AI is rapidly moving from a tactical tool to a strategic enabler within communications. At VMA Group’s recent interactive workshop, one message stood out clearly: organisations are not struggling with access to AI. They are struggling to use it meaningfully.
The session delivered in partnership with Erum Quddus and Farhan Ahmed from The Agile Storytelling Company provided a grounded, experience-led view of where communications teams stand today, and clear insights into what communicators must change for AI to deliver real strategic value.
Insight 1: Adoption is Widespread, but Not Yet Strategic
AI adoption across communications is increasing, but depth of use remains limited. While 42% of participants believe the biggest impact of AI is still to come, just over a third of our workshop attendees continue to use it primarily for productivity gains.
Time constraints, combined with gaps in skills and governance, are preventing more strategic application. Nearly half (48%) of attendees cited lack of time to learn and experiment as their main barrier to adopting AI more strategically.
The result is broad but shallow adoption, where AI accelerates existing workflows rather than transforming them, and with it, missed opportunities. Without focused investment, it risks becoming a tool for efficiency, not impact.
Insight 2: Prompting is a Core Communication Capability
Prompting has evolved into a critical professional skill. High-quality outputs depend on structured, intentional inputs grounded in context, audience understanding and clear direction.
Employing frameworks, such as CRISPE (Capacity, Role, Insights, Statements, Personality, Experiment), can define role, insight, tone and iteration, significantly elevating the quality of AI-generated content.
“Done well, prompting enables communicators to produce more nuanced, audience-aware and strategically aligned messaging, reinforcing it as a core capability within the function.” – Erum Quddus
Insight 3: AI Delivers Greatest Value Upstream
The highest-impact use of AI sits before content creation, not after it.
Applied effectively, AI can support insight generation, audience analysis, message testing and leadership decision-making. These applications move AI’s role from execution to strategy, enabling communicators to make more informed, evidence-based decisions and design communications with greater precision and relevance.
Insight 4: Capability Must Be Matched with Governance and Judgement
As AI capability accelerates, governance is struggling to keep pace. Clear frameworks are essential to ensure accountability, maintain trust and manage risk.
Equally, AI outputs require careful oversight. Risks such as inaccuracy, overly polished but low-value content, lack of context and hallucinations – where AI generates confident but unfounded or fabricated information as fact – reinforce the need for strong human judgement.
As discussed in the workshop, managing these risks requires active interrogation of outputs, including techniques such as prompting AI to validate its own responses and rigorously fact-checking against trusted sources.
Ultimately, AI should be viewed as an enabler, not a decision-maker.
Final Reflection
The organisations seeing the greatest value from AI are those approaching it with clarity and intent. Success depends not on the number of tools in use, but on how effectively they are embedded into strategic thinking.
Strategic Value comes from:
- Asking better questions
- Embedding AI into thinking, not just execution
- Applying strong human judgement and governance
- Building confidence through experimentation
AI is not the strategy, It is an amplifier of it, and the communicators who grasp that distinction are the ones best placed to lead.
The question is no longer whether AI belongs in communications. It is whether communicators are ready to command with it.
