Chiefs of Staff share how they’re integrating AI into their internal comms

People are using the power of GenAI for everything: from writing blog articles to creating operational strategies to reading their birth charts. 

Internal comms are no exception. But because this business function isn’t customer-facing, it offers unique value as a testing ground where organizations can green-light broad experimentation with AI.

“Internal comms is a great AI sandbox,” notes Claire Podulka, Chief of Staff at digital product consultancy TXI. “There’s more control over what you put out, when you put it out, and who you’re putting it out to. You also tend to have more access to the data you need.”

Catherine Webb, Chief of Staff at Pinion, agrees. “Oftentimes, when working with clients, you feel your service needs to be perfect,” she says. “Whereas when you’re working internally, you give some grace and space to one another for experimentation. Right now, AI is at that stage of necessitating experimentation.”

AI is quickly becoming the antidote to common internal communications challenges, and Claire and Catherine are at the forefront of this shift. Below, we share Catherine’s and Claire’s takes on using AI for internal comms—as well as their views of the most urgent challenges and most promising use cases.

The strategic role of AI in internal comms

While Claire and Catherine both recognize AI’s value to internal comms, each leader has taken a different approach to championing AI within their company. 

Here’s how these Chiefs of Staff are using AI as a tool for better communication, faster work, and greater company alignment:

Stronger first drafts

Claire says AI is essential for creating that messy first draft for presentations, agendas, memos, and more—especially when it comes to messaging that needs to be ultrapolished upon delivery.

“For a major policy change we need to put into place, I’ll write the messaging first to get the general outline down,” she says. “Here are things we want to convey, here’s what’s changing, and here’s why.”

Next, Claire uses Claude to apply different personas to the messaging and critique it from different angles. For example, how does an employee vs. a COO view PTO policy changes?

“Having AI role-play different constituencies can make you better prepared for more effective communication because you can get ahead of some of the questions and concerns folks will have,” Claire points out.

Internal comms teams can also use Prezent’s Communication Fingerprints feature to instantly tailor messaging to niche internal audiences, like the CEO.

Streamlined intake requests from internal comms

As Pinion underwent a period of rapid growth, Catherine realized that the company’s leaders needed internal comms support to successfully usher in big changes. AI plays a huge role in managing the myriad intake requests the internal comms team receives.

“To prioritize requests, the comms team developed an intake form and automations with Monday.com,” she says.

This move has helped streamline intake requests while allowing the team to handle them in order of time-sensitivity or importance.

Broad research and information synthesis

Being a Chief of Staff requires a deep understanding of the organization and its strategic goals, values, and priorities, along with the company’s internal and external landscapes. That’s why Claire uses AI to enhance the human capabilities, including relationship-building, that are essential to succeeding as a Chief of Staff. 

“In my role, I’m constantly taking in real-time, real-world context about human relationships, communication styles, and values, and responding in real time,” notes Claire. “Then, I outsource synthesis and broad research projects to AI.”

With the help of Claude, Claire turns multi-day research projects into just 30 minutes of prompting, with a comprehensive research report as the output—while also correcting the LLM if she notices incorrect data.

“Human judgment plus AI capability is the real magic,” she says.

When creating a presentation that involves research, time can be the biggest barrier. Prezent’s Story Builder provides more than 1,000 structured storylines to help Chiefs of Staff who need ideas and support to structure their presentations in the most impactful way. And our Synthesis feature allows you to instantly create an executive summary from a long presentation. 

Fewer meeting notes and project management tasks

AI can be a game-changer for Chiefs of Staff who want to automate note-taking and project management tasks to improve information-sharing with the larger organization.

Catherine pointed to a speech she wrote for Pinion's annual meeting that emphasized how AI will enable humans to be more human, prioritizing relationship interactions and sharing expertise, rather than digging in the software and spreadsheet trenches.

"We're a relationship business," shares Catherine. "And we need to understand where AI is going to catalyze capacity for us to focus on the human connection."

4 considerations for adopting AI for internal comms

No matter how you adopt AI to support internal comms, here are four things you need to embrace for every use case:

1. Be mindful of privacy and security concerns

TXI employs a number of tech-savvy consultants, and Claire is proud of how the company leverages AI alongside critical thinking and values. This is important when it comes to AI, which comes with very serious ethical, sustainability, and privacy concerns.

“If you don’t have any questions or challenges about AI, you’re not thinking critically about it,” argues Claire.

Instead of latching onto every AI tool that hit the market, Claire says her team was very deliberate about AI adoption. She believes that other teams need to be critical about how and when they use AI—including making sure that the tools and platforms they use are up-to-snuff with their security and compliance requirements. 

“There are all kinds of data privacy and security concerns, particularly when we are putting our clients’ data into AI tools,” she says. “We need to make sure it’s very locked down and the process is transparent to our clients, because our obligation to them is very high.”

These critical security needs are why Prezent offers a robust security program that uses granular access control, validated data protection, and dedicated customer instances to protect each customer with enterprise-grade security.

2. Have open conversations about AI use

When leading her firm through AI adoption and experimentation, Catherine believes that effective implementation starts with the problem you’d like to solve—not the technology you want to adopt.

“It’s the ‘success postcard’ term in agile methodology,” Catherine notes. “Before you do anything, you say, ‘Well, what should success look like at the end of this project?’ Not just KPIs, but what should the overall experience look like? The rest of the project falls into place from that one statement.”

To view AI from this angle, other Chiefs of Staff should foster open conversations across the C-suite and functional teams about the purpose of AI use—including what success will look like. After this vision is defined, the company can move forward with soliciting feedback from the larger organization to understand AI’s benefit to the customer or internal stakeholders.

3. Don’t be afraid to experiment

When implementing AI tools across the org, don’t be afraid to experiment. As Chief of Staff, you can help cultivate a culture of curiosity that will encourage exploration across the company’s workforce.

First, think about your level of adoption: how much AI is your org ready for? Catherine has been working on this philosophy with Pinion’s CIO.

“We may not want to be a 95% adopter on a particular technology, for example,” she says. “Maybe we want to be in the 80% adoption range.”

Claire recently took an AI course where she was encouraged to identify where friction exists within organizational roles, and to then experiment with AI to see if it could be part of the solution. But this approach is only constructive when participants remain open to the possibility that AI can’t be the solution to every problem.

“Maybe there’s friction in the process, but AI can’t solve it,” Claire says. “Often, it can be part of the solution. But I’m always coming back to: ‘What are our goals and priorities?’”

4. Use AI to glean context for project management support

For Chiefs of Staff with high volumes of strategic thinking tasks on their plate, AI can provide surrounding content for project management tasks, allowing those leaders to focus on higher-level initiatives.

Claire has been looking into Agentic AI by playing around with AI integrations:

“I’m trying to find ways to automate certain things I do by hand. Based on an emoji reaction, for example, I recently attempted to take a Slack message and create a fleshed out and contextualized agenda item in Notion.”

While Claire hasn’t mastered all of her automation hacks yet, she knows AI’s capabilities will only continue to evolve.

Best practices for leveraging AI as a Chief of Staff

You understand the key considerations for adopting AI tools. Now it’s time to talk about what happens once you start to integrate them. 

Here are Catherine and Claire’s best practices for using AI as a Chief of Staff:

Be transparent about your AI use plan

For Claire, it’s essential to be open and honest with both internal employees and external partners about how the organization plans to use AI tools.

“Part of our culture at TXI involves being really open and embracing different viewpoints, and our discussions around AI are no different,” Claire says. “There are very real productivity benefits to AI, which ultimately means we can build more for our clients faster and deliver better results. But we also need to acknowledge that, with any tool, there are pros and cons.”

Work from clean data

As a Chief of Staff, training an LLM model can only be successful with clean data inputs.

“I don’t think AI is quite there yet with being able to orchestrate coordination to the level a Chief of Staff requires,” Catherine says. “But to its credit, it will get there very quickly if your firm can give it the right data.”

Catherine believes companies need to prioritize data management practices that ensure inputs are clean, structured, and in the right warehouses for AI efforts to be successful. 

Consider how AI can free up your time (or your C-suite’s) to build better relationships

Catherine is mindful of the fact that 60% of Pinion’s workforce isn’t based in an office. That’s why, for large-scale company town halls, Pinion doesn’t implement AI beyond the use case for meeting minutes. 

Although AI can make the communications more efficient, she says, it can’t provide a relational value at that high level.

“Our business is so relationship-based, and most of our offices are spread across the U.S,” Catherine says. “We try to take every opportunity to have that personal connection with our internal communication or with our leadership.”

Catherine wants to assure her company’s workforce that AI isn’t replacing jobs. Instead, it’s changing the dynamics so employees can focus on their relationships with customers and other stakeholders.

Tools like Prezent’s Auto Generator accelerate first-draft creation with a single prompt, while the Slide Library offers 35,000+ on-brand templates ready to plug and play. The result: teams get back precious hours to focus on what really matters—customers, colleagues, and strategic impact.

Leverage AI to be the best Chief of Staff possible

Whether you’re in the beginning phase of researching LLMs or you’ve already integrated a handful of tools, internal comms can become a valuable venue for AI experimentation—and that green light for exploration may ultimately benefit the entire company.

“It's safe to try and safe to fail,” says Claire. “If you mess up internally, there are still repercussions. But there are exponentially greater consequences externally. So experimenting internally first is a great approach.”

When testing AI’s capabilities across keynote presentations, town hall meetings, board meetings, and more, Prezent is here to help. We make AI-powered presentation creation easy, with enterprise-grade security and cost savings of up to 60%.

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