Happy Wednesday! Below, you’ll find:

Let’s get started!

For the past few weeks, I’ve been exploring how communicators can actually use AI — not as a shortcut, but as a thinking partner. I’ve shared frameworks, experiments, and even a custom GPT to walk through strategy step by step. But a lot of that can be overwhelming. So I built something concrete: a structured prompt playbook designed specifically for how communicators actually work.

It’s a 50+ page Communications Prompt Playbook designed specifically for our field. This is the resource I wish I’d had when I started experimenting with AI in communications — something I could use as a reference to find a decent prompt to get me started for some of the most common situations we’re in, day to day.

You can download the full Communications Prompt Playbook below — for free:

Most AI prompt resources fall into two camps: too generic to be useful, or too narrow to matter.

Communications work doesn’t fit neatly into “write me a blog post” prompts. We deal in nuance — risk, tone, credibility, cross-functional alignment, stakeholder interpretation, second-order effects. We need tools that reflect how we actually think. But, when we’re told to “use AI” (often without any further direction!), that level of complexity often creates blank page paralysis. I wanted to make it easier for us to hop onto Claude or Copilot or the like and get started.

This is the on-ramp I wish someone had made for me.

I can’t predict the future — if I could, I’d be buying lottery tickets, not writing this newsletter. But I tried to anticipate as many different needs as I could here. The playbook has more than a dozen communications disciplines in one place, each with 50 structured prompts. That’s 600+ prompts organized around the real questions we wrestle with: voice, audience, risk, measurement, credibility, governance, long-term narrative health. Whatever discipline you're working in, there's likely something here for you.

To be clear, these are designed to be thought starters, and only thought starters — if you pop one into an AI chatbot, it’ll put you on the path to something better, but it won’t fast-forward you to the finish line. They’re designed to help you pressure-test messaging, surface blind spots, generate angles, and build stronger first drafts — while keeping your judgment at the center. This is a starting point, not a shortcut to excellence.

After putting this guide together, I had an idea for a bonus section — a cross-functional playbook specifically for crisis situations.

It maps prompts across more than a dozen communications functions at once — internal, external, exec, investor, etc. — so teams can coordinate under pressure. Each mini-section is role-specific and structured for real-world use. Most comms teams don’t actually have that documented anywhere. Now you do.

In fact, the crisis section alone is worth the 90 seconds it’ll take to download — it's the thing to open when your phone starts ringing and you need to coordinate three teams in the next hour.

👉 Your next step: Download the whole playbook here. And again, it’s free.

If you’re new to AI, this gives you a credible place to begin. If you’ve been experimenting but feel inconsistent, this gives you a sharper framework to build from.

🤝 And share it! If you find it useful, forward this email or share the download link with a colleague — sharing the page rather than the PDF means they'll always have the latest version. The more communicators who get comfortable using AI as a thinking tool — not a crutch — the stronger our work becomes.

If you’re a decision maker at your company, you need to be on the bleeding edge of, well, everything. But before you go signing up for seminars, conferences, lunch ‘n learns, and all that jazz, just know there’s a far better (and simpler) way: Subscribing to The Deep View.

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A few weeks ago, Gartner released its “Top Communications Predictions for 2026: What Every CCO Must Know,” featuring an hour-long webinar that dives into the details. Don’t have an hour? No worries — they toplined it in the image, below.

You can click the image for a larger (and more legible) version — or just read below 😀 And you’ll immediately see the key theme: AI is fundamentally changing how we work.

Why it matters: If this is right — even if it’s just directionally correct — AI is going to become the intermediary between us, as storytellers, and our audiences. The LLMs are going to take our work, repackage it, and make it available in ways that we have to anticipate and master. And we’ll need a budget to help us do that.

Your next step: There’s a lot to do here, but I’d probably start with the narrative intelligence work. Map out your story — starting with your “why” — and how you want the world to understand it. Put that narrative in writing, stress-test it, and make sure leaders agree not just in principle, but in language.

Getting consensus and signoff on that story is a must-have before you communicate it internally or externally. In an AI-first world, repetition becomes reality: AI systems don’t invent narratives; they converge on the ones they see most often. If your framing is fuzzy, their synthesis will be, too.

A director at Meta, working on its AI safety and governance, lost a lot of her work when an AI agent deleted a bunch of emails it shouldn’t have. I saw a few comms pros flag this story with the same general take: AI agents are going to cause a lot of crises — and we need to be thinking, now, about how to communicate about their impact and our companies’ efforts to mitigate those problems.

I think they’re right. The Meta employee had guardrails in place, but those guardrails failed. It’s a flaw in the machine. Joshua Woodruff, a leader in security and agentic AI, explained the issue on LinkedIn:

This “whiteboard effect” is something OpenAI and other LLM leaders are aware of. Last summer, a spokesperson for OpenAI told Gizmodo that ChatGPT has built-in safeguards, and “these safeguards work best in common, short exchanges, [but] we’ve learned over time that they can sometimes become less reliable in long interactions where parts of the model’s safety training may degrade.”

How long is too long? That’s unclear, at best. And it’s not clear how fixable this is. So expect more crises like this in the future — and you may want to get your crisis plans in place now.

ChatGPT is a superpower if you know how to use it correctly.

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Vibe coding — using platforms like Claude, Lovable, and Base44 — is getting a lot of attention, because it lets non-coders (like me!) to build apps that we would otherwise be unable to on our own. But it’s overwhelming — where do you start? what should you make? — and that may keep you from giving it a try.

Gab Ferree of Off The Record is addressing that this week with a free one-hour webinar. It’s a practical session — you’ll end up with a roadmap you can refine and ultimately act on.

🖖 Sign up here — there’s a session tonight, tomorrow, and Friday. (And tell Gab I say hi!)

And don’t forget MESSAGE — My custom GPT that works with you to create a great first draft for just about any comm. (Learn more about MESSAGE here.)

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Until next Wednesday,

Dan

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