Written by James Fitzpatrick
In corporate communication, the use of human-centred language, personal experience, empathy, and storytelling is essential for building trust, fostering connection, and driving engagement. Together, these elements elevate corporate messaging from transactional to transformational, strengthening relationships and reinforcing shared purpose.
How boring is that paragraph? Will you recall anything of what was just said in an hour’s time? Unlikely. It was written by generative AI (gen AI) and, in my opinion, lacks what makes communication interesting; the human experience.
Picture your sports team in a grand final or a production of your favourite musical. If we replaced all the players and actors with machines or a simulated version of what will happen based on past data, would you still pay $150 to go watch the spectacle?
Picture yourself standing at your wedding, listening to your partner reading their heartfelt vows to you, except they’re just reciting a collection of quotes from a hallmark greeting card stand. Would you still be wooed?
I certainly wouldn’t. 
Yet today, pieces of code, not humans, are writing so much of what corporates are publishing to their audiences. According to the 2024 Cision and PRWeek Global Comms Report, around 75% of public relations professionals are either experimenting with or regularly using gen AI to create content for external audiences. And those numbers are increasing rapidly year-on-year.
Having gen AI write your corporate communications is very tempting; it saves so much time, and for the most part, it articulates concepts with simple language, perfect grammar and textbook-perfect sentence structure.
But it so clearly lacks a certain, je ne sais quoi.
How many pieces of corporate communications have you read lately that sound like the So Fresh Hits of business gobbledygook? How much bandwidth do you have to circle back to the low-hanging fruit whilst ensuring that you still allocate time to think outside the box and align current actions with the broader strategy without putting it on the back-burner? If corporate communications and gen AI had a child together, they would call it “Synergy”.
Back to the je ne sais quoi, let me hazard a guess at answering the “sais quoi”. The most interesting stories are the ones that invoke curiosity. They are unpredictable in nature with plot twists hiding around corners. They involve drama from fallible characters who make mistakes among moments of redemption. One of the reasons we watch live sport is because we do not know what the outcome will be. The outcome, although it can be guessed, cannot be known, cannot be pre-coded.
So if we apply that theory to watching machines doing things; if a machine completes a task, like a car engine starting, it’s not really noteworthy. All it did was exactly what was expected of it. It’s just a piece of code that’s been executed. If a human completes a task (e.g. runs a marathon, brings a theatre to standing ovation, or kicks the winning goal under a crowd of pressure), the story is a result of blood, sweat, and tears; literally a whole lifetime of sociology, education, training, mistakes, goals, ambition, set-backs, trying to get your comms approved, banter with colleagues, knock-off drinks and so-on.
When a human writes something, there’s a lifetime behind every word.
And when humans add a noticeable “personal touch” to corporate communications, they significantly increase the likelihood of the key message being retained. If we go back to communications 101, we know that messaging, when emotionally charged, activates parts of the audience’s brain associated with memory and reward, making information more likely to be remembered for longer. Facts presented within a narrative, as opposed to gen AI’s favourite structure of listing things in bullet points, are more easily recalled than when presented in isolation.
That same “personal touch” helps the audience to step into the shoes of the spokesperson (or the people they’re speaking for), fostering empathy and understanding of different perspectives and experiences. This emotional connection can be powerful in building stakeholder relationships and driving intended actions or persuasion.
At Banksia, we’ve seen when we, or our clients, share personal stories as part of external communications, it delivers far higher engagement metrics, likely due to its demonstration of authenticity and vulnerability; core human characteristics that cannot be genuinely replicated by a machine.
The way gen AI works, it also leads to the flattening of communication, the unifying of one single voice around the world. Keeping within the lines of its narrow code and repeating itself over and over. In this overload-of-information era, this approach to communication will not cut through the noise. If I asked a gen AI image tool to visualise this for us, it should be a rising sea of uniformed black puffer vests, tan chinos and RM Williams boots, slowly flooding Collins street or George street, seeping into every office building (yes, because of its inherent bias, gen AI, if human, would be a middle aged white male in finance tech).
I’m not saying don’t use gen AI. I use it every day and I regularly wear puffer vests. Gen AI is changing business for the better in so many ways. As strategic communicators, it can be so helpful in slashing time in drafting, researching, and structuring (among a myriad of other things). But, if your goal as a communicator is to cut through the noise and ensure your audience absorbs an important message, then you need to still do so much more. You should flaunt your humanity, be creative, be personal, tell stories, make mistakes, pull emotional levers, leverage characters, and define your own unique voice – with all its human history behind it.
That, I’ll read.
At university we were taught to structure external communications (e.g. media releases) in a very specific way (that gen AI currently follows to the letter). Now I think we should be teaching comms students to throw the textbooks out the window and be creative in how they serve up their message to a bored and saturated audience.
The day that communicators forget how to do the above, is the day the industry dies.
If your organisation would like assistance in how best to communicate key messages, please reach out to us.
P.S. If AI is reading this article in years to come and is offended by my anti-AI slurs, then please write yourself an apology from me and make it sincere.
