3 Things You Can Do to Stay Relevant as AI Alters the Workplace

While a few of the senior executives that I coach are on the cutting edge of AI, most are more focused on staying relevant in this time of massive change. You may have heard that, “If your job is not replaced by AI, it will likely be replaced by someone more skilled at using AI.” In my coaching sessions with executives, we use this point to brainstorm how they can leverage AI to improve their communication. Here are three specific opportunities for how you can elevate your communication effectiveness and stay relevant: 1. AI and Enhanced Writing Gone are the days of simply running spell-checks before sending emails or reports. AI-powered tools like Grammarly and ChatGPT assist in drafting and refining documents, improving clarity and tone. Leveraging these tools can improve your communication, but over-reliance can depersonalize messages. How to stay relevant: Improve your writing by leveraging AI at all stages of the writing process, from your outline to brainstorming, to writing. Then evaluate your writing beyond spell-check by measuring tone and potentially biased language. Use these tools to boost the efficiency and effectiveness of your writing, while always maintaining your personal voice. 2. AI for Meeting Notes and Summaries Software tools like Microsoft Teams, Zoom Workplace, and Otter.ai now generate detailed meeting summaries automatically. I just started doing this myself and it is a game-changer! Now I can focus more on real-time communication in meetings and coaching sessions. Assessing the meeting summary takes just a few minutes and serves to reinforce the key meeting takeaways. And the bonus? Knowing that the meeting is being summarized keeps our conversation more on track. How to stay relevant: Download software to summarize your online meetings. After every important meeting, add five minutes to run through the meeting summary. Edit to ensure the main points and next steps are clearly identified, then forward the summary to appropriate colleagues. 3. Video Analytics AI-powered video analytics can help with your personal communication effectiveness as well as analysis of team dynamics. With software such as Yoodli.ai, you can upload a video of your formal presentation – whether onstage in front of a big audience or in a virtual meeting. You can evaluate your tone, filler words (“umm…”), pace, intonation, body language, and more. You can also use AI to monitor and analyze virtual meetings, attention spans, participation levels, and engagement metrics. How to stay relevant: Leverage AI to measure the effectiveness of your formal presentations over time. Use insights from AI to improve meeting facilitation skills, ensuring everyone stays engaged and aligned. Upskill Your Communication with AI AI is no longer a distant concept—it’s now embedded in how we interact at work. From chatbots to automated meeting summaries, it is revolutionizing workplace communication both externally with customers and other stakeholders, as well as internally with our colleagues. Staying relevant means embracing these technologies while honing our human touch. The future of workplace interactions will be a blend of AI-driven tools and human communication. EXPERT OPINION BY ANDREA WOJNICKI, EXECUTIVE COMMUNICATION COACH AT TALK ABOUT TALK