How AI Is Changing Communication: Weighing Efficiency with Efficacy
HBR IdeaCast
This episode explores the transformative impact of generative AI on executive communication, weighing its efficiency gains against risks to authent
Key takeaways
- AI is highly effective for synthesizing large volumes of internal data (Slack, email, CRM) but requires human verification to prevent errors in speaker attribution.
- The 'comprehension gap' occurs when overreliance on AI leads to a lack of deep knowledge, causing anxiety during spontaneous high-stakes questioning.
Main topics
- AI in leadership communication
- Risks of authenticity loss
Notable quotes
You can delegate the work, but you can't delegate the accountability.
Conclusion
The episode concludes that while AI is an unparalleled tool for effici
Transcript preview
Speaker 1 (0:02) This podcast is sponsored by Dataiku Agent Management. Enterprises have a system for tracking and approving the software they use. But when it comes to AI agents, most of them can't say the same. Take control of your agentic workforce with one view across every platform and tool, showing what's driving revenue, what's drifted, and who signed off on it. Visit dataiku.com slash HBR. D-A-T-A-I-K-U dot com slash HBR. Speaker 2 (0:47) I'm Alison Beard. Speaker 1 (0:48) And I'm Adi Ignatius, and this is the HBR IdeaCast. Speaker 2 (0:58) For 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? Speaker 1 (1:24) 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, and I've seen it provide enormous writing and organizational help to people who are not writers by nature. Speaker 2 (1:39) 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 Speaker 1 (1:59) 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? I mean, AI will give everyone a baseline writing and thinking ability. So that leaves 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. Speaker 2 (2:29) 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. And 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. Wade, Matt, thanks so much for being on the show. Speaker 3 (3:09) Yeah, thanks for having us. Really excited to be with you. So Speaker 2 (3:12) Matt, let's start with you. How do you see AI changing the way we all, and especially leaders, communicate at work? Speaker 3 (3:21) 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. Speaker 2 (3:56) Wade, 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? Speaker 4 (4:07) 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. 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. 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 cloud 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 us the right idea or not? That becomes problematic because the speed at which you can generate. AI output is just really, really high. And so there can be a huge amount of low effort, low thought volume that sort of seeps into communication. And so it does require a level of effort to sort of police and set etiquette around those things. Otherwise, you kind of get a little bit of a runaway train going on. In Speaker 2 (6:14) 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? Wade, 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? Speaker 3 (6:36) 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. AI 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. And are you addressing those themes? And AI can be a very useful tool for identifying them. I Speaker 4 (8:00) 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. Speaker 3 (8:32) I 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. Speaker