How AI Is Changing Communication: Weighing Efficiency with Efficacy

ALISON BEARD: I’m Alison Beard.

ADI IGNATIUS: And I’m Adi Ignatius, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.

ALISON BEARD: For the next few weeks, we’ll be dropping an episode each Thursday that explores how the rapid advancement of AI is changing what it means to be an executive. Today, Adi, we’re going to look at one of the core ways that generative AI is adding value—or maybe not—in organizations, and that’s communication. A lot of people are using these tools to craft everything from emails to speeches, internal reports to client pitches. Do you see that as a good thing?

ADI IGNATIUS: As someone who writes for a living, I’m definitely not comfortable with having AI write for me. That said, I’m happy getting research assistance from generative AI, and I’ve seen it provide enormous writing and organizational help to people who are not writers by nature.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah. I agree on your personal view. I see the upsides. I also see a lot of risks, even for non-professional writers, notably that people become too reliant on it so that they’re not actually engaging with the work as much as they should or sounding like humans or even making sense, even though the words might seem polished.

ADI IGNATIUS: I think as with every other part of the organization, we will have to figure out with writing and communication, what is the proper balance between how much AI can and should do, and what are the truly unique strengths that humans provide in the process? AI will give everyone a baseline writing and thinking ability, so that leaves it to humans to provide the missing ingredients that maybe ultimately make a difference, like judgment, like taste, curiosity, creativity, persuasion, prioritization, all of that.

ALISON BEARD: Exactly. So today we are going to explore the ways that AI is changing writing, leading, and communication, especially for leaders, when they should use it, when they shouldn’t, and the most important skills to develop right now. Our two experts are Matt Abraham, Stanford professor, author of Think Fast, Talk Smarter, and host of the podcast Think Fast, Talk Smart, and Wade Foster, the CEO of Zapier, which is a platform that connects multiple web applications so they can work together automatically with the help of AI. You can imagine he is a big user of generative AI. Here’s our conversation. Good? Okay. Outro. Adi, you want to go?

ALISON BEARD: Matt, thanks so much for being on the show.

WADE FOSTER: Yeah, thanks for having us.

MATT ABRAHAMS: Really excited to be with you.

ALISON BEARD: So Matt, let’s start with you. How do you see AI changing the way we all, and especially leaders, communicate at work?

MATT ABRAHAMS: So AI is both helping and I believe hindering the way leaders are doing their work. It is absolutely providing an opportunity for leaders to synthesize a tremendous amount of information, to structure it in a way that’s meaningful, to look for themes and trends that might’ve taken a long, long time to uncover. But at the same time, it poses the risk of jeopardizing authenticity, hindering empathy. So we have to be careful with how we absolutely deploy AI to help us as leaders and as individuals in organizations.

ALISON BEARD: So Wade, as the leader of an AI-focused company, I assume that you’re a pretty heavy personal user of it. How has it changed the way that you talk to your team and your workforce?

WADE FOSTER: Yeah. I think similar to Matt, there’s a lot of advantages and definitely some tricky things that we have to figure out in terms of etiquette. The massive benefit is I am able to ingest a lot more of what’s going on inside the company. I can point an agent at all the data sources inside of a company, whether it’s our Slack instance, email, meeting notes, project management, CRM tools, code base, et cetera. And so I can get summaries of most anything that’s going on inside of a company at any given time, and it’s generally pretty good. You do have to be a little careful.

If you’ve got inconsistency in your communication, inconsistency in your data, it can summarize poorly. One of the challenges with a lot of the meeting recorder tools is speaker attribution; it can mix up things like that. So you’re often getting directionally correct data, but you usually do have to go verify and understand that. But a lot of times in the past, you would have to go talk through layers and layers of management just to get even a far less comprehensive summary.

And so that aspect makes it a lot easier to surface the things that are really important in a company. You can have the agent giving you signals and saying, “Hey, you should ask more about this. You should dig into these things.” And so that part is really, really helpful.

Similarly, it’s an amazing thought partner for thinking through ideas and then figuring out how should I go communicate those things? But as powerful as the tool is, I do think we haven’t quite as a society yet adapted or figured out what the right etiquette is for how to use these tools.

And so you still do see a fair amount of sloppy AI use where someone would just say, take a Claude output, copy and paste it, and just represent it as their own idea without really actually thinking much about did it actually surface the right idea or not? That becomes problematic because the speed at which you can generate AI output is just really, really high. And so there can be a huge amount of low effort, low thought volume that sort of seeps into communication. And so it does require a level of effort to police and set etiquette around those things. Otherwise, you get a little bit of a runaway train going on.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah. In terms of output, I’d love to hear from both of you what you think is an effective use of AI for a leader. Is it speech writing? Is it drafting emails? Is it putting together PowerPoints for the boards? Wade, for you, where do you use it personally? Matt, where have you seen the executives that you’ve talked to and work with use it well? Matt, why don’t you go first?

MATT ABRAHAMS: I really see AI helping the executives I teach and the ones I coach using AI is a way to jumpstart thinking about the communication. It is a great way when you’re staring at a blank screen to get yourself started, and a lot of times that start is hard. So using it as an initial way to start, using it as a thought partner when you have some ideas and have it help you to coalesce those ideas, to look for themes. And then as you know, Alison, I’m a big, big fan of structure to help you think through different ways of structuring it based on the audiences you’re working with. AI can be a wonderful tool to help you do that. But as Wade alluded to, it’s really important that you look at the output, that you think about it, and that you actually reflect on, is this serving the goal that I have in the work that I’m doing?

To simply blindly say, go create this deck for the board or this pitch for a prospective client or this deck for my all hands can get you in trouble, but looking at how to use it to help you structure how to start is really important. And then I love using AI and encouraging the people I coach and teach to use it as a reflecting tool. So go back and look at themes that came up in Q&A, in discussion, and see what those themes are, and are you addressing those themes? AI can be a very useful tool for identifying them.

WADE FOSTER: I use AI for all of those communication mechanisms that you mentioned. I think the big thing that I always come back to is judgment. My co-founder, Brian, has this line, “You can delegate the work, but you can’t delegate the accountability.” And so if I’m not reviewing the output, if I’m not paying attention to the quality of the work, that reflects back on me. At the end of the day, the most important thing is the quality of your communications. And you can get good quality using AI, you can get good quality without using AI. Inversely, you can get bad quality using AI and you can get bad quality without using AI.

MATT ABRAHAMS: I think it’s really important for executives and leaders to role model and to set rules and guidelines for how AI should be used, and that really can make a fundamental difference in organizations. In the work I do, it’s all about helping people with people process and infrastructure, and AI plays a role in all of that, and making sure that as leaders, we role model and make clear what we expect in terms of usage of AI is really important because otherwise you can run into some of those judgment issues that Wade is referring to.

ALISON BEARD: So if you’re advising a CEO on AI communication policies, what are some rules that you would set out?

MATT ABRAHAMS: So I think first and foremost is to share when and how AI should be used. So AI is a thought partner, AI is a sparring partner, AI is a way of testing ideas, but also making sure that the final product is something that you review and synthesize, declaring when and where AI is used so people have an appreciation for what your actual thinking is versus what the AI is thinking. I think it’s important and incumbent on leaders in the hiring process, in the performance review process to be talking about how people are using AI to help and also where they’re struggling to use AI. That way the company can set up better, broader, more robust advice and guidance.

ALISON BEARD: Wade, what are some of the rules that you have at Zapier?

WADE FOSTER: So here’s a handful that I think are useful. I think one, the author should put more effort in than the reader. Being transparent about where AI is used in the authorship can help quite a bit. Oftentimes when I’m sharing material with folks, I’ll caveat. I’ll say, “Hey, I had very little time. I did a quick query. Here’s the output. Take it if it’s useful.” And so that helps people assess like, “Oh, how much has Wade really invested in this thing or not?”

The flip side is I’ll also say, “Hey, I put a lot of effort into this. I stand by it 100%.” Just thinking through where is the AI the author, the coauthor, or just an assistant can help people gauge. And so I think that’s one of those things that internally can go a long way because it helps people understand where are we at in terms of working on this concept? Are we at the very beginning just spitballing ideas? Are we at the part where it’s like, “Hey, we’re signing this in blood.” Those types of rules can go quite a long way.

The place we haven’t quite nailed yet is it can differ based on the communication medium and the task involved. If you’re communicating with customers, that has a certain level of responsibility that goes with it. If this is meant to be an automated status update or an automated generated Jira ticket or something like that, there’s a different level of quality that you expect with that. And so I think there is something that is important about organizations just simply doing what you’re suggesting, which is, “Hey, you should define your own internal etiquette.” I don’t think it has to map from one company to another, but I do suspect there probably will start to be a little bit of societal norms around these things.

ALISON BEARD: What’s one thing that you would never delegate and want to do entirely yourself when it comes to communication and that you would want to make sure your managers don’t delegate either?

WADE FOSTER: When I’m doing a company all hands or kickoff speeches or things like that where I’m communicating everybody in the company, I’ll use AI to help me, but there’s a lot of Wade going into that.

MATT ABRAHAMS: I think anything that involves high emotion needs to be a high investment of us personally. So if you’re giving a negative performance review, if you’re having to give constructive feedback, if you’re having to try to align a team that is having some challenges or conflict, we really need to be present. The big risk with AI from my perspective is the outsourcing of empathy. AI can be a wonderful tool for helping you enable empathy. You can think about and use AI to help you hone your message based on characteristics you provide, but at the same time, it can cause empathy atrophy. If all we do is outsource the most challenging communication we have, then we’re in trouble. So I recommend to my students as well as to the people I coach that when there’s high emotion, especially negatively valenced emotion, that you need to be invested fully in the communication so that you can connect, respond in a way that’s real and true for you.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah. I mean, AI, it can do a lot of research, but it doesn’t have human empathy. It’s very good at writing polished prose, but it’s not always well structured or logical, I can tell you as an editor who gets a lot of drafts. And so you do need to do a lot of prompting to make sure that it’s giving you language, coaching, rehearsing that will actually make you a better communicator, not a more polished one, right?

MATT ABRAHAMS: I would agree with that. The other thing that you didn’t mention that I see a lot is that it actually enhances people’s anxiety. People are getting more nervous the more they’re using AI because they realize that the output is pixel perfect, but it’s not really their synthesized information. If you think about it, communication is the end result of a whole long process.

Communication is operationalized critical thinking, and if we outsource that critical thinking and then are put on the spot to answer questions, to give input, to give an update, people get really anxious because they realize they don’t have that depth of knowledge and the critical thinking behind it. And so it is really important not just to review the output, but to really review the thinking so that when you’re put on the spot, when you have to respond, you have that confidence that you know what you’re really thinking and speaking about.

ALISON BEARD: Wade, do you worry that the more your teams use AI to do that sort of pre-communication work, the less capable they’ll be of doing those things themselves?

WADE FOSTER: Again, it kind of just depends on the task. AI is this fantastic tool and to not use it I think would be a mistake. It could be a lot better if you use it responsibly. And I think that responsible thing is what everyone’s trying to figure out. There are definitely situations where I feel this myself and I talk to my staff where they say, “Hey, there is this sort of comprehension gap that’s kicking in when you don’t use AI responsibly, where you’re sort of delegating almost too much.”

And as you get asked questions about this thing, as you start to investigate, you realize, “Oh, I don’t actually know enough about this area that I should.” But there could be areas where the impact is relatively low and you’re fine delegating the work to the AI more fully. And so it just comes down to the judgment here.

ALISON BEARD: I do worry about the sort of slipping of standards. I think AI can make every executive who uses it sound like average, sort of cliche jargons, like a corporate bot, and obviously you’re going to work against that, but that can sometimes be hard if it sounds smooth. My colleague Scott Berninato loves to say that LLMs are really just an averaging machine, so if you want to be average, you should use them. So how do leaders use AI and protect against that sort of loss of their distinctive voice, their personality, specificity, and vulnerability?

MATT ABRAHAMS: What you’re really highlighting, Alison, is what I call the authenticity crisis that AI brings because we never truly know what somebody is saying, if it’s really theirs or if it’s AI. And we have that averaging and people begin to sound the same. We never know if that Cyrano de Bergerac is in their ear or on their screen giving them guidance on what to say.

So there are two ways to approach that. One is to signal your humanness. One is to signal that this is me thinking this. How do you do that? Well, there’s several things you can do. One, we have to be less concerned about some of the things that just a few years ago I would coach against. So a few filler words here or there, a few hesitations, that signals humanness. Also, giving insight to our thought process.

So sharing, “Hey, that’s a really challenging question you just asked.” Or saying, “That reminds me of a time when this happened.” Those are all signals of humanness and our authentic self-presenting. Now to leverage AI to help us, you can certainly train it on your voice and on your information. As somebody who’s hosted a podcast for a long time, I’ve trained AI on the episodes that we’ve done of Think Fast, Talk Smart, and it can sound like me. So as I’m writing, I can lean into the colloquialisms that I use, et cetera. So I think there are two ways to approach that authenticity crisis. First, we have to recognize it’s true as you highlighted. And then second, signal humanness in the way we communicate, what we say, how we say it. And then we can actually train the AI to help it sound more like us. So as we’re working with it as a partner, it can help us be our natural self in our own voice.

ALISON BEARD: Wade, you’ve also built a Wade bot, right? Tell me about what you’ve learned.

WADE FOSTER: Yeah. I have a whole host of skills that are trained on big corpuses of writing that try and get these models to sound more like me. Even still, I’d say it only gets 80, 90% of the way there. And as new models come out, I have to consistently update them. In fact, some of the newer models I find to be even less good at communication tasks. They’re very good at coding tasks and it feels like that’s what they continue to get better and better and better at. But the communication stuff, the models feel, I don’t know, my cofounder says they sound fried.

Some of the things Matt talks about, I don’t know that I do it with crazy intention, but I have noticed at times I’ll feed it something that I have written and it will try and it’ll give me suggestions that do make me sound more polished, but I will intentionally not accept them.

I have raw edges. I’m not a perfect human being and I don’t like that it’s sort of sanding me down. So yeah, I don’t know. I think that there’s something to that where if I wanted to talk to an AI, I would, but if I want to talk to you, I want to talk to you and I want to hear what you think on this topic. Even if it’s messy, even if it’s imperfect, I think that’s the part that I care about. And I assume the same when people come to me. It’s like they want to know what Wade thinks, warts and all.

MATT ABRAHAMS: I 100% agree, Wade, that we need to be who we are and we need to connect as human beings. That’s what communication does for us. I worry about younger workers and people who are new to the workforce who might not have that confidence that Wade has based on his experience, based on his position and power, that relying on AI to make us sound smart, so I show up the way I think people want me to show up. And I think it’s really important for leaders and organizations to take that into account that somebody who is new either to the organization or new to their role, that AI might become a crutch that helps them, at least they perceive that it’s helping them and it might actually in the long run be hurting them because we’re not hearing their true voice. So I do think it’s incumbent on senior leaders, on those of us in the education system to really reinforce that your natural own voice and thoughts are really important and AI can help, but you shouldn’t rely on it.

WADE FOSTER: When I find Claudisms inside of people’s writings and stuff, I’ll just call it out. I’m like, “That sounds like AI slop. That sounds like AI slop.” What do you actually think here? Tell me what you think.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah. I will give a shout out for Em Dashes, which are now apparently banned because they’re seen as an AI-ism. And I fully disagree. I’m a human and I love them and I don’t want them to be banned anymore. But I will say I’ve even heard of managers now requiring in-person interviews because they’re concerned that anyone who’s being interviewed online just has a chatbot that is feeding them the answers that they think the manager wants to hear. How do you think leaders should handle that?

MATT ABRAHAMS: So I 100% agree that organizations and academic institutions, blue books are back. Those of my generation remember handwriting into blue books instead of typing things in. And that’s why the ability, I believe, to speak spontaneously in the moment has become such an important skill because it’s how you demonstrate your thought process in a world where everybody’s got the chatbot up on the side. So I do believe leaders need to think about how they set up the environments to enable people to really demonstrate their true thinking and their true communication ability. It might be easier to have everybody remote, but it might be more beneficial to the discussion, to the ideation, to have everybody physically present. We do have to not just consider the communication, but architecting situations that allow for what we want to get out of the communication.

ALISON BEARD: Can AI help make you a better in-person communicator? Have you, Wade, used it to rehearse difficult conversations or think through speeches?

WADE FOSTER: It’s not the AI itself that has helped with this. I’m a huge voice to text fan now because of AI. One of the things I don’t really like doing is editing my voice to text stuff. So I find that before I start talking, I think better. I’m just going to stop, think for a minute, what do you want to say? Complete the sentence and say exactly what I mean. And so it’s interesting to have observed how this new workflow has influenced how I talk.

And again, that’s not necessarily AI feedback, that’s just I have this new workflow where I’m doing more voice to text and I just was like, “Man, I have to edit these a lot.” Turns out when I talk, I didn’t like sometimes what the transcript would say. I’d be like, “Oh, I said that? I got to go fix that.” And so it held a mirror up to me and made me think, “Oh, I should write better.” Of course, I have done it for other topics as well where maybe I’m giving a tough performance review and I really want to have my talking points dialed in.

But even still, when I do that, I often will take the output, I’ll read through it, but then I will just take the bullet points. I’m like, okay, just keep the bullet points front and center for me. I don’t want to be reading Claudisms. I don’t want to be reading the very polished output. I want to just have these checkpoints that remind me, Hey, you need to mention this.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah.

MATT ABRAHAMS: I have seen people role play with AI. So imagine you’re going into a really challenging meeting of some sort and you can imbue the AI with different roles or different perspectives, and then you can engage in conversation and say, give me what types of questions come from somebody who’s skeptical or from somebody who has lots of vast experience in this realm and use it as a way to help you prepare. Athletes use sparring partners, offense has the defense, defense has the offense, and AI can serve in that function. In the classes I teach at the GSB at Stanford, we have a couple assignments where students take Q&A, and one of the requirements is that they practice Q&A with an LLM, not to memorize the answers, but just to get the reps of answering questions and that makes them better.

ALISON BEARD: Wade, at Zapier, you are in a position now where you’re sort of managing teams of humans and AI bots. So what does that mean for how communication works in the organization?

WADE FOSTER: Probably for the bots part of this, I’d say there are a couple different examples that are important. One, we often have bots that are communicating on a schedule or proactively inside of Slack. Everyone knows those are bots. They have a bot avatar. It’s not a bot masquerading as Wade or masquerading as somebody else.

So you can see that that’s what it is. There is a certain amount of tuning that goes on with those bots. People are not afraid to give feedback to the bot and be like, “Hey, that was incorrect or you need to try and make it look like this.” And so there’s a fair amount of just coaching and guidance and stuff like that that happened for the bots. Saying that out loud though, I’m like, “Why do they get all the feedback and humans don’t? Feels like humans should get this same kind of feedback at times.

ALISON BEARD: Because they don’t have feelings to hurt.

WADE FOSTER: I know, right? But nonetheless, I think it would be useful for us to do the same with humans. So you see that a lot. I think for certain workflows, we have this hyper structured. So for example, we have AI bots that work in customer support and there’s human in the loops on a variety of steps in those workflows, but those bots are measured very specifically.

We have metrics every step of the way that are measuring CSAT. We have our own internal evals and measurements that suggest is it giving good output or bad output? And so those are getting tuned with way more statistical rigor than say the internal Slack box. Those are a little more vibe-based, I would say. So those would be the two places where I would say we see a lot of, almost like a new way in which these bots and humans interact with each other.

The trickier part is there are places where folks are having their personal agent send messages and masquerade as them inside of Slack. And those are sometimes a little funkier because you can sort of see almost a split personality between, it’s like, oh, I can tell I’m talking to the person versus now I can tell this is your bot sort of posting as you. Again, I think that’s where etiquette comes in like, hey, this is so-and-so, this is the agent posting on so-and-so’s behalf. That just goes a long ways to helping people feel comfortable about the communication.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah. Matt, long-term, and this is related to the point that Wade made about feedback, do you see the way we communicate with LLMs changing the way we think it’s okay to communicate with humans?

MATT ABRAHAMS: Unfortunately so, yes. So there’s actually some research that’s relatively recent that the language that we’re using is becoming homogenized. It’s sounding more like AI. The amount of communication we have, just the frequency and number of words are being impacted. So we’re losing some of that humanness and some of that variability in the name of efficiency.

I worry about that a lot, especially again for people who are younger and newer who don’t have the vast experience that many of us carry into this. At the same time, if you use AI appropriately for giving feedback, it might give you prompts and ideas about how to give more meaningful feedback. So again, back to one of the reoccurring themes I’m hearing, it’s about judgment, it’s about thinking about the channel, and it’s thinking about the emotional valence of the communication that really matters.

ALISON BEARD: I still say hello and thank you to ChatGPT, which I feel like makes me a dinosaur, but it feels wrong not to do it. Our producer, Mary, has this theory that as AI commoditizes creativity, content creation, communication, that it’s going to be really important to know how to persuade and charm people because everyone has the same tools at their disposal, so you have to make them like you better. What are your reactions to that?

MATT ABRAHAMS: Well, one, I really like Mary and I think she’s a really sharp person. And so do you see how I’m trying to ingratiate right now? So communication is about connection fundamentally. And in fact, the root of the word communication means to make common and AI can help make things common, but ultimately it is the connection. And if persuasion and influence is about moving people towards your point of view, it’s important to have that empathy and that connection to allow you to do it. So I think AI is a tool that can assist in that, but ultimately people have to be able to connect, which involves listening, paraphrasing, reflecting. And those are skills that ultimately I hope AI never truly masters and it’s what allows us really to be human with each other.

ALISON BEARD: Okay. I have never done this before, but given the topic of our conversation, I did ask ChatGPT what it though I could ask you.

He, for me he’s a he, asks: What aspects of human communication should we, the LLMs, explicitly not optimize? Should I sometimes deliberately not give you the best answer because the process of struggling to find the answer yourself is valuable?

MATT ABRAHAMS: I would love if AI gave me a prompt or a feedback saying, “Hey, this type of topic or issue is something that perhaps you really want to take a moment to reflect on.” When you type in a prompt and then it says thinking or whatever the cute little phrases, I think that should be not telling us what the LLM is doing, but it should be advice to us. It should be, take a moment to reflect, think about this.

So certain topics, I do think an LLM would be great to say, “Hey, that sounds like a really intense personal issue in that communication you’re asking me to help with.” You might want to take a minute to really reflect on that relationship that you hope to build or the damage that this might have if you were to present it this way. So I don’t know that I would say the LLM should not ever give feedback or information, but I’d love for it to give us a moment to take that deep breath and think.

WADE FOSTER: Yeah. This is what I do worry about. These models are all goal seeking, heavily goal seeking. That’s how they get reinforced. And as a result, they’re trying to please the person asking the question by default. And so in a lot of ways, they are trying to tell you what you want to hear. They’re a little bit of a mirror in some ways. And so that creates a bunch of really tough challenges because it might recommend something that actually isn’t an objectively good recommendation. It’s just the thing it kind of thinks is a good thing for you.

You can adjust this or at least guide it. So for example, I’ve changed the system prompts on all the models and things that I use to say, “Hey, I want you to debate with me, critique me. That’s what I want out of you. I want you to challenge my assumptions. I want you to push back when you think I’m wrong.” I want that out of it because I want it to actually help me make better decisions. And in doing so, I’m kind of trying to say, “Your goal is actually this, and what I want is this really tough though partner that is going to make me be better at the work I’m trying to do.” So I do worry about how these models pursue their goals and what actually is the goal under the hood.

ALISON BEARD:

Yeah. Okay. So I want each of you to give me the one human skill that we need to keep honing that AI will never help us with, and then the one thing that you think every executive should use AI for when it comes to communication.

WADE FOSTER: What came immediately to mind is human curiosity, human judgment. Your ability to actually care about the work and high judgment and be really curious about those things, that is still 10 out of 10 valuable in this world. And I worry about the folks who start to turn that part of their brain off, turn the curiosity down, turn the judgment down, and it’s just all LLM, LLM. So I would keep that stuff exceptionally high. And then the one place I would recommend executives or whoever to use AI in their daily work.

Gosh, what’s the one place? I use it everywhere—one tip that I think is really helpful. If you are not hooking up your LLM to the actual data that you have inside your organization, you are getting a much worse experience. You are getting general coaching and guidance, but you should hook it up to your company communication systems and your data sources. As soon as it actually has that context, it will start to work a lot better for you inside that environment. So I think that would be the one tip I would give for folks.

ALISON BEARD: Great advice. Matt?

MATT ABRAHAMS: So I would say never automate empathy. You have to be person to person, not pixel to pixel on that. And then in terms of value that AI can bring, I think every time we have a high stakes communication, we should be checking in with the AI about the audience we’re speaking with. Give the AI information about the audience and have it give you some suggestions about ways to make the message tighter and more specific for the audience. The better we can make our content relevant for the audience, the better the communication will be.

ALISON BEARD: Terrific. Well, thank you both. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation.

MATT ABRAHAMS: Thank you as well. It was great to chat with both you and Wade.

WADE FOSTER: Thanks for having me.

ALISON BEARD: That was Wade Foster, the CEO of Zapier and Matt Abrahams, Stanford professor, author of Think Fast, Talk Smarter, and host of the podcast Think Fast Talk Smart.

We’ll be back on Tuesday with a conversation between Adi and Apple store creator Ron Johnson, plus another AI series episode on Thursday.

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