How AI Is Changing Communication: Weighing Efficiency with Efficacy

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0:47I'm Alison Beard. And I'm Adi Ignatius, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.

0:58For the next few weeks, we'll be dropping an episode each Thursday that explores how the rapid advancement of AI is changing what it means to be an executive. Today, Adi, we're going to look at one of the core ways that generative AI is adding value, or maybe not, in organizations, and that's communication. A lot of people are using these tools to craft everything from emails to speeches, internal reports to client pitches. Do you see that as a good thing? You know, as someone who writes for a living, I'm definitely not comfortable with having AI write for me. That said, I'm happy getting research assistance from Generative AI.

1:32And I've seen it provide enormous writing and organizational help to people who are not writers by nature. Yeah, I agree on your personal view. I see the upsides. I also see a lot of risks, even for non-professional writers. notably that people become too reliant on it so that they're not actually engaging with the work as much as they should, or sounding like humans or even making sense, even though the words might seem polished? I think, as with every other part of the organization, we will have to figure out with writing and communication what is the proper balance between how much AI can and should do and what are the truly unique strengths that humans provide in the process.

2:13I mean, AI will give everyone a baseline writing and thinking ability. So that leads it to humans to provide the missing ingredients that maybe ultimately make a difference, like judgment, like taste, curiosity, creativity, persuasion, prioritization, all of that. Exactly. So today we are going to explore the ways that AI is changing writing, leading, and communication, especially for leaders, when they should use it, when they shouldn't, and the most important skills to develop right now. Our two experts are Matt Abraham, Stanford professor, author of Think Fast, Talk Smarter, and host of the podcast Think Fast, Talk Smart.

2:51And Wade Foster, the CEO of Zapier, which is a platform that connects multiple web applications so they can work together automatically with the help of AI. You can imagine he is a big user of generative AI. Here's our conversation.

3:07Wade, Matt, thanks so much for being on the show.

3:09Wade Foster:Yeah, thanks for having us. Really excited to be with you. So Matt, let's start with you. How do you see AI changing the way we all, and especially leaders, communicate at work? So AI is both helping and I believe hindering the way leaders are doing their work. It is absolutely providing an opportunity for leaders to synthesize a tremendous amount of information, to structure it in a way that's meaningful, to look for themes and trends that might have taken a long, long time to uncover. But at the same time, it poses the risk of jeopardizing authenticity, hindering empathy. So we have to be careful with how we absolutely deploy AI to help us as leaders and as individuals and organizations.

3:56Wade, as the leader of an AI-focused company, I assume that you're a pretty heavy personal user of it. How has it changed the way that you talk to your team and your workforce?

4:06Wade Foster:You know, I think similar to Matt, there's a lot of advantages and definitely some tricky things that we sort of have to figure out in terms of etiquette. The massive benefit is I am able to ingest a lot more of what's going on inside the company. I can point an agent at all the data sources inside of a company, whether it's, you know, our Slack instance, email, meeting notes, project management, CRM tools, code base, etc. And so, you know, I can get summaries of, you know, most anything that's going on inside of a company at any given time. And, you know, it's generally pretty good. You do have to be a little careful.

4:43Wade Foster:You know, if you've got inconsistency in your communication, inconsistency in your data, like it can summarize poorly. One of the challenges with a lot of the meeting recorder tools is speaker attribution. It can mix up things like that. And so, you know, you're often getting like directionally correct data, but you usually do have to go like verify and understand that. But a lot of times in the past, you would have to go, you know, talk through layers and layers of management just to get even a far less comprehensive summary. And so that aspect makes it a lot easier to surface the things that are really important in a company.

5:14Wade Foster:You can have the agent giving you signals and saying, hey, you should ask more about this. You should dig into these things. And so that part is really, really helpful. Similarly, it's an amazing like thought partner for, you know, thinking through ideas and then figuring out how should I go communicate those things. But as powerful as the tool is, you know, I do think we haven't quite as a society yet adapted or figured out like what the right etiquette is for how to use these tools. And so you'd still do see like a fair amount of like sloppy AI use where someone would just say, you know, take a clawed output, copy and paste it and just sort of represent it as their own idea without really actually thinking much about like, did it actually serve as the right idea or not?

5:51Wade Foster:That becomes problematic because the speed at which you can generate, you know, AI output is just really, really high. And so there can be a huge amount of like low effort, low thought volume that sort of seeps into communication. And so it does require, you know, a level of effort to sort of like police and set etiquette around those things. Otherwise, you kind of get a little bit of a runaway train going on. In terms of output, I'd love to hear from both of you what you think is an effective use of AI for a leader. Is it speech writing? Is it drafting emails? Is it putting together PowerPoints for the boards?

6:30Wade, for you, where do you use it personally, Matt? Where have you seen the executives that you've talked to and work with use it well? I really see AI helping the executives I teach and the ones I coach. Using AI is a way to jumpstart thinking about the communication. It is a great way when you're staring at a blank screen to get yourself started. And a lot of times that start is hard. So using it as an initial way to start, using it as a thought partner when you have some ideas and have it help you to coalesce those ideas, to look for themes. And then, as you know, Alison, I'm a big, big fan of structure to help you think through different ways of structuring it based on the audiences you're working with.

7:11AI can be a wonderful tool to help you do that. But as Wade alluded to, it's really important that you look at the output, that you think about it, and that you actually reflect on, is this serving the goal that I have in the work that I'm doing? To simply blindly say, go create this deck for the board, or this pitch for a prospective client or this deck for my all hands can get you in trouble. But looking at how to use it to help you structure how to start is really important. And then I love using AI and encouraging the people I coach and teach to use it as a reflecting tool. So go back and look at themes that came up in Q &A, in discussion, and see what those themes are.

7:56And are you addressing those themes? And AI can be a very useful tool for identifying them.

8:00Wade Foster:I use AI for all of those communication mechanisms that you mentioned. I think the big thing that I always come back to is judgment. You know, my co-founder Brian has this line, you can delegate the work, but you can't delegate the accountability. And so if I'm not reviewing the output, if I'm not paying attention to the quality of the work, that reflects back on me. At the end of the day, the most important thing is the quality of your communications. And you can get good quality using AI, you can get good quality without using AI. Inversely, you can get bad quality using AI and you can get bad quality without using AI.

8:31I think it's really important for executives and leaders to role model and to set rules and guidelines for how AI should be used. And that really can make a fundamental difference in organizations. In the work I do, it's all about helping people with people process and infrastructure, and AI plays a role in all of that. and making sure that as leaders we role model and make clear what we expect in terms of usage of AI is really important because otherwise you can run into some of those judgment issues that Wade is referring to. So if you're advising a CEO on sort of AI communication policies, you know, what are some rules that you would set out?

9:13So I think first and foremost is to share when and how AI should be used. So AI is a thought partner. AI is a sparring partner. AI is a way of testing ideas, but also making sure that the final product is something that you review and synthesize, declaring when and where AI is used so people have an appreciation for what your actual thinking is versus what the AI is thinking. And I think it's important and incumbent on leaders in the hiring process, in the performance review process to be talking about how people are using AI to help and also where they're struggling to use AI. That way, the company can set up better, broader, more robust advice and guidance.

9:59Wade, what are some of the rules that you have at Zapier?

10:01Wade Foster:So here's a handful that I think are useful. I think, one, the author should put more effort in than the reader. You know, being transparent about where AI is used and the authorship can help quite a bit. oftentimes when I'm sharing material with folks, I'll caveat. I'll say, you know, hey, I had very little time. I did a quick query. Here's the output. Take it if it's useful. And so that helps people assess like, oh, how much has Wade really invested in this thing or not? The flip side is also say, hey, I put a lot of effort into this. I stand by it 100 percent. You know, just kind of like thinking through like where is the AI, the author, the co-author or just like an assistant like can help people, you know, gauge.

10:39Wade Foster:And so I think that's one of those things that internally can go a long way because it helps people understand like, where are we at in terms of like working on this concept? Like, are we at the very beginning, just kind of spitballing ideas? Are we at the part where it's like, hey, we're signing this in blood? You know, those types of rules can go quite a long way. The place we haven't quite nailed yet is it can differ based on the communication medium and the task involved. You know, if you're communicating with customers, that has a certain level of responsibility that goes with it. if this is sort of like meant to be an automated status update or like an automated generated like JIRA ticket or something like that, you know, there's a different level of quality that you sort of expect with that.

11:17Wade Foster:And so I think there is something that is important about organizations just simply doing what you're suggesting, which is, hey, you should define your own internal etiquette. What's one thing that you would never delegate and want to do entirely yourself when it comes to communication and that you would want to make sure your managers don't delegate either. You know, when I'm like doing a company all hands or like, you know, kickoff speeches or things like that, where I'm communicating everybody in the company, I'll use AI to help me. But like, I am, I'm, this is, there's a lot of weight going into that.

11:49I think anything that involves high emotion needs to be a high investment of us personally. So if you're giving a negative performance review, if you're having to give constructive feedback, if you're having to try to align a team that is having some challenges or conflict We really need to be present. The big risk with AI from my perspective is the outsourcing of empathy. You know, AI can be a wonderful tool for helping you enable empathy. You can think about and use AI to help you hone your message based on characteristics you provide. But at the same time, it can cause empathy atrophy. If all we do is outsource the most challenging communication we have, then we're in trouble.

12:30So I recommend to my students as well as to the people I coach that When there's high emotion, especially negatively valenced emotion, that you need to be invested fully in the communication so that you can connect, respond in a way that's real and true for you. Yeah. I mean, AI, it can do a lot of research, but it doesn't have human empathy. It's very good at writing polished prose, but it's not always well-structured or logical. I can tell you as an editor who gets a lot of drafts. And so you do need to do a lot of prompting to make sure that it's giving you language, coaching, rehearsing that will actually make you a better communicator, not a more polished one, right?

13:15I would agree with that. The other thing that you didn't mention that I see a lot is that it actually enhances people's anxiety. People are getting more nervous the more they're using AI because they realize that the output is pixel perfect, but it's not really their synthesized information. If you think about it, communication is the end result of a whole long process. You know, communication is operationalized critical thinking. And if we outsource that critical thinking and then are put on the spot to answer questions, to give input, to give an update, people get really anxious because they realize they don't have that depth of knowledge and the critical thinking behind it.

13:56And so it is really important not just to review the output, but to really review the thinking so that when you're put on the spot, when you have to respond, you have that confidence that you know what you're really thinking and speaking about. Wade, do you worry that the more your teams use AI to do that sort of pre-communication work, the less capable they'll be of doing those things themselves?

14:23Wade Foster:Again, it kind of just depends on the task, right? AI is this like fantastic tool and to not use it, I think would be a mistake. Like you can, you could be a lot better if you use it responsibly. And I think that responsible thing is what everyone's trying to figure out. There are definitely situations where, you know, I feel this myself and I talk to my staff where they say, Hey, there is this sort of like comprehension gap that's sort of kicking in when you don't use AI responsibly, where you're sort of delegating almost too much. And as you get asked questions about this thing, as you start to investigate, you realize like, oh, I don't actually know enough about this area that I should.

14:56Wade Foster:But there could be areas where, you know, the impact is relatively low and you're fine delegating, you know, the work to the AI more fully. And so it just comes down to the judgment here. Support for this podcast and the following message comes from Dataiku. AI investment is at an all-time high. The problem is that most of it never makes it to production. The reason is simple. Without people, orchestration, and governance working together, even the best AI strategy can fail. Dataiku is the platform for AI success, trusted by the world's largest companies to drive return on AI investment. Visit dataiku.com slash HBR.

15:37D-A-T-A-I-K-U dot com slash HBR.

15:46I do worry about the sort of slipping of standards. I think AI can make every executive who uses it sound like average, you know, sort of cliche jargons like a corporate bot. And obviously you're going to work against that. But, you know, that can sometimes be hard if it sounds smooth. My colleague, Scott Bernardo, loves to say that LLMs are really just an averaging machine. So if you want to be average, you should use them. So how do leaders use AI and protect against that sort of loss of their distinctive voice, their personality, specificity, and vulnerability? What you're really highlighting, Alison, is what I call the authenticity crisis that AI brings because we never truly know what somebody is saying, if it's really theirs or if it's AI.

16:38And we have that averaging and people begin to sound the same. We never know if that Cyrano de Bergerac is in their ear or on their screen giving them guidance on what to say. So there are two ways to approach that. One is to signal your humanness, right? One is to signal that this is me thinking this. How do you do that? Well, there are several things you can do. One, we have to be less concerned about some of the things that just a few years ago I would coach against. So a few filler words here or there, a few hesitations that signals humanness. Also giving insight to our thought process. So sharing, hey, that's a really challenging question you just asked or saying that reminds me of a time when this happened.

17:20Those are all signals of humanness and our authentic self presenting. Now, to leverage AI to help us, you can certainly train it on your voice and on your information. As somebody who's hosted a podcast for a long time, I've trained AI on the episodes that we've done of Think Fast, Talk Smart, and it can sound like me. So as I'm writing, I can lean into the colloquialisms that I use, etc. So I think there are two ways to approach that authenticity crisis. First, we have to recognize it's true, as you highlighted. And then second, signal humanness in the way we communicate, what we say, how we say it.

17:56And then we can actually train the AI to help it sound more like us. So as we're working with it as a partner, it can help us be our natural self in our own voice. Yeah, Wade, you've also built a Wade bot, right? Tell me about what you've learned.

18:11Wade Foster:Yeah, I have a whole host of skills that are like trained on big corpuses of writing that, you know, try and get these models to sound more like me. Even still, I'd say it only gets like 80, 90 percent of the way there. And as these new models come out, you kind of I kind of have to consistently update them. In fact, some of the like newer models I find to be even like less good at communication tasks. Like they're very good at coding tasks and it feels like that's what they continue to get better and better and better at. But the like communication stuff, the models feel, I don't know, my co-founder says they sound fried.

18:45Wade Foster:They've lost all like personality. You know, some of the things Matt talks about, I don't know that I do it like with crazy intention, but I have noticed at times like I'll feed it something that I have written and it will try and like, it'll give me suggestions that do make me sound more polished, but I will intentionally not accept them. I have raw edges. Like I'm not a perfect human being. And like, I don't like that. It's sort of like sanding me down. So, yeah, I don't know. Like, I think that there's something to that where if I wanted to talk to an AI, I would. But if I want to talk to you, I want to talk to you.

19:19Wade Foster:And I want to hear what you think, even if it's messy, even if it's imperfect. Like, I think that's that's the part that I care about. And I assume the same, you know, when people come to me, it's like they want to know what Wade thinks, you know, warts and all. I 100 % agree, Wade, that we need to be who we are and we need to connect as human beings. That's what communication does for us. I worry about younger workers and people who are new to the workforce who might not have that confidence that Wade has based on his experience, based on his position and power, that relying on AI to make us sound smart, right?

19:52So I show up the way I think people want me to show up. And I think it's really important for leaders and organizations to take that into account, that somebody who is new either to the organization or new to their role, that AI might become a crutch that helps them, at least they perceive that it's helping them. And it might actually, in the long run, be hurting them because we're not hearing their true voice. So I do think it's incumbent on senior leaders, on those of us in the education system, to really reinforce that your natural own voice and thoughts are really important and AI can help, but you shouldn't rely on it.

20:30Wade Foster:When I find like claudisms inside of people's writings and stuff, I'll just call it out. I'm like, that sounds like AI slop. That sounds like AI slop. Like, what do you actually think here? Like, tell me what you think. Yeah. I will give a shout out for MDashes, which are now apparently banned because they're seen as an AI-ism. And I fully disagree. I'm a human and I love them and I don't want them to be banned anymore. But I will say I've even heard of managers now requiring in-person interviews because they're concerned that anyone who's being interviewed online just has a chat bot that is feeding them the answers that they think the manager wants to hear.

21:10How do you think leaders should handle that? So I 100 % agree that organizations and academic institutions, blue books are back. Those of my generation remember handwriting into blue books instead of typing things in. And that's why the ability, I believe, to speak spontaneously in the moment has become such an important skill, because it's how you demonstrate your thought process in a world where everybody's got the chat bot up on the side. So I do believe leaders need to think about how they set up the environments to enable people to really demonstrate their true thinking and their true communication ability.