By Chris Gee
AI Educator and Advisor
Every communicator I talk to right now gives me some version of the same answer.
“Oh yeah, I use AI. I use ChatGPT.”
And I get it. A year ago, that was the right answer. Getting familiar with the tools, testing them out, figuring out what they could and couldn’t do. That was the work. That was progress.
But we’re past that now. And if your relationship with AI still begins and ends with a prompt box, you’re not behind yet. But you’re about to be.
Here’s the distinction I’ve been making with clients and students for the past year, and it’s the one that actually changes how you think about this:
There’s a difference between using AI and building with it.
Using AI means you open a tool, type something, get something back, and move on. It’s reactive. It’s manual. And it scales exactly as much as you do, which is to say, not very much.
Building with AI means you design systems. You create workflows that run on a schedule, surface what you need before you go looking for it, and handle the bottom of your task stack so you can stay focused on the work that actually requires you.
For communications professionals, that bottom of the stack is enormous. The weekly monitoring sweep. The inbox triage. The legislative scan. The briefing that needs to land in a client’s inbox by 8 in the morning. These are all things that matter, but they don’t require your judgment. They require your time. And right now, most of us are still giving them both.
The communicators who figure this out first are going to have a different kind of edge. Not because the technology is impressive, but because they’ll have built something real. A system that works for their practice, in their voice, on their schedule.
The good news is that the barrier to entry is lower than it’s ever been. You don’t need to know how to code. You don’t need to understand large language models. You don’t need an engineering team or an IT budget. You need a clear problem, a willingness to design a solution, and the right tool to build it in.
That’s what I’ve been working on with CommsCollectiv Partner, Monica Talan, and it’s why we’re launching AI Agents for PR Pros on May 5th.
It’s a 6-week cohort for communications professionals who are ready to move from dabbling to building. Every participant leaves with a working agent they built themselves: a custom Issues Intelligence Briefing Agent that monitors their topic area and outputs a stakeholder-ready summary on their schedule. No code. No API keys. Built in Claude Cowork.
If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to make this transition, this is it.
Space is limited and filling up fast! Learn More