My AI + Comms Path — And How You Can Walk It, Too.

Happy Wednesday! This week:

Let’s get started!

I’ve been finding AI very valuable, I want you to get the same value out of it, and building my own tools and workflows is how I got there. And I want to get you there, too. The webinar — details below — is a great way to start, as is my new course site, The Build.

I’m only one data point, but I think my journey has been instructive. What follows is the path I actually walked between then and now — not because it was special, but because it wasn't. Every rung was available to any comms person reading this. Here's the order it happened in, and what you can do to climb the same one.

1. First, I had to believe it was worth my time.
Last September, I was very reluctant to use AI tools — at work, I had access to Copilot, which wasn’t doing much for me, and at home, I was using ChatGPT as a magical search box. It wasn’t helping me with my work. My colleagues created a set of prompts for all sorts of purposes and I gave a few of them a try — and that helped a lot, because I was seeing outputs that made sense and were faster (but not better) than what I could do on my own. For low-value work, it helped — and that was the whole unlock. Nothing after it would have happened without that first "oh, this is different" moment on something I actually cared about. Here’s a path you can follow:

2. Then I got honest about why I wanted it.
I learned a lot more about how to prompt better and I began to realize that AI use is a skill and one I needed to learn. (The good news is, so did everyone else!) I really wanted it to do everything really well from the get-go because that’s what was promised to us, but it’s not magic — it’s just another tool that gets more useful the better you become with it.

But to start building that skill, I needed to want this thing to work for me. Personally, I like being innovative, so I started to try things that I hadn’t seen many others try, and finally built a custom GPT. I showed it to everyone who would listen. While I no longer use or share that GPT, it sparked the joy I needed to keep learning. It's the same thing I now tell every leader who asks how to move their team: figure out your why before your what.

Most people aren’t me, though — you’ll need to see a more tangible result if you want to really build that desire to do more. My suggestion:

3. I stopped prompting and started briefing.
The real skill turned out to be one comms people already have. I quit hunting for clever prompts and started treating AI like a sharp junior hire — context, the goal, the constraints, an example of my voice. The day I built a reusable voice profile and led with it every time was the day the output stopped sounding like a robot and started sounding like me. Honestly, it’s still not great and I find myself discarding that copy more often than I use it. (A quick aside: “Honestly” is a dead giveaway of AI-drafted copy, but — honestly 😀 — that was 100% human written.) But the larger prompts that brought context to the effort were a big step up. I wasn’t just tossing things at an LLM and hoping it would give me something useful, I was — effectively — mentoring it on a path toward success.

To follow the trend of this newsletter, here are three things you can do to experience the same:

4. I learned to diagnose, not just do.
I’ll admit — I’ve yelled at Claude and ChatGPT a few times. Not verbally, that’d be super weird, but the “WHY CAN’T YOU DO THIS??!?” all-caps thing? Yep, I’m guilty as charged.

After a few of those, though, I treated that rhetorical question as an honest one — why can’t the LLMs figure out what I’m after? I had no idea. But something clicked — I realized I could just ask the chatbot what’s going on. And I then asked myself the same — where am I taking shortcuts, asking the chatbots to infer info I haven’t provided, for example. The important part is the shift — asking the chatbots and yourself to diagnose, not just do. This is where I think you level up your AI use — it’s like the mushroom or fire flower for Mario, but real.

No three-part path for you in this one — if you’re at the step, it’s straightforward: pressure-test what you’re doing and ask the LLMs to do the same about what they’re doing.

5. And then I started building my own tools.
This is the part I didn't see coming in January. Using a plain-English coding tool — Claude Code — I stopped borrowing other people's software and started building my own: a media-intelligence system that does journalist research the way I'd do it, a scanner that audits how AI models "see" a brand, a chief-of-staff setup that drafts my own recurring work on a schedule while I sleep. No developer. Just me describing what I needed in English.

Most of what I’ve created isn’t “software” in the typical sense. It’s just a lot of complicated prompts that Claude Code has access to and reads without me copy/pasting. I didn’t write them — Claude did for me, as part of my conversations with it. I’ve never even looked at them — there’s no need. I just worked with the AI chatbot to create something that I needed, it created it, and now it uses that creation to help me do my work.

This is the hardest part to get started on, which is what tomorrow’s webinar and The Build are there for — I want to help you take those first few steps. I hope you’ll join me for at least one, if not both.

But either way, that's the whole arc: believe it matters, get honest about why, learn to brief, learn to diagnose, then build. I climbed it in seven months, in public, one issue at a time — and I'm now convinced any communicator reading this can climb it faster than I did, because I've watched enough of you do exactly that.

Nearly fifty of you have now sat through this one with me: an hour, seven prompts, and a real working tool at the end of it. No coding experience required.

What you'll build is The Comms Gut Check, a web app where you paste in a draft and get structured feedback on clarity, jargon, tone, and where your audience is likely to push back. (I ran the Declaration of Independence through mine. The loyalists did not care for Jefferson's prose.) But the tool isn't really the point — getting comfortable enough with Claude Code to build the next one on your own is.

The next session is tomorrow, August 6 at 11 a.m. ET. Same build as last time, so if you couldn't make the earlier ones, this is your chance. Save your seat.

💡 Can't make it? Click here to build The Comms Gut Check on your own — same course materials, but on your own time, and also free.

👍 Planning on attending? Here’s a bit of setup before we start, so we can get through the whole build in the hour:

If you'd rather see the full walkthrough of what we build and why, here's the issue where I broke it all down.

And if you want me to run a guided build for your team, get in touch.

5,000+ professionals use Skill Leap to get ahead with AI. Right now, two of their best courses are completely free - Claude 101 and the 14-Day AI Boot Camp.

Claude 101 covers prompting frameworks, Artifacts, file analysis, and real-world workflows in 19 lessons.

The Boot Camp covers ChatGPT, Gemini, Midjourney, and prompt engineering in 16 lessons. Downloadable workbooks. LinkedIn certificate.

Zero cost, no credit card, no catch.

Get 2 Free AI Courses

I came across this essay by Bob Pearson, "The Chief Workflow Officer," and it put a title on something I've been circling for months. Pearson's argument is simple and, for us, a little thrilling: major technology shifts change how work happens before they ever change the org chart, and the person best positioned to redesign that work in the AI era isn't in IT — it's the Chief Communications Officer. His logic is that comms leaders already live in the places AI strains hardest: how information flows, where it breaks down, how stakeholders react, and how quickly trust erodes when the machine gets it wrong. So instead of waiting for a technical function to hand us a rollout plan, he says we should be the ones architecting the new workflows — building the governance, the training, the human-escalation rules, and the institutional memory that keep an AI-accelerated organization from flying apart. Rename the role if you like; the point is that redesigning how work moves is becoming a communications job.

What makes this land for comms pros specifically is that it reframes AI from a productivity toy into a mandate we're uniquely qualified to own. If content creation is collapsing from days to minutes and research is nearly instant, the scarce, premium skills become the ones AI can't fake — judgment, strategy, creativity, and the ability to lead people through change. Those have always been our skills; we just rarely got to apply them to the operating system of the company itself. That's the opportunity hiding in Pearson's title. The communicators who thrive in the next few years won't be the ones with the cleverest prompts — they'll be the ones who stopped thinking of AI as something to use and started treating it as something to build workflows around, on behalf of the whole organization. Whether or not "Chief Workflow Officer" ever shows up on a business card, the work is already ours to claim.

Whether you're trying to build systematic AI adoption across your team or focused on AI search visibility for your brand or organization, I’m here to help.

I have three slots open for late August/September — learn more and book an intro call.

These links are sponsored; trying these tools will help support this newsletter. Thanks!

#CommsJobs started with a problem nobody was solving.

Daniel Méndez Aróstica had just moved countries and was rebuilding his network from scratch. His feed began filling up with comms roles, so he started sharing them with his network. That network is now 25k strong.

Every Friday, the #CommsJobs newsletter drops the week's comms roles straight to your inbox. Hand-curated. No spam, no filler, and never a charge to the communicator looking for work. 

Your next role is hopefully in this week's list.

Subscribe and go find it.

Was this forwarded to you by a friend or colleague? Want to get this in your inbox next week? Click here to subscribe!

Quick question: how can I help?

What workflows are you struggling with? Where does AI still feel mysterious or overwhelming? What has worked that you’d like to share with others?

I’m a builder, and I’d love to help you and the rest of The Comms Stack community find great new ways to use AI.

Reply and tell me.
I read every response.

Even a one-sentence reply helps. For example:
“I wish AI could help me with ______.”

Until next Wednesday,

Dan

Advertise | Subscribe