ME:

Role: Act as a business communications coach.
Assignment: Draft a five-minute speech on this topic: “How AI is impacting communication skills.”
Context: This speech will be delivered to an audience of around 100 people at a networking event for people who work in the City of London. It is an after-work event including drinks and canapés, so the speech should be lively and good-humoured.
Source: Use the same style as a previous speech, which I will paste into the next block.
Artefact: Arrange the speech under topic headings so that I can easily change the order. Begin with an attention-grabbing opener. End with a short list of do’s and don’ts when using AI as a communications tool.
Constraints: Stick to the time limit as I have a hard stop at 5 minutes.

CLAUDE:

Please go ahead and paste the previous speech and I’ll get started on the draft!

ME:

[[Did as I was told.]]

CLAUDE:

Here’s the speech, arranged under moveable headings and timed to land comfortably inside five minutes at a natural speaking pace (roughly 650–700 words).

—

# “How AI is Impacting Communication Skills”

### A Five-Minute Speech for a City Networking Event

—

## [HOOK] The Email That Wrote Itself

Picture this. It’s 6:47 on a Tuesday evening. You’re still at your desk. You need to send a delicate email to a client who is, let’s say, *not delighted* with recent events. You’re tired, you’re hungry, and frankly your diplomacy reserves are running low.

So you try something. You type a rough prompt into an AI tool. Thirty seconds later, a beautifully structured, impeccably polite email appears on your screen. You read it. You tweak one word. You hit send.

And here’s the question I want to sit with tonight: *Was that good communication? Or was it the absence of it?*

—

## [THE PRINCIPLE] AI as Amplifier, Not Author

AI doesn’t make you a better communicator. It amplifies what’s already there. Feed it clear thinking and you get clear output. Feed it muddled thinking — and you get very *confident*-sounding muddled output, which is arguably more dangerous.

It may seem obvious, but the tool reflects the person holding it. A hammer doesn’t build the house. You do.

—

## [THE PROBLEM] The Skills We’re Quietly Offloading

Here’s what worries me — professionally and, I’ll admit, commercially.

When we outsource the *drafting*, we start to lose the *thinking*. Writing isn’t just transcription. It’s how we work out what we actually mean. The discipline of finding the right word forces clarity of thought. Take that away, and the thought gets fuzzier.

I’m already seeing it. Professionals who are brilliant in conversation but increasingly uncomfortable writing without AI assistance. People who can prompt well but struggle to present live — because live, there’s no editing pass.

And in the City, where trust is the actual product, that’s worth paying attention to.

—

## [THE UPSIDE] What AI Gets Right

Let’s be fair. AI is genuinely useful for certain communication jobs. First drafts under time pressure. Restructuring a sprawling document. Checking tone when you’re too close to something. Translating technical content for a non-specialist audience. These are legitimate wins and I’d be a hypocrite to pretend otherwise.

The issue is substitution versus assistance. Used well, AI is an extraordinary editor. Used lazily, it becomes a ghostwriter for a voice you never fully developed — and people *notice*. Readers notice. Listeners notice. Clients notice.

—

## [THE HUMAN EDGE] What AI Still Can’t Do

AI cannot read the room. It cannot feel the slight shift in energy when an audience disengages. It cannot make the choice, in the moment, to abandon its prepared remarks because something more important just happened in the room.

It cannot be *you* — specifically, idiosyncratically, imperfectly you. And in a world where content is becoming increasingly frictionless and generic, *specific and human* is the competitive advantage.

Your instinct, your credibility, your presence — those still have to come from somewhere. They still have to come from practice.

—

## [CLOSE] The Invitation

So here’s where I land. Don’t fear AI as a communications tool. But don’t sleepwalk into dependency either.

Stay curious. Stay sharp. Keep writing things yourself — badly, if necessary — because the struggle is the training. And when you do use AI, treat it like a talented junior colleague: useful, fast, occasionally overconfident, and very much in need of your editorial judgment.

—

## ✅ Do’s and Don’ts: AI as a Communications Tool

**Do:**

• – Use AI to *edit and pressure-test* drafts you’ve written yourself.
• – Prompt it with specific context — vague in, vague out.
• – Read the output aloud before sending; your ear catches what your eye misses.
• – Use it to simplify jargon for non-specialist audiences.

**Don’t:**

• – Let it replace the thinking, only the typing.
• – Send AI output without reading it carefully — it hallucinates with great confidence.
• – Rely on it for anything requiring genuine emotional nuance or personal credibility.
• – Forget that your voice, built over years, is worth protecting.

—

*Thank you. I’ll be around for the rest of the evening — come and find me if any of this landed, or if you think I’ve got it completely wrong. Both conversations are equally welcome.*

—

## [END]

How Did Claude Do?

Overall, Claude’s draft is not perfect, but it’s pretty good. When I read it aloud, some of the phrasing felt weird – definitely not “me”. And what’s with the asterisked words? Is that telling me to emphasise them? I didn’t like those asterisks and got rid of them straight away.

With more time, I’d have found a better source for my style. But it was straightforward to replace phrases like “the question I want to sit with”, “a hammer doesn’t build a house” and “here’s where I land” with wording that was more authentic to me.

I liked the message about trust as a key commodity in the City of London. I asked Claude to make more of this topic. To help, I pasted in a blog I wrote last year on building trust. It was a great part of the speech and resonated with the audience. (To make space for the new content, I took out the Do’s and Don’ts, which didn’t work for me as a place to end.)

Finally, I thought I could use the speech to do some soft promotion for MSB Executive. I asked Claude to mention how valuable it is to work with a voice coach in the section ‘What AI Still Can’t Do’. I pointed Claude to our website to pull out some key messages.

This was an emergency situation – I had to draft a speech at very short notice. Let’s be honest, in outsourcing a bit too much of the thinking, I did exactly what Claude warned against in the speech. With more time, I would have thrown together a rough first draft myself and worked with Claude on refining it.

Would the result would have been vastly different? I’m not sure! Because my prompt was good, because I was clear from the start about what I needed from Claude, I got a good result in a very short time.

Postscript

I gave Copilot, Microsoft’s AI agent, the same prompt. What it produced ran along similar-ish lines, but it was definitely inferior to Claude’s draft.

You know what really annoyed me?
Copilot did that AI thing.
You know that thing.
Lots of sentences like this.
Short ones.

This style sounded all wrong in my voice. (Copilot, more of a productivity tool, excels at other tasks.) The tone was also a bit inconsistent, veering from too clever to too chatty. I felt the jokes were not me and wouldn’t land. It didn’t acknowledge the City of London audience, and it was definitely too long for 5 minutes. On the other hand, Copilot managed a couple of things that Claude didn’t. It was mostly better at British English idiom, and I especially liked a sly reference to ‘two canapés and a glass of Sauvignon’. Overall, it would have taken me longer to work with Copilot towards a version I’d have been happy to deliver.