The Career Case for Owning Your Company's AI Transformation

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A lot of the advice floating around about AI and communications still treats it as a tools problem — which chatbot, which prompt, which workflow. Gab Ferree thinks about it differently: as a career move. She's the founder of Off the Record, a community and newsletter for communications professionals, and she built out her "Paid, Promoted, Powerful" framework after watching who actually gets ahead when AI shows up at a company — and who doesn't. I asked her to turn that framework into a Q&A, pulled from the OTR workshop she ran on the same topic.

Let's jump in.

🤔 "Paid, Promoted, Powerful" starts with your own AI use before it gets to the team or the company. What's the one thing you'd tell someone to protect from AI entirely, no matter how good the tools get?

💬 Gab's take: I'm not recommending that anybody protect something entirely from AI, as in AI plays no role whatsoever. But I do recommend that people audit their work and rank it: the most highly valuable and strategic work at the top, and the rote tasks on the bottom. For the ongoing day-to-day that doesn't necessarily need your big beautiful brain — automate away, build systems, be hands-off. But the top of the pyramid, when things are really highly strategic, that's what you're getting paid for, and that's the business value you provide the company. I would be really mindful about how much you allow the AI to be a decision maker there. Everyone thinks everyone else is already using AI, so this is an opportunity to audit and ask yourself, "Is this a trusted way for me to be using AI? If my boss found out this is how I use AI, would it build or break trust? Is this the right thing to do?" There's definitely no one size fits all. However, I do encourage people to keep some work AI-free. Don't automate everything end-to-end. Make your brain work. Faster is not always better. Sometimes the work is the work is the work, and the churning and the editing and the backspacing and rewriting can be the work.

🔎 My take: This is the "judgment over stenography" line again, just drawn in a new place — it's not what AI does, it's what you let it decide. The audit she's describing is really an audit of where your judgment is the actual product.

👥 On the team level, what does an "AI champion" actually do day to day — and how much of a real job is that, versus a title someone wears on top of their normal work?

💬 Gab's take: This is a real job. It should be a part of someone's KPIs and a part of the percentage of someone's work, if not their entire job. It depends on the size of the team. If you've got quite a large team, this might be someone's full-time role or multiple people's full-time roles. If you have a smaller team, this is probably just going to be part of someone's existing role. But I do think someone on the team needs to own it. That's what takes AI from "Cool, that's a training we did that one time" to "We're actually systemically changing." Without someone who cares about the team-wide work, everyone's just going to continue to work in silos, and you're not going to prioritize your build days and your share days. If you continue to ask your team to just do it in the margins of a busy workload, you're not going to have the same successful outcomes as if you give it the priority it deserves — which is actual time, KPIs, and the ability to say, "I achieved my results with this work."

🔎 My take: I've said this before and I'll keep saying it — the cheapest, highest-leverage thing a comms team can do is name an owner, not buy a tool. I really like Gab’s insight here — a title with no KPI attached is a hobby, not a transformation.

🛠 You talk about building systems, not prompts. What's an example of a system beating a one-off prompt in practice?

💬 Gab's take: In my entire use of AI, I have never worried about prompting, and I've continued to build masterful AI systems without it. I don't think the prompts matter. That's just not the reality of today with AI. You need context. You need diamonds. You've got to give it information, but you don't have to master a prompt. The best way I would recommend doing this: if you're starting on a project for the first time, just go into voice mode in AI and start with this phrase: "I have this problem." Describe what the problem is, let the AI know if you want feedback on solutions, and end it with "Ask as many follow-up questions as you can." Then just go back and forth and build something great. Now, you didn't prompt — you gave it context, you gave it diamonds. Now is your cue to build a system: "Build me a skill so I can do this work again." That skill will have the context of all the back-and-forth you just went through, and that's a system you can deploy moving forward.

🔎 My take: This is the "a skill is just a file of context" idea from the other direction — the magic was never the prompt, it was the context you hand over, and the system you build once you've got a good answer. (And a reminder — here’s my quick start on how to build your first AI skill.)

📣 At the company level, why should comms be the one to own AI transformation instead of IT or legal? What's the case you make when someone pushes back on that?

💬 Gab's take: IT and legal certainly have a role to play in AI transformation, but they do not have the reputational role to play. They are not thinking about the brand impact if I'm Aerie, our brand value is “100% Aerie Real,” and our customers discover that we have used AI-generated bodies in our ads or creator content. That's not necessarily an IT or legal challenge. That's a brand challenge. That's a communications challenge. The way a company does and does not use AI — whether leadership is making mandates without clear training, where the critical thinking and strategic value of your employees come in versus where AI is fair game — that is all brand and reputational impact, both external and internal. We cannot relegate a transformation that is so closely aligned to brand reputation to IT and legal. So my suggestion is to work collaboratively alongside IT and legal and position the role you're playing: where AI affects reputation, and how the way you do or do not use AI is a competitive moat and advantage.

🔎 My take: This is the pitch I keep making for why comms belongs in the room early, not after the rollout email goes out — reputational risk doesn't wait for IT's timeline, and neither should we.

⚖️ You've got a good test for disclosure — “would this build or break trust if my boss saw it?” Walk me through how that actually plays out when someone's deciding whether to say "I used AI for this."

💬 Gab's take: I have a suspicion that a lot of people might have over-relegated some of their critical and strategic thinking to AI. So this is a Rorschach test for you to audit how you're using AI today and ask yourself, "How would I feel if everyone knew this?" If you don't feel good, that's probably a good signal to reassess and adjust how you're using AI. If you're totally fine with how you're using AI, then keep going — and promote that to your boss. Let them know how you are using AI and, more importantly, where you're not using AI. That way you're never afraid of being caught using AI, because you were super transparent about it. So when you're deciding whether to say "I used AI for this," ask yourself: Am I comfortable with people knowing that I used AI for this? If not, maybe change your systems or evaluate how you're using AI.

🔎 My take: What I like about this test is that it skips right past "is this allowed" and goes straight to "would I be embarrassed" — a much harder, more honest question, since plenty of technically permitted AI use would still make someone wince if their boss actually saw it. That's exactly the reputational risk communicators are supposed to be the ones watching for — this just points the question at ourselves first.

Thanks to Gab for taking the time to share this with me — you can find her and the rest of the Off the Record community at joinofftherecord.com.

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For the past year, communicators have worried about how AI search sees our brands. Turns out AI search is also quietly building a reputation system for journalists — and PR's two biggest media-intelligence vendors just turned it into a product feature.

Pete Pachal, who writes The Media Copilot, laid it out in Fast Company (Oct. 9): since AI answer engines are becoming "the new Google," getting cited by them is becoming the new measure of who counts as authoritative on a beat. Muck Rack built that measurement into its product back in March with "AI Visibility Badges" — sorting journalists and outlets into three tiers (Highest, High, Some AI Visibility) off more than 15 million AI citations it tracks. Cision followed in July with its own dashboard showing which journalists turn up most in AI answers.

If AI citations are becoming a journalist's report card, the old "build a media list" instinct gets even more backwards — you're no longer choosing who to pitch, you're choosing who the models already decided matters.

Why it matters: The infrastructure for ranking reporters by AI visibility already exists and ships as a feature, not a research project.

Your next step: If you have Muck Rack or Cision access, pull the AI-visibility tier on the three reporters you pitch most, and see if it matches your gut. If it doesn't, that gap is worth understanding before you build your next list around either one.

I spent 15+ years running digital and AI-adoption strategy inside global brands — the kind of enterprise-scale channel work most "AI consultants" have never actually done from inside a company that size. I bring that same playbook to comms teams directly now: workflow audits, executive AI systems, the intranet-and-channel rebuilds I used to run in-house.

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Until next Wednesday,

Dan

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