Consciousness is the Strategy

By Taazima Kala, CIPR International Chair

I’d like to make an assertion that has been sitting with me for some time: the communications industry may have spent the last two years asking the wrong question about AI. I say this in no way as any kind of expert on the matter, but as a learning practitioner trying to learn better.

I use AI tools daily. I find them fascinating, occasionally humbling, and far more capable than many of us expected. I am not writing from a place of suspicion. Quite the opposite. But as the conversation around AI and communications has evolved, including through several excellent discussions led by CIPR International colleagues, I’ve increasingly felt we are circling something important without fully landing on it.

The question we keep asking is: what can AI do?

And the answer keeps expanding. It drafts, monitors, pitches, summarises and approximates tone with increasing confidence. Sometimes, uncomfortably so.

But I’ve become more interested in a different question: what does AI reveal?

Because when you strip away everything a machine can now do, what remains is not simply creativity or relationship-building. What remains is something harder to define, and considerably more valuable: human awareness.

A while back, I sat with a leadership team hours before a difficult public announcement. The statement was prepared. The media lines were sound. On paper, we were ready. But something in the room told me we were not.

A certain silence. The way one question was carefully deflected rather than answered. The emotional temperature beneath the conversation. I knew the announcement, delivered the way we had planned it, was going to land badly. No brief captured that. No dashboard flagged it. I could not have translated it into a prompt. I simply understood it in the way communicators sometimes understand things before they can fully articulate them.

That, to me, is where strategy actually lives.

Not instinct as a soft skill listed on a credentials deck, but the ability to hold ambiguity, politics, emotion and consequence simultaneously, and make a judgment call from inside the situation rather than at a distance from it.

AI works extraordinarily well with information. What it cannot do is experience the weight of what that information means. It does not reckon with a situation; it processes it. That distinction matters enormously in communications, because much of our work is about reckoning. With frightened or frustrated publics. With leadership teams navigating uncertainty. With narratives that are unstable, emotionally charged and deeply consequential.

In that environment, the value of a communications advisor is not simply executional competence. It is presence. The ability to read a room, sense instability, understand implication and help others navigate complexity responsibly.

I sometimes think we have been so eager to prove our relevance in an AI-augmented world that we have accidentally made the wrong case for ourselves. We defend our ability to write, create and execute, while AI quietly reveals that those things were perhaps never the centre of our value to begin with.

The most valuable communications professionals were never simply the fastest writers or the most efficient producers of output. They were the people organisations trusted to sit inside uncertainty, absorb complexity, recognise consequences early and help others navigate them with clarity.

That is a very different kind of contribution. And importantly, it is one rooted less in information itself than in the human ability to interpret what information means when real people, reputations and decisions are involved.

That is what I find genuinely interesting about this moment. AI is not only changing communications. It is revealing what human communications professionals uniquely contribute when the stakes are high.

The intelligent move is not to resist AI. The technology is already here, and communications professionals should absolutely learn it, explore it and use it well. But perhaps the more important question for organisations is no longer whether AI can produce communications outputs.

It is whether, in moments of uncertainty, they still have access to people capable of understanding the human consequences behind them.