Imagine this scene
Leadership has asked for a briefing on a 40-page report. You could read it, highlight key points, and prepare a summary — but that would take hours. Instead, imagine having a junior analyst who can scan the entire document in seconds and pull out themes, highlights, and potential issues. That’s what AI does best: turning volume into actionable insight.
AI can distill long documents, meeting notes, or multiple perspectives into concise summaries. It can pull: key facts, main arguments, recurrent themes, contrasting viewpoints. For communicators, this is a multiplier — instead of manually sifting through pages, you focus on strategic interpretation.
AI summarizes patterns but doesn’t know what’s mission-critical, sensitive, or politically nuanced. That’s where you add value: deciding which insights matter most for your audience, providing missing context, adjusting emphasis according to strategy. Think of AI as the first pass — you bring judgment, experience, and organizational insight.
AI is also great at comparing multiple sources: meeting notes from different departments, media coverage across outlets, internal communications drafts. It can highlight overlaps, contradictions, and trends — giving you a high-level view faster than manual comparison. This is critical for executive briefs and stakeholder updates.
Treat AI outputs as a starting point. Always: validate key facts, check for tone and bias, supplement with judgment and context. By combining AI’s speed with your analytical skill, you produce summaries that are accurate, relevant, and actionable.
The Mindset Shift
AI gives you comprehension at speed; your expertise gives it meaning.
Turn something long and dense into something useful and brief.
Choose a long document, email thread, report, or set of meeting notes you need to act on — ideally something you haven't had time to fully read yet.
Paste it into an AI tool and prompt: "Summarize this in five bullet points for a senior leader who needs the key takeaways and any decisions required."
Read the summary critically. What did AI get right? What did it miss, underweight, or frame incorrectly?
Add one or two things AI couldn't know — organizational context, sensitivities, strategic implications, or what this means for your specific audience.
Use the final version as a real briefing document or as your starting point for a communication. This is AI as a compression tool — not a replacement for your judgment.
