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I use AI almost every day, but after 25 years of leading communications through launches, transitions, crises, and transformations, I know where human insight matters.
Every week there's a new headline about AI replacing communications professionals.
I'm not here to argue with that. I use AI almost every day. I've built AI-powered tools for clients. I stay current, I experiment, and I genuinely believe these tools have changed what's possible in communications work, including the speed, scale, and ability to do more with less.
But after 25 years of leading communications through the moments that matter most — launches, transitions, crises, transformations — I also know where AI runs out of road. And right now, with communications teams leaner than they've ever been, I think it's worth being honest about that line.
Early in my career, I worked as a software sales rep when our CEO died unexpectedly in a plane crash. Overnight, my job became something different: reaching out to our resellers to confirm what happened, and more importantly, to reassure them that the company they'd bet their business on was going to be okay.
There was no playbook or template that quite fit. The message was written for us, but the audience was made up of real people who needed to hear something true and human from someone they trusted, before news stories and rumors filled in the story for us.
AI can draft a crisis statement. It cannot tell you what this particular audience is afraid of, what they've heard already, or what they need to believe before they'll stay.
I've helped introduce new CEOs to their organizations multiple times, each under different circumstances, with a different set of things left unsaid in the room. One followed a scandal. Another followed a high-profile departure. Still another was inheriting a team that had been through too much change already and was running low on trust.
In every case, the communications plan was the easy part. The hard part was figuring out what employees actually needed to feel and believe before they could listen to anything the new leader said. That required listening, understanding, and judgment that no tool can replicate. It was specific to those people, in that moment, with that history.
When the pandemic hit, I was in the middle of a global brand campaign for a large enterprise technology company. Within days, we realized that everything we'd planned was for a moment that no longer existed. The real world had changed overnight. We paused all in-flight advertising, coordinated with agency partners to ship production equipment to the CEO's home, and turned around an entirely new TV ad and digital campaign in one week. It spoke directly to the experience customers were facing right now, not what we'd planned to say six months ago.
We had already been using tools to help with creative adaptation. But the pivot wasn't just about speed or copy changes. It was about reading the moment, understanding that the world had completely shifted, our audience's needs and priorities had changed, and the only message worth sending was one that acknowledged that honestly and with human sensitivity.
I’ve led communications for the rollout of numerous software platforms, which sounds straightforward, except that the real job is never announcing each new system. It’s getting thousands of company employees to adopt and actually use it, trust it, and not quietly go back to the way things had always been done before.
It required understanding why people resist change, what they need to feel capable and confident, and how to sequence communications so that adoption feels like momentum rather than mandate. The technology is the easy part. Moving people to change is the project.
In every one of these moments, the question was never just "what do we say?" It was "what do these people need to understand, feel, and believe, and what will move them forward?"
That's the judgment AI can't replicate. Not because it isn't powerful. It is. But because that question is specific and uniquely human. It depends on who these people are, what they've been through, what they're afraid of, and what they're ready to hear. It requires someone who has been in enough of these rooms to know what they feel like.
I use AI to work faster, draft smarter, and scale what I know. But the work that actually moves people – through change, into something new, to get behind a vision of the future – requires the human ability to read the moment and know what it calls for.
If your team is leaner than it was a year ago and you're staring down a launch, crisis, transition, or too many of these at once, it's exactly the kind of moment to give me a call.
Sara Mariani is a fractional communications leader with 25+ years supporting C-suite executives at Fortune 500 companies. saramariani.com
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