Stop asking which AI tools to use

Elif Güvençer · 14 August 2026

Right now there is an impossible race to adopt AI as fast as possible, to use the newest technology as fast as possible. The problem with that is by the time you adopt it, the technology has already moved on. Chasing the newest technology is not the answer.

This also means which AI tools to use is not the right question either. The right question is this: in a world where AI is reshaping the way and the speed we access information, make decisions and interact with one another, where is the new basis of value? I am coming at this from a communications perspective, but this is also pretty much true for most knowledge work.

AI won’t take your job, someone who uses AI will. This has been circulating for a while. It is incorrect. Someone who understands the basis of value is changing, and is able to rethink what the role should be, that is who is going to take your job.

Let's take a look at how that works.

The traditional building blocks for communications are around:

editorial judgement
relationship capital
anticipating and acting on risk
bringing voices of stakeholders not in the room
taking the organisation out of its bubble, translating external to internal and vice versa

The people able to offer this combination were rare and specialised. That was the value of the communicator. Until AI.

AI is separating and redistributing those capabilities away from the individual and commoditising them. You can use an AI assistant to write, use a predictive machine to anticipate risk and the list goes on.

This is hitting the communications discipline really hard and a lot of the focus right now is on moving towards the things AI can't do, at least not yet.

Judgement is one of those last human forts most of us rely on. My counter argument to that is from legal, a discipline based on judgement. Sixteen law professors sat down to grade short answers to contract-law questions. They graded blind. Nobody told them which answers came from a colleague and which from a large language model (LLM).

Professors rated LLMs far higher than their peers (average win rate = 75.33%), with models performing similarly to the best instructor. LLM responses were also rarely flagged as harmful (3.53%, vs 12.06% for professors).

Betting on the things AI cannot do yet is swimming in a pool that is shrinking. The technology is getting better, and it is learning from every single one of us who uses it. It is learning from every business built on it. The smarter AI gets, the more it will centralise value away from individuals towards the system itself.

(A lot of AI-native businesses are not actually AI-native businesses, they are businesses built on someone else’s capabilities; AI labs and infrastructure providers).

It is a matter of time before AI catches up and does many of the things currently ascribed to humans ‘good enough’. And guess what, good enough will be the choice for most organisations. This approach of human vs AI also keeps us in the fear and scarcity mindset. This is not where we will thrive.

Sangeet Paul Choudary makes this point in his book, Re-Shuffle. The useful question about any technology is not what it can't do, it's what it breaks.

This interrogation should start not with the role but the environment the role exists in, and aim to trace where the new basis of value is for communications. I am going to use content and reputation building, two main arteries of this discipline, to illustrate my point.

First, what did AI change within the system?

Copywriting has a special place in comms. It is wordsmithing, it is framing, it is what differentiates a message that lands well from the one that becomes the start of an issue. Communications used to be the central owner of the corporate voice.

Your stakeholders, deprived of this special skill, had to rely on you to provide this value and there lay your power. Until AI.

Content creation is now being commoditised and technically anyone with an AI assistant can create content. Your CEO might be drafting his quotes with AI and think he's doing a great job of it. An illusion that is taking hold…to be fair, executives having the perception that they can do communications better than the comms professionals themselves is not a new bug, but it has escalated now that they have access to this commoditised skill.

Reputation management used to be centred around relationships. You build relationships with the key audiences, you can mediate, negotiate with them. When something goes wrong, you have trust in the bank to sustain those relationships and soften the blow. The centre of reputation is moving away from a relational model towards an architecture that's increasingly designed and mediated by machines.

You used to have the chance to have the first word, now for each conversation you are about to have as an organisation, there is a chance AI has got there first and handed over a version of you to anyone who asked.

Your risk horizon used to be narrower with stories dying out quicker, eclipsed by the next news cycle. Now your CEO’s unfortunate quote from 2018 is frozen in the corpus and available for anyone who asks.

Your media relations used to be bilateral, now they are a triangle. Journalists are not limited to you for the special industry voice. In most instances, they can extract that information easily with AI research. They also can become even more pointed in their inquiries to you because they have access to your entire corpus, not just the statements from last quarter. Yes, AI has got there first too.

These are tectonic changes that redefine the terrain on which comms operates. Optimising the existing system to make it faster or better is investing in a value system that has already changed and is constantly on the move. We don’t even know what we do not know with AI, so this is not the last of the changes.

(To keep things simple, I am not going into the broader changes that are happening in the way we and the world work in general that also have an impact on comms.) That is a post for another time.

In these two examples, what happened to the value?

For content creation, value is no longer about creating the first draft or the best content. Unlike what most think, speed in putting the message out is not the new value either. It's about looking in to see whether critical thinking has gone into the copy (increasingly written with AI), who owns the message, whether it survives machine compression and what kind of signal it adds to the organisational picture (painted by AI) that already exists.

If your CEO started writing his own content, the value is not forcing the old system onto him. Being perceived to be standing in the way of an efficiency or a value gain will only frustrate your stakeholders. Instead, I would suggest unlocking the value and redesigning the system around it. An alternative approach can be helping them use AI responsibly and appropriately, bringing the risks to their attention, building the appropriate governance around it.

For reputation building, it is recognising that persuasion no longer starts from a blank page. It starts from a machine-made baseline. It is looking at the total picture and seeing if it tells the story you want, taking action to correct it when it doesn’t. A practice I call signal architecture.

It is in understanding you are targeting humans and machines and they each have different requirements. Your narrative needs to still appeal to people but provide enough credible proof that substantiates that narrative to stick with machines.

These two examples are where value moves somewhere else.

There is also brand new value that can be created if you know where to look…the cracks AI creates. Accountability gaps, compounding bias, automated decisions that no one can reproduce a path for and the risks that come with them. Those are the new pressure points, where new communications needs emerge and will continue to emerge.

Who owns GEO is the wrong question

The same AI that disrupts is also bringing new opportunities to come together. People, departments, workflows that could not be coordinated before now can. This is another value creation opportunity.

This is relevant for the current debate on who Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) should sit with. There's a lot of conversation, and depending on where you sit you can argue both sides. You can argue marketing has to own it. You can argue communications has to own it.

AI is breaking the rigid boundaries between functions. Marketing and corporate communications are becoming increasingly fluid, and they have to collaborate on this together. They are not the only ones; any department that puts content out into the world proactively or indirectly causes content to exist as the byproduct of their work (e.g Compliance issue) has to be part of the conversation.

Why? Because the picture AI puts together is not painted by a single department. Every department does its job on its own surface and optimises it. What nobody reads is the whole. That used to be manageable. Now you have a synthetic intermediary able to read that picture and distribute it to anyone who asks. The value is no longer in optimising individual parts. It's in zooming out and keeping track of that picture, aka signal architecture.

In my view, who owns GEO is again the wrong question. The focus should be directed away from turf wars and towards how you create a system where all the relevant functions there (Comms, Marketing, HR, Investor Relations, Compliance, Legal…) can collaborate and manage this live and fast moving picture that AI is painting.

Stop asking which tools to use.

Zoom out. Take the broader landscape in. Trace the new value. The questions to ask are:

what AI changes in the broader environment
where is the new basis of value for communications
in the new value system, which workflows/tasks lose meaning, which ones survive
what skills are needed to deliver that value
what cracks AI is creating: this is where new comms tasks will emerge
what collaboration, connection was previously impossible but is now possible with AI
how can we use AI to realise the new comms role
AND ONLY THEN which tools do we need

If you are wondering where to start, the Two Clocks Framework™ is built entirely on the idea of the changing basis of value for comms and gets into what the role needs to become before that is decided by someone else’s logic.

Authenticity statement

I use AI mostly as an interviewer and then an editor. I ask it to interview me on a topic, help me flesh out my thoughts and stress-test ideas, and define the skeleton of what I want to write. It can also suggest angles based on my past writing and what it knows about me. I use it to tear my claims apart and poke holes in my thinking before anyone else does. I have a set of reviewer agents. To name a few: a CCO who reviews whether what I write resonates, and an AI expert who makes sure I stay technically accurate. I speak three languages and English is my second, so I use AI to check my writing is correct and reads well. I use it for image and video creation too.

The irony is that AI disclosure is demanded but the second it is provided, it shows to decrease the trust in the work and/or person. This is a new bias we are up against. If reading this statement changed how you felt about the newsletter, that is the bias doing its work. First step in working with it is awareness! If you are curious about the AI disclosure trust penalty, check out this post.