A year ago, I finished my master’s capstone on how generative AI is reshaping the communications profession. I studied policy, ethics, industry usage, LinkedIn trends, and audience expectations. The research confirmed my instinct that communication professionals—with our grounding in two-way dialogue, emotional intelligence, and trust-building—are uniquely equipped to guide responsible, effective AI use in today's organizations.
Great news for strategic comms folks. But of course, research only becomes meaningful when you apply it. So over the last year, I’ve been merging theory with practice by building custom GPTs—first for myself, then for MarketDesign Consulting—to explore the different ways AI can help build efficiency, cultivate empathy, and enhance opportunities for thought leadership.
Thought leadership is the practice of offering expertise, guidance, and a distinct point of view that helps audiences better understand the challenges and opportunities within their world. Its currency is audience trust, built over time when the author’s voice, values, and authenticity come through in what they publish.
Now, I know what you're thinking. If AI can generate content in seconds, is that really "thought leadership"? When anyone can prompt a tool for a point of view, the line between originality and output starts to blur.
It's a legitimate question and a valid concern. Here's what I tell people: AI can create content, yes. But content isn’t thought leadership. Thought leadership requires judgment, humility, context, and a point of view shaped by lived experience; things AI cannot replicate. AI can’t invent your voice, but it can help you understand it, define it, and amplify it.
Used well, AI becomes a mirror. Not to replace our humanity but to reflect it back with a heightened awareness and clarity.
Before I could help leaders embrace AI to strengthen their voice, I needed to understand what it revealed about my own. I trained a custom GPT on three writing samples I was most proud of, which represented my style, voice, and viewpoint. These included:
I fed these samples into the GPT alongside my DiSC personality to represent my natural communication tendencies, and the model reflected these insights back to me:
This exercise wasn’t about creating an AI version of me. It was about codifying the essence of my authentic voice so AI could support it, not override it. From here, we can get really specific on what distinguishes you from everyone else. Your signature traits, distilled into patterns, principles, and choices that make your voice unmistakably yours, so AI can help you express them with even greater clarity and consistency.
Cool or creepy? You tell me.
If I could describe the future of strategic communications, it would be this:
AI prepares the ingredients. We create the experience.
Baking a cake from scratch is precise and time-intensive, with every ingredient measured and mixed in a specific order. But assembling a charcuterie board is different. It’s about selection, balance, and composition.
Communicators aren’t spending all their time making the “batter” anymore. We’re choosing the flavors, refining the pairings, and deciding how everything comes together. AI expands what’s possible, but we determine what resonates, what needs more depth, and what should be left out entirely.
The craft hasn’t disappeared. It has simply shifted — from producing every element to designing the final experience with intention, empathy, and clarity.
This actually deepens our role: the meaning-makers, the pattern-seers, the stewards of voice and truth.
Okay, sometimes we're still baking the bread. ...Is anyone else hungry?
We don’t create generic content engines. We build AI-augmented extensions of a leader’s authentic voice rooted in their:
We treat voice analysis not as a dataset, but as a digital fingerprint of thought leadership.
Thought leadership, as my research shows, is an incredibly effective business practice because it extends the best of PR and content marketing offering helpful, audience-first insight while positioning the author, whether a CEO, IT director, or systems analyst, as a trusted expert who puts a human face to the brand and builds the kind of rapport and credibility that ultimately drives preference and business outcomes.
I believe AI can support thought leadership, but it cannot become the thought leader.
I don’t use AI to write for me. I use it to listen to me. To understand my own patterns so I can help others discover theirs. Authentic thought leadership still comes from the same place it always has: in the quiet, unfiltered moments where ideas form before they’re polished—where we share what we know, and admit what we don’t. Where our lived experience becomes a guide that helps someone else see, appreciate, or simply consider something in a new way.
If you’re exploring what AI-augmented thought leadership could look like for you or your organization—from building a custom GPT, to shaping your voice, sharpening your perspective, or developing a thought leadership strategy that feels true to who you are, reach out to us.