Your internal messaging is out of date

When I served as global head of corporate communications in a global companies, one thing never stopped: the work of trying to keep everyone on the same message. Positioning shifted as the market moved. Products evolved and demanded new narratives. The world outside changed, and we had to shift. Messaging was never static; it was a living thing. And inside the company, only a small group of people were actually in that loop.

Everyone else was improvising or still using messaging that had been current two years earlier. Not because they were sabotaging, but because they either did not know the new story or had not mastered it because they are busy professionals. To compensate, we - as any company - campaigned internally the way we campaigned externally: launch decks, town halls, intranet pages, enablement sessions. This is called internal communication. And just like external campaigns, people need to see it multiple times and connect the dots across different moments. It takes a huge amount of time before even our own colleagues consistently use the new messaging.

The painful part? By the time the organization finally caught up, you are already refining the story again. Quite some people are a few updates behind.

The invisible cost of out-of-date messaging

Knowledge sharing is a 700 billion dollar industry for good reason. If people in your company cannot use the messaging, facts, and case studies you have created, you are paying twice. You pay once to develop them, and again in lost opportunities because they are not used. That double payment shows up as stalled deals, weak positioning in the market, and endless rewrites of materials that should have been straightforward.

Every corporate communications leader will recognize the pattern. You invest months in comprehensive messaging frameworks: carefully crafted positioning statements, tested value propositions, thoughtful tone of voice guidelines. These represent serious financial and intellectual investment. Yet when deadlines hit, agencies need fast direction, new team members arrive, or sales needs something by tomorrow, people default to memory, old decks, or their own improvisation.

Your brand loses twice: once for the wasted work, once for the bad results. You end up as a company that sounds different every time it speaks. Brand value never gets the chance to accumulate, because consistency never really happens.

The messaging that works is the messaging that gets used.

Why traditional fixes and generic AI are not enough

Over twenty-five years in communications, I have seen every attempted fix. Brand books. Massive messaging matrices. Elaborate folder structures. Intranets and wikis that were supposed to be the single source of truth. Outside in, inside out internal communications. The problem is persistent because the problem is human processing power and human patience.

To use messaging well under the old model, someone has to find the right documents, read and interpret them, and pick the relevant pieces. They then adapted them to the situation and checked that they were still consistent with everything else. That easily takes 25–60 minutes for a single piece of content. Under pressure, people skip that process. They are not wrong; the cognitive overhead is simply too high for daily reality.

Then AI arrived, and a new habit emerged. Someone opens ChatGPT or another LLM and asks it to write a statement, a press release, or internal note. What comes back is smooth, confident, and completely generic. Which makes it the devil the disguise.It sounds like every other company in the industry.

If the reaction is quick, it is probably: "AI stuff does not work for us. It is not our messaging or our voice. We are too complex for AI."

No you are not. You just need to infuse AI with your context, rules and expectations.

But the AI risk is bigger than just disappointment.

Because AI outputs are so plausible, people will run with them. If your teams use generic AI tools without your knowledge infused, you are effectively scaling bland improvisation. The more the team relies on those tools, the further your actual positioning drifts.

The input is the problem to solve.

Turning AI into your internal messaging engine

Here is the good news: the same technology that can undermine your messaging complety can also finally solve the problem that has frustrated corporate communications for decades.

The core issue was never that your messaging frameworks were not good enough. The issue was that no human could process and apply them at the speed and scale your organization needed. Humans process roughly 250 words per minute. Modern AI systems can analyse over a million words per minute. That processing power changes what is possible.

Instead of asking every employee to remember, find, and interpret complex messaging documents, you can give your AI the full context once and let it do the heavy lifting. Your positioning statements, proof points, tone of voice patterns, case studies, and internal narratives can move from static documents into a structured knowledge base that actually knows your organization.

With that in place, something fundamental shifts. When someone asks the AI to draft an email to a customer, a slide for an internal all-hands, or a LinkedIn post for an executive, it is no longer pulling from bland internet averages. It is drawing on your approved messaging, your voice, your facts. The same system that today produces generic corporate speak can become the fastest, most consistent way to stay on message.

The companies that sound the same every time are the ones people remember. Systematically feeding your AI with your real messaging is how you become one of them.

From small inner circle to shared, living knowledge

In most organizations today, there is a small inner circle truly on top of the messaging. They are in the meetings where the new story is shaped. They understand why certain phrases were chosen and others rejected. They can improvise on message because they hold the full context in their heads. Everyone else is, at best, catching up.

An AI-powered messaging system changes that balance. Instead of trying to push knowledge out through repeated internal campaigns, ans trying to make people read and understand it when it is not the most relevant to them, you make the knowledge itself omnipresent. Every team member can "play with" the latest messaging in the tools they already use, when they want. They do not need to hunt down the latest deck or ask someone in communications or the executive team. The system brings the right version of the story to them, shaped for their specific context.

This removes the bottleneck of human processing so that creativity and judgment can finally sit on top of a reliable, shared foundation. Communications professionals stop being traffic controllers and become what they were meant to be: strategic guides who shape the narrative and decide what goes into the system. Instead of manually enforcing it one asset at a time.

Choosing which future you want

We are at a fork in the road for internal messaging and knowledge sharing. On one path, AI becomes another source of fragmentation: smooth, generic language that feels helpful but  pulls your organization off message all day long. On the other path, AI becomes the engine that finally makes your best thinking available to everyone, in the moment they need it, in words that truly sound like you.

Sounds like an easy choice right?

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