You sent the memo. They got it. So what?
Internal communication, in an age of AI-amplified messaging, can do more than transmit faster and easier. It can also recall us to questions of meaning & motivation in the midst of overwhelming work.
Hey there and welcome to a biweekly newsletter that asks how to make changes in working communities to produce generosity, care, flexibility, and hope. Glad you’re here!
This week, we’re talking about the yawning gap between what AI can do and what else it’s good for.
Turns out, the small town of Ballycastle in Northern Ireland is a good place to start a hike, as my wife and I found on a recent coastal amble. The little town is also a good place to start a broadcast, as Guglielmo Marconi found in 1897 when he beamed a message to Rathlin Island across 8 miles of water. Marconi’s message wouldn’t change the world—he was announcing the winner of a boat race—but his transmission would. We’ve been wirelessly transmitting ever since.
In fact, if you check your inbox eleven times an hour like so many people do, you’ll see plenty of wireless transmissions from your higher-ups, I’m sure.
It’s unfortunately much easier to transmit employee communications than it is to cultivate meaning and motivation among your employees. We all know that internal communications often wastes time and money. Think of NIKE in 2018 sending out toxically-top-down internal communications. Think of OpenAI in 2023 and 2024 sending out chaotic announcements about the firing and rehiring of Sam Altman Think of even an ordinary mid-sized company and you can readily watch half a million dollars a year disappear in leaky internal communications.
Is there obscenity strong enough for such internal communication? Let’s all just take a moment to cuss out messaging that conveys no clear goals, provides ambiguous feedback, generates jargon silos, and worsens digital overwhelm?
#$%@ it all to *&%$! (There, I feel marginally better. How about you?)
I promise to stop posting pictures of my recent trip to Northern Ireland soon. But check it out: up there and on the right is Rathlin Island, where the first radio transmission was beamed.
Does it make things a little better that internal communicators can now use AI to boost their efficiency, clarity, and reach? I think so. I think we should even give thanks that AI is good at drafting organization-wide news digests, that it’s good at giving notifications for institutional happenings, and that it’s not-too-terrible at correcting the tone of dicey emails.
But if all we get from AI-powered internal communications is better transmission, we’re not doing too much better than Marconi beaming out the results of a boat race. We’re forgetting the power of internal communication to cultivate sorely needed meaning and motivation in our working communities.
Can AI help us do that? Yep. But we might need a little media history first.
Humans have a long history of seeing only what technology can do and missing what else it’s good for. If you and I were standing on the shore of Ballycastle with Guglielmo Marconi back in 1897, we would have cheered for the first radio broadcast. But that’s not how Guglielmo would have understood it. Like everybody else in his time, Guglielmo (gosh, I really like typing that guy’s name) thought his tech was for private, point-to-point communication. So he missed what else radio was good for. As communication historian John Durham Peters notes, it wasn’t until the 1930s that people recognized that radio could and probably should be understood as a public broadcast medium, broadly useful for democratic society.1
We spend a lot of history ogling what a tool can do and missing what else it’s good for.
Clearly, AI is good at boosting and speeding internal communications. But let me state an easy-to-overlook truth: most users experience AI less like a broadcast than a dialogue. We experience chatbots and agentic AI conversationally. And, I think that’s something else large language networks are good for. Too good, in fact. Which is why we worry our rising professionals will get addicted to overly supportive virtual friends who never stop telling them how wonderful they are. It’s why we’re bothered that people with mental illness often prefer the empathy expressed by virtual therapists. But don’t miss this: AI’s emergent developments remind us of just how much humans crave empathy, authenticity, and communicative presence—and how much we need all that for meaning and motivation.
Can we frame at least some of the affordances of AI this way? Large language models and their chatbot interfaces remind us of the energy coursing through all internal communication: the often unnoticed wattage of language itself.
If we think of language as simply a tool for managerial transmission or employee complaint, we will misuse AI in the workplace. Count on it. But if we allow AI to help us notice all over again the capacities of style and invention, the voltage of metaphors and analogies, the sheer amplitude of linguistic craft, we have a shot at using AI well. Of course, language can also abuse and deceive. We’ve all seen the myopia and the obfuscations propagated by internal communication. But we have to take that risk in order to stay human. It’s just too costly to forget how elemental words are to life and work. New tech doesn’t just announce innovations; it also offers reminds of ancient and strong truths. And one of those old verities is that language has always been a powerful locator of meaning and generator of motivation in human toil.
I’d be lying if I said that I’m not worried about the threat of AI for human labor. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t sobered by the “AI-sober” arguments of anti-AI writers like Elizabeth Oldfield. Like everybody else, I’m living and working in the gap between what this new tech can so damagingly do and what else it’s actually good for.
Internal communicators can use AI to beam out strategy and disseminate procedures from here to Northern Ireland. But we have far greater challenges than transmission. We also have crises of vocational meaning and occupational motivation. As my friend Meryl Herr has written so compellingly, “work hurts” far too often. And work’s exhaustion, harassment, and loneliness empties labor of meaning.
So, let’s make a mode switch from asking how AI can power our internal transmissions to asking how AI can re-animate good questions.
How can we use this particular message to tie a task to our company values?
How can we activate the team’s flexibility in chaotic conditions?
How can we help workers connect to long-range goals to sustain motivation?
Asking questions like these might suggest more conversational ways to use AI in our internal communications. Maybe we should use chatbots to ask us about our own mission and vision. (I regularly ask AI to be tough on my ideas, to take on the posture of a skeptic. And, yes, I have to repeat this request, so deeply ingrained is its tendency to bullshit the heck out of me.) Maybe we should encourage our teams to dialogue with Perplexity and Gemini, not just about faster ways to do things but about the fit between a particular project and our company’s values.
Let’s not replicate Marconi’s misunderstanding. Let’s not miss this technology’s recollection of dialogue and of the vitality of language in human life and work.
This happens a lot in the history of technology. Check out John Durham Peters’s amazing 1999 book Speaking into the Air. Even the telephone, which we have a hard time not imagining as a tool for private communication, was first seen as a broadcast technology.