Catch message drift before AI changes your meaning
Approved language shifts whenever someone reworks it. This one-week exercise turns those changes into a review checklist.
Chris Gee is founder of Chris Gee Consulting and an advisor for Ragan’s Center for AI Strategy.
Your team spends weeks getting one sentence just right: the mission line, the vision statement, the phrasing that legal approved and leadership actually likes.
Then that sentence leaves the building. A colleague edits it for a partner newsletter, someone trims it for a board memo, and a third person rewrites it for a policymaker’s staff. That’s where AI helps most. It’s also where meaning starts to slowly drift.
Remember the telephone game from back in the day? Each time you whispered in someone’s ear, the first message changed just a little, and no one noticed until the last kid said it out loud. AI makes each handoff faster. It doesn’t guarantee that the message survives the journey between hands.
I watched this play out in a recent workshop with a communications team. We asked them to sort five recurring tasks into a few piles:
- Do it myself.
- Do it with AI’s help.
- Hand it off entirely.
The votes mostly lined up, but the reasons behind them were much more revealing. Most of those reasons came down to four questions:
- If it goes wrong, can it be fixed? A mistake in a newsletter may go unnoticed and can be corrected in the next issue. A leader’s mistake in front of an audience can damage the company’s reputation.
- Whose voice is it? Short news blurbs can be AI-assisted, but anything that influences someone’s point of view must stay in human hands.
- Is it original or repurposed? Reworking approved material carries far less risk than writing from a blank page.
- Does doing it by hand build a skill your team needs? Improving your writing skills and critical thinking came up first. One person said she’d rather read a full report than ask AI to summarize it because that’s how she learns what makes her audience tick.
The biggest lesson came next.
Most tasks were split in half. AI can pull the analytics numbers, but a person must explain what they mean. AI could find every time your CEO has talked about an issue through analyzing hours of transcripts, but a person must decide what really matters from all that data.
One guiding principle: use AI at any point in the work but keep the decisions that go out under your name. Think copilot, not autopilot.
This week, pick one core message that your team owns. Ask your AI tool to adapt it for three audiences: your partner, your board, and a policymaker. Put all three next to the original version. Mark every line where the meaning started to move away from its original intent. These marks represent your review checklist. Share it with the team and run every altered piece against it before it goes out.
Your messaging guide may be built to travel, but you have to know where to check it at each stop.
