The University of Wollongong’s marketing faculty recently invited me to contribute to its research on artificial intelligence in marketing education. Much of our conversation was about the technology. What I most wanted to get across was about people, and the skills that no tool can practise for you.
I was pleased to be invited by the University of Wollongong’s marketing faculty to take part in a research project called Artificial Intelligence in Marketing Education. It is asking a question that matters right across our field, and just as much in strategic communications as in marketing.
Teams in agencies and in-house alike are under growing pressure to adopt AI across content, customer relationships, strategy, design and research, and there is still no settled framework for choosing between the tools or keeping pace as new ones appear almost daily.
The conversation covered the issues every organisation is now weighing. How do you judge the cost and benefit of investing in AI, from the technology itself to the training and upskilling it asks of your people? What does it mean for how many people you need, and for the kind of work they do?
They are fair questions, and I answered them as honestly as I could.
But the input I felt was most useful was not about technology at all.
What skills matter more in the age of AI?
For me, some of the most important human skills in an AI-driven workplace are the ones that can be difficult to develop fully in a classroom.
Networking. Picking up the phone to a journalist. Pitching a story and handling the conversation that follows.
These are strategic communications skills, the kind that win coverage, start conversations and earn trust, and they are learned by doing.
After many years working in communications, I still believe some of the most valuable opportunities begin with something very simple: picking up the phone and having a conversation.
Generative AI tools can help with all of it. They can research what a journalist covers, draft a pitch, suggest questions and help you rehearse.
What they cannot do is have the conversation for you.
Influence and engagement still happen between people. A well-judged phone call, a genuine question, a moment of rapport: these shift things in a way no automated message does, and they are what people remember.
None of this is an argument against AI.
Used well, it takes the load off the routine parts of the job and frees people to spend more time where they add the most value, which is with other people.
That is the real shift.
As AI lifts the standard on the mechanical work, human skills stop being a nice extra and become the thing that sets one communicator, and one organisation, apart.
For the small businesses, government teams and not-for-profits we work with, the lesson is practical.
Invest in the tools, and invest just as deliberately in your team’s ability to build relationships.
If you are early in your career, seek out the moments that feel uncomfortable: make the call, go to the event, pitch the story.
If you lead a team, give your people the room and the reason to practise.
The organisations that get the most from AI will not be the ones that use it to replace the human parts of the work.
They will be the ones that use it to make more time for them.
If you would like to talk through how to pair smart use of AI with the relationship-building that earns coverage and builds trust, we are always happy to help.
Infodec Communications helps small businesses, government teams and not-for-profits with strategic communications, grant and tender writing and public relations.