Hey there, I'm Devin!
Most of the time you can catch me deep in the world of internal comms at Workshop (yes, the Happy Mondays folks!), and while I love AI, there are just some comms questions that need a human who really gets it… that’s me!
Hey Devin! I’m an internal comms practitioner who’s been experimenting with AI tools to speed up my workflow — drafting content, building templates, that kind of thing. But I keep running into a wall when it comes to tone. Everything I generate feels a little too polished, a little too corporate. My company has a really distinct culture and voice, and I’m struggling to get AI to capture it authentically. How do you train AI to sound like your company — and how do you know when to trust it versus rewrite it yourself?
Oooh, we are at the same place on this one! This was one of the very first conversations I had with my team when we started thinking seriously about AI for outputs — and I came in a little hot, if I’m being honest. Like, “we should be using AI for everything” hot. And what I learned pretty quickly is that before any of that can work, you need your brand voice and tone documented and accessible. Not just for the AI — for your whole team. But it does mean you can train up what our CMO Jamie likes to call “bot babies” with very specific instructions: when writing this, do this. Don’t do that. Avoid these sentence structures. Ditch the rocket ships. The more specific you are, the better your output is going to be.
Frankly, it’s also just a lot of practice. Over and over. And I almost never let AI take the first spin at something. I come in with a pretty strong opinion about how I want something to look and feel, and I use it more like that final brushstroke — a last check, or a way to slice and dice content for different channels. Very rarely do I go to it and say, “write me a full comms plan,” and just accept whatever comes back. It’s never going to have that level of nuance (I think!).
As for when to trust it versus rewrite — there’s definitely a weight component. For things like policy docs or onboarding materials, the more flat and informational stuff, AI actually crushes it. That’s kind of what it was built for. But for sensitive updates — a team transition, a promotion announcement, anything where it really needs to feel like a person wrote it and spent time on it — that’s where you come back in. Those messages need a human heart. Best of luck!
