Your Comms Team Uses AI. That Doesn't Mean It's Ready for AI.

Everyone's experimenting. Not everyone knows where they're going.

Someone in your communications team is using ChatGPT to write LinkedIn posts. Someone else is summarising reports with Claude. Your designer has discovered an AI tool that produces an entire campaign in the time it takes the rest of the team to agree on a headline.

And somewhere, a communications director is telling senior management that the team has embraced AI.

Lovely.

But here's a question.

Does anyone actually know how ready the team is?

Because using AI and being ready for AI are two very different things.

And after two years working with AI in communications and marketing, I've become increasingly convinced that we're measuring the wrong one.

The great AI participation contest

I've spent much of my career working with communications teams. Agencies, international organisations, global brands. Different structures, different budgets, remarkably similar challenges.

AI has added an interesting new one.

For years, digital transformation was something organisations planned. There were strategies, budgets, implementation programmes and consultants explaining why everything needed to change.

AI arrived slightly differently.

People just started using it.

No committee. No transformation roadmap. Sometimes not even permission.

One person discovered how to write a decent prompt. Another automated their meeting notes. Someone in marketing began producing campaign concepts at a speed that made everyone else slightly uncomfortable.

And suddenly, the organisation had an AI adoption story.

Except adoption tells us who is using something.

It doesn't tell us whether they're using it well.

Or whether the organisation is getting any better because of it.

A team with ten enthusiastic ChatGPT users isn't necessarily more AI-ready than a team with three. It might simply have seven more people generating content nobody particularly needed.

Check it. 👇

The real question isn't how many people are using AI.

It's whether the team has developed the collective ability to use it effectively, responsibly and towards a shared objective.

That's a much more interesting measurement.

Six dimensions. One rather uncomfortable picture.

When I started developing my AI Readiness Scorecard for communications and marketing professionals, I wanted to move beyond the usual questions.

Do you use ChatGPT? How often? Have you attended an AI workshop?

Useful information, perhaps. But hardly a diagnosis.

Instead, I built the assessment around six dimensions that, together, provide a more complete picture of AI readiness.

1. Strategy & Leadership

Let's start with the awkward one.

What's AI actually supposed to achieve?

Not what the technology can do. Not what the CEO saw at a conference.

What does your communications function need to accomplish, and where can AI genuinely help?

That might mean improving audience intelligence, strengthening reputation monitoring, producing better multilingual communications or giving a small team more capacity.

But somebody needs to make those choices.

Without a clear direction, AI adoption becomes a collection of individual experiments masquerading as strategy.

2. Workflows

Here's a familiar situation.

A communications manager uses AI to research a campaign. A colleague uses it to draft the content. Someone else checks the facts manually. The approval process remains exactly as it was in 2019.

Congratulations. You've made one part of the process faster.

The rest is still waiting.

AI readiness means understanding how work actually moves through the team, identifying where AI adds value and redesigning processes accordingly.

Otherwise, you're just putting a faster engine into a car that's stuck in traffic.

3. People & Capability

Every team has its AI enthusiast.

You know the one. Has tried seventeen tools, speaks enthusiastically about agents and keeps asking whether anyone has seen the latest model.

That person is useful.

They're not an AI strategy.

What matters is the capability of the team as a whole.

Can people recognise where AI helps? Do they know how to challenge its outputs? Are they confident enough to experiment, but sceptical enough to question what comes back?

And perhaps most importantly, is that knowledge being shared?

A team shouldn't become dependent on the person who happens to write the best prompts.

4. Technology & Knowledge

Buying licences is easy.

Making technology useful is harder.

Communications teams work with brand guidelines, audience research, campaign histories, stakeholder information, approved messaging and years of institutional knowledge.

If AI tools can't access the right information, or nobody knows which information they should trust, their usefulness is limited.

You can have the most sophisticated model in the world.

It still won't know your organisation's position on a sensitive issue unless you've given it reliable context.

Readiness isn't about owning the most tools.

It's about having the right tools, the right information and the ability to connect them.

5. Governance

Imagine your team publishes an AI-generated statement containing an invented statistic.

Who is responsible?

The person who wrote the prompt? The person who approved the copy? The communications director? The software provider?

And why didn't anyone catch it?

Governance sounds like something that belongs in a legal department. Until your organisation is trending for the wrong reason.

For communications teams, it means practical rules around confidentiality, accuracy, copyright, transparency, human review and accountability.

Not a 70-page policy nobody reads.

Rules people understand and actually follow.

6. Measurement & Optimisation

And finally, the question everyone should be asking.

Is any of this making communications better?

Not faster. Better.

Are we understanding audiences more accurately? Producing more effective campaigns? Improving the quality of our decisions? Identifying reputational risks earlier?

Or are we simply producing twice as much content in half the time?

Efficiency matters. Of course it does.

But producing something nobody needs more efficiently isn't much of an achievement.

AI readiness requires the ability to measure outcomes, learn from experience and improve how the team works.

Otherwise, we're just celebrating activity.

Your strongest AI user might be hiding your biggest weakness

Here's what makes these six dimensions interesting.

They don't necessarily develop together.

A team can have excellent technical skills and almost no governance. Strong leadership ambition and weak processes. Sophisticated tools and very little understanding of how to measure their value.

And individual capability can hide collective weakness.

That brilliant colleague producing impressive results with AI might make the organisation feel more advanced than it actually is.

Until they leave.

Or until someone else needs to reproduce their work.

Or until something goes wrong.

That's why I think readiness needs to be assessed across dimensions, rather than reduced to a single question about adoption.

The objective isn't to turn everyone into an AI expert. It's to make the team collectively capable of using AI well.

There's a difference.

Before the next workshop, find out where you stand

I like AI workshops. I've delivered quite a few.

But I've also seen how easily enthusiasm disappears once everyone returns to their inbox.

The problem isn't necessarily the training.

It's that organisations often start with the solution before understanding the problem.

Another workshop. Another licence. Another pilot.

What if we started by establishing a baseline instead?

Where are we strong? Where are we exposed? Which gaps matter most? What should we tackle first?

That's the thinking behind the AI Readiness Scorecard I've developed specifically for communications and marketing professionals.

It assesses six dimensions of readiness and gives you a structured starting point for understanding where you stand.

It takes 12 minutes.

It's free, for now.

And it might be more useful than buying another AI subscription.

Take the free AI Readiness Scorecard

Because before you decide where AI should take your communications team, it's worth knowing where you're starting from.