How AI Is Changing Communication: Weighing Efficiency with Efficacy

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

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Alison Beard (0:47)

I'm Alison Beard.

SPEAKER_1 (0:49)

And I'm Adi Ignatius, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.

Alison Beard (0:59)

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, to 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.

Alison Beard (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.

SPEAKER_1 (1:59)

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. I 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.

Alison Beard (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 Abrahams, 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.

Wade Foster (3:09)

Yeah, thanks for having us.

Matt Abrahams (3:11)

Really excited to be with you.

Alison Beard (3:12)

So Matt, let's start with you. How do you see AI changing the way we all, and especially leaders, communicate at work?

Matt Abrahams (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 in organizations.

Alison Beard (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?

Wade Foster (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 our Slack instance, email, meeting notes, project management, CRM tools, code base, et cetera. And so I can get summaries of 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'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 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 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? 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.