As AI tools increasingly summarize workplace updates, internal communications may no longer travel directly from leadership to employees. Instead, messages are being filtered, condensed, and reinterpreted before reaching their intended audience. In this exclusive interview with Inside Telecom, we explore what happens when AI becomes the first reader of corporate communications, why only a small fraction of employees fully engage with internal messaging, and what organizations must do to ensure tone, intent, and leadership narratives survive the growing AI summary layer.
INSIDE TELECOM: Your research suggests that AI is no longer just helping employees read internal communications, but actually standing between leadership and the workforce. What does that shift mean for companies?
David Bowman: The shift means being more deliberate about what outcome the organisation is trying to drive with the communications being sent. An organisation on “broadcast-everything” mode is going to find it much harder to drive change, build culture and measure impact than an organisation that is in “deliberate mode” which accepts that interpretation is the endpoint, whether that’s organic comms via team managers or AI tools.
INSIDE TELECOM: Only 12% of employees now read internal communications in full. Is this mainly a content overload problem, or does it reveal a deeper issue in how companies communicate?
David Bowman: Having one main cause would be a great outcome but unfortunately multiple issues are compounding, and volume is creating conditions where relevancy filtering becomes necessary.
That 12% is best explained as the product of both forces together. The deeper issue is that most organisations have never developed a meaningful way to measure whether communications are understood only whether they were delivered. When the only feedback loop is a delivery metric, the natural response to “comms isn’t working” is to send more.
For many organisations the lack of internal communications strategy or solid understanding of the role, its purpose and value creates conditions where broadcast-mode is the only mode.
INSIDE TELECOM: If employees are reading AI summaries instead of the original message, are they still receiving the leader’s intended message, or the machine’s version of it?
David Bowman: We’re somewhere in between. AI tools are good at preserving factual content – the what, when, who. What they are less good at preserving is tone, priority and intent – the why and how the organisation wants people to feel about it.
The factual content is useful but not impactful. It’s the why that builds culture, connection, and prompts action.
INSIDE TELECOM: The report shows that employees largely trust AI summaries, while internal communications teams worry that AI can distort tone and intent. Why is there such a gap between the two sides?
David Bowman: Because they are coming from different places with competing objectives. Employees experience AI summaries as efficient and useful – the gist is established and they move on. They’ve got zero context of the original message because they didn’t read it. On the other hand communicators have spent time crafting the tone and framing of the message – the careful word choices with organisational and audience nuance, the deliberate warmth.
Neither perspective is wrong. In most conversations I’ve had, the concern is higher on communications where tone matters – crisis communications, sensitive HR matters, leadership narrative during periods of change. That’s most representative of where the gap between ‘accurate summary’ and ‘intended message’ becomes consequential, and where the 92% of internal communicators who are worrying about this are focused.
INSIDE TELECOM: You said “subtraction is now a strategic necessity.” What should companies stop doing immediately if they want important messages to survive the AI summary layer?
David Bowman: There are three things.
First, stop publishing low-value content through high-value channels. When everything arrives with the same urgency and the same format, employees learn to treat everything as low priority. The most important messages get filtered along with everything else. Volume is the enemy of attention, and most organisations are generating far more volume than their employees have attention budget for.
Second, stop measuring delivery as a proxy for understanding. Page views, open rates and click-throughs tell you that a message arrived but say nothing about whether the intent landed. The organisations in our research that were most confident their communications were understood as intended were also the ones with the most limited evidence base for that confidence.
Third, stop designing communications as if the intranet or email is the final destination. If a meaningful proportion of your workforce is going to encounter your content through a layer (AI or team managers), the structure of the content itself needs to carry the intent clearly enough to survive that. That means hierarchy, explicit priority signalling, and ruthless clarity about what the message actually requires of the reader.
INSIDE TELECOM: Should companies now write internal communications for both humans and AI, knowing that AI may be the first filter employees use?
David Bowman: Yes, though I’d frame it slightly differently: companies should write so clearly that AI can’t misrepresent them.
The disciplines that make content AI-resistant are the same ones that have always made internal communications effective: a clear hierarchy of information, an explicit statement of what this means and what action is required, and a distinction between what is important and what is merely informational.
AI doesn’t create that failure but it does make it harder to hide.
The more important shift is structural rather than stylistic. Communications that require nuance, context, or emotional register to be understood as intended (e.g. change management announcements, sensitive people decisions, leadership messages during uncertainty) need to be explicitly flagged as high-sensitivity content. Whether that means AI tools are designed to handle them differently, or that they are delivered through channels where AI mediation is less likely, is a decision each organisation needs to take deliberately rather than by default.
INSIDE TELECOM: What are the first three practical steps organisations should take to manage AI’s role in internal communications without overwhelming employees further?
David Bowman: First, establish visibility. You cannot manage what you cannot see. Our research found that the majority of internal communications teams have very limited insight into how their content is being consumed outside their owned channels. Start by asking the question: if an employee asked an AI tool about our last major announcement, what would it say? It’s not hard to run that test yourself.
Second, audit for subtraction, not addition. Most organisations’ instinct when communications aren’t working is to do more – more channels, more formats, more frequency. Our research suggests the opposite is usually the right move. A structured audit of what you’re publishing, against what employees tell you is relevant, typically reveals significant scope to reduce volume without reducing value. That reduction directly improves the signal-to-noise ratio for the messages that genuinely matter. Conversationally, most internal communications professionals already know what they shouldn’t be publishing. The difficulty is often convincing stakeholders (usually their budget holders) that their updates are not as important as they think they are.
Third, design your most important communications for mediation. Assume they will be summarised. Assume they will be encountered out of context. Structure them so the intent is explicit rather than implied – lead with what this means and what it requires, then provide the context. That discipline protects intent regardless of how the content travels.
None of these steps require a new platform. They require a different way of thinking about communication as a designed experience rather than a publishing activity.
Inside Telecom provides you with an extensive list of content covering all aspects of the tech industry. Keep an eye on our Interviews section to stay informed and up-to-date with our daily articles.
