I recently attended a course called Strategic AI for Internal Communication Professionals led by Dan Sodergren and Mike Klein — and I’ll be honest, I didn’t expect it to shift my thinking as much as it did.
The common thread running through everything was this: the old way of relying on outdated communication channels and hoping the message filters down through managers is no longer enough. Information moves faster and in far greater volume than it did even a couple of years ago. By the time a message reaches the frontline through traditional layers, the context has changed, the urgency has passed, or the meaning has shifted. The infrastructure of internal communication needs to catch up with the speed of the world it operates in.
Here are 3 things that stuck with me.
1. We’ve been here before — but the stakes are just as high
Steam. Electricity. Computing. The internet. AI.
Every industrial revolution created winners and losers — and the dividing line was almost always the same: those who paid attention early and adapted fast, versus those who waited for certainty before moving.
We are in the 5th industrial revolution right now. AI is compressing time itself — tasks that took hours now take minutes, decisions that took days now take hours. This is not a future trend. It is happening in your organization today, whether you have a strategy for it or not.
The lesson from history is uncomfortable: during revolutions, a lot is determined fast. Progress over perfection isn’t just good advice — it’s survival logic.
2. Managers are already at a breaking point
Before we even get to AI, the numbers are striking.
Manager span has increased 50% since 2013. The average manager now has 12.1 direct reports. And when that number exceeds 20, goal completion drops to just 60%.
Now layer on top of that the acceleration of AI: more decisions per day, more coordination needed, more complexity cascading down from the top. Managers are being asked to do more, with more people, faster than ever before.
This is not a management problem. It is a communication infrastructure problem. When people don’t know what the priorities are, when messages get lost or mistranslated across layers, when alignment breaks down — it lands on the manager’s desk.
Internal communication isn’t a support function in this environment. It’s load-bearing.
And if the trend continues — more reports, faster decisions, thinner margins for error — the question isn’t just how we support managers today. It’s whether the traditional management layer itself is sustainable at all. And while we debate that, there’s a more urgent question sitting at the bottom of the chain: how are the frontline workers — the people actually doing the work — getting the information they need to do it well?
3. AI is fragmenting people — IC is the glue
Here’s the paradox no one talks about enough: the more AI each person uses individually, the more isolated they become from each other.
When everyone is running their own GPTs, writing their own prompts, building their own workflows — you get efficiency at the individual level and fragmentation at the organizational level. Different people operating from different versions of reality. What the course called “fragmentation of organizational truth.”
This is where internal communication becomes something it has never quite been before: the human layer that holds an AI-accelerated organization together.
Every AI transformation needs a human translator. Someone who can take the speed, the noise, and the complexity — and turn it into clarity, alignment, and shared direction.
That is the internal communication function. Redefined, elevated, and more necessary than ever.
My takeaway: This isn’t just about learning new tools — though there are plenty worth exploring. It’s about understanding that the ground has shifted, and that IC professionals who combine the right mindset with the right tools will be the ones helping their organizations find footing in what comes next.
Other ideas that stayed with me:
- Load it before you ask it. Treat AI like a new intern: brief it on org structure, audience data, tone of voice. A well-briefed average intern beats a brilliant uninformed one every time. Never accept the first answer.
- Use AI to predict, not just produce. Before a single message goes out, you can stress-test tone, resistance triggers, and friction points per audience segment. Pre-launch mitigation — not post-send analysis.
- You already know your audience better than any marketing team on the planet. IC pros have exact demographics, DISC profiles, engagement history, career aspirations — confirmed, assessed, stated. Not guessed. That’s ~95% audience accuracy. The opportunity is to stop underusing that data and start feeding it to AI to make communication sharper, faster and more personal at scale.
Attended: Strategic AI for Internal Communication Professionals — thecsce.com