For more than a quarter-century, I’ve made my living as a writer and communications strategist. Writers are inventors whose creations spring from our minds.

From speeches to blogs, press releases, video scripts, and talking points — we transform ideas into stories. Writing is thinking, and I believed no machine could match the human mind’s ability to do that.

Until now.

For the past few years, I’ve been testing out tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s Gemini — and I’ve been honestly blown away by what they can do.

Two years ago, I wasn’t worried; the output was clunky, uninspiring, and flawed. But recently, I fed one a broad outline for a Wainger Wisdom blog post — just for kicks — and within seconds, it produced a draft that was 75% there. I had to reorganize and fine-tune, but it was pretty damn good.

In fact, I asked it to edit my first draft of this blog and the few suggestions it offered did make it better.

When robotics began replacing factory workers, parking attendants, receptionists, I felt a pang of concern — but I also thought, “That’s the price of progress. This will spare us from the grunt work. It won’t replace me.”

Clearly, I was wrong.

The writing is on the wall. As companies look to reduce costs, they will rely more and more on machines to do the things that we thought only humans could do. 

What does this mean for us knowledge workers, particularly communications professionals?

Adaptation and repositioning.

🟢 We need to dig deep and identify and demonstrate the unique value we bring — the creativity, judgment, context, and ability to connect with people— that machines simply can’t match.

🟢 We should not run away from tech but figure out how to harness it to augment the skills and talents we bring. 

🟢 We need to develop new skills, particularly how to take best advantage of large language models and algorithms.

🟢 We must be strategists and doers.

AI tools can free us from mundane and time consuming tasks to focus on the issues, on relationship building, on connecting the dots, on messaging and framing and on bringing forth new ideas or old ideas in new ways. The AI tools are only as good as what we humans feed them.

The genie is out of the bottle.  Yes, we should worry.  We have to figure out how we move forward in this brave new world. Our future depends on it.