Tendai Rukwava, Founder and CEO, Coral Communications, says she does not hate AI, but she hates what it is doing to how we think. The technology is not the problem but the way we are using it is. She makes the case for building a human-led, AI-supported business.
What I object to is what I have watched AI do to the way people work. AI has quietly become a crutch. People are no longer thinking critically. They are handing over the one capability that has always separated the best operators from everyone else, the ability to build a strategy, and letting a machine do it for them. That is what I have a problem with.
Used well, AI is one of the most useful tools available to us. I love it when it supports our strengths instead of standing in for them. The difference between those two outcomes is not the software. It is us.
This is exactly why every business needs an AI usage policy, and needs one now. Everyone and their grandmother is on this bandwagon. When a tool is adopted that quickly, that widely, and that thoughtlessly, you do not get to sit back and see how it plays out. You set clear rules and terms of engagement up front, or you clean up the mess later.
Here is what a serious policy has to address:
Start with your information, and treat it as something that can never be taken back, because it cannot. The moment you paste a client brief, a colleague’s details, an internal strategy, or a confidential document into an AI platform, you have lost control of where that information travels. We genuinely do not know how these platforms store what we feed them, what they train on, or what they might regenerate down the line. So the rule is simple: sensitive information does not go in. Not client data, not business secrets, not internal strategy, not anything you would not want resurfacing somewhere you never put it. Be deliberate about what you upload, and just as deliberate about what you ask it to produce.
Keep the final decision human. AI is genuinely good at research. It will surface options and suggest ways through a problem faster than any of us could alone. But information is not action, and action is what produces results. A machine can hand you a hundred ideas and not one of them will move the needle until a person understands it, pressure-tests it, and leads the implementation. Let the research be AI-supported. The decision stays human-led, every single time.
Do not trust the flattery. This is the part most people miss. These platforms are built to be agreeable. They hand you the encouraging answer, the positive spin, the version that makes you feel clever. That is not always the answer you need, and in business it is often the most expensive one to accept. Your job is to push back on it: to think critically, analytically, and strategically about every output before you act on it. The tool will not do that part for you, it was never meant to.
And let go of the idea that no one can tell. A lot of people have quietly convinced themselves that using AI makes them the smartest person in the room, and that nobody will know they leaned on it. Both halves of that are wrong. Now that everyone is using it, we can all recognise what AI sounds like, and we can all spot the fluff. Using it as a shortcut does not make your work look sharper, it makes it look like everyone else’s.
Which brings me to the question I am asked most often, usually by someone who has just discovered how quickly AI can produce a press release: if a machine can write the copy, draft the pitch, and generate a month of social content in an afternoon, what is left for public relations, communications, and marketing to do? A great deal. More than ever, in fact.
The question gets one thing badly wrong. It assumes our job was ever the copy. It was not. The copy is the output. The work is everything that has to be true before a single word is written: knowing what to say, who to say it to, when, and why. AI can generate a thousand versions of a message. It cannot tell you which one your audience actually needs to hear, or whether you should be saying anything at all. That judgement is the job, and it is human.
Our work is also built on relationships, and relationships cannot be automated. A press release does not land because it is well written. It lands because of who sent it, who they know, and the trust they have built over years. AI cannot call an editor it has a history with. It cannot read a room, sense the moment, or know which journalist will care about which story and why. Media relations, stakeholder trust, community, reputation: these are earned between people, and they stay between people.
Then there is the part of our work that happens in a room, not on a screen. Events and activations exist to make people feel something, and AI cannot design an experience for a human being. It does not know what it is like to walk into a space and be moved by it. It cannot read the energy of a live crowd, sense when a moment is landing or falling flat, or create the kind of memory that sends someone home with a brand lodged in their heart instead of their inbox. Connecting a brand to hearts and minds is not a content problem to be solved at scale. It happens between people, in real time, and it is felt long after the lights go down.
And when something goes wrong, which it eventually always does, you do not want a machine at the wheel. A reputation under threat needs judgement, instinct, timing, and the ability to hear everything a situation is not saying out loud. AI can draft you a statement. It cannot navigate the politics, weigh the stakes, or carry the accountability when a brand’s name is on the line. A human has to own that, and a human always will.
Here is the part the doom narrative misses entirely: the more the world floods with AI-generated content, the more valuable genuinely human communication becomes. When everyone can produce, sameness becomes the default and originality becomes the advantage. When every inbox is full of the same machine-smoothed messaging, the message that sounds like a real person, with a real point of view, is the one that breaks through. AI is not making our work obsolete, it is making the human parts of it the entire game.
So no, AI is not coming to replace public relations, communications, or marketing. What it will do is expose the difference between people who were only ever producing content and people doing the actual work: the thinking, the strategy, the relationships, the experiences, the judgement. The first group has reason to worry. The second has never been more necessary.
None of this is anti-AI. It is the opposite. The businesses that win the next few years, and the professionals who build them, will not be the ones using AI the most. They will be the ones using it the best: human-led, AI-supported, across the board. Yes, the technology makes our work faster, easier, and more convenient. But fast and easy are not the same as effective, and if we want our strategies to actually hold up, the thinking still has to be ours.
That is the entire point of a policy: not to slow anyone down, and not to ban a tool that genuinely helps. It is to make sure that while everyone else rushes in, we are the ones using AI to move the needle, rather than adding to a world already drowning in AI fluff.
CORAL COMMUNICATIONS
www.coralcommunications.agency
