willing to think and act on what AI means for their function and how to redesign their value proposition
Elif's framework is urgent and incisive. Like all her thinking it is shockingly clear. Leaders must manage here and now operational challenges with the strategic reimagining of their world. Where to start? Start here. Elif's advice.
The Two Clocks Framework is an intelligent and practical way of understanding, and reshaping, the communications function in the age of AI. It's a rare contribution to thinking about the consequences of this revolutionary technology for communication, because it takes account of the radical nature of the challenge. Elif really gets it.
Elif Güvençer brings a much-needed strategic management perspective to the discourse on AI and corporate communications. Her 'two clocks' framing is a brilliant concept: leaders must manage the immediate demands of an AI-mediated reputation landscape while protecting time to redesign what the function needs to become.
The framework
Every communications function is running two clocks. Most manage only one
Inward-facing
The structural clock
What the function needs to become as AI changes how people find information, perceive companies and make decisions
Where the mandate is redesigned. Few teams run it
Outward-facing
The immediate clock
Monitoring, content and reputation management in a world where AI now sits between the organisation and anyone who wants to know about it
This is where the visible risk lives. Almost every team runs it
The framework has five dimensions: three on the structural clock and two on the immediate clock. Both clocks have to run
Read more about the framework →Get in touch
Tell me what's happening and I'll tell you how I can help
Prefer to talk? Book a 20-minute call →
Thanks. I read these myself — not my AI — and reply within two working days. While you wait, the newsletter is where I think out loud
Or email me directly: elif@thetwoclocks.com
Newsletter
Not ready to talk yet?
AI: The Reputation Signal
AI, reputation and the future of communications leadership
The clocks run faster for agencies
If you lead or own an agency, the structural clock is about what you sell and how you charge for it, and it is faster because the work AI automates is exactly what agencies productise and sell by the hour