27-July-2025
Our veteran PR correspondent* – fresh from losing three clients last week and facing a punishing assignment between martini lunches – sat down with Dan Nestle to discuss his transition from corporate communications executive to AI-enabled communications consultant. What started as a begrudging interview turned into a fascinating exploration of authenticity, AI, and the future of executive influence.
Look, I’m helping executives unlock what I call “sleeping assets” – all those speeches, articles, presentations, and insights that are gathering digital dust. Most leaders have decades of valuable thinking locked away in filing cabinets and hard drives. The Engine synthesizes and reimagines that content into fresh, strategic communications that sound authentically like them, but amplified.
Absolutely not. It’s smart repurposing – finding the golden threads that run through a CEO’s body of
work and weaving them into something that sounds fresh but carries all that accumulated authority. The AI acts like a research librarian with a PhD and an uncanny ability to adapt to your personality, voice, and style.
Perfect example: I work with a CEO of a boutique management consultancy. She has two decades of acknowledged leadership, dozens of FastCo articles, hundreds of blog posts, video appearances. Strong POV on workplace transformation – and how AI is disrupting all of it. But she has no time and no experience in content strategy to deal with the fracturing of audiences and proliferation of channels.
So I set up the Engine for her. Now she uses it primarily to respond to the bevvy of articles and studies that come out every week in her field, providing her POV and advice on LinkedIn, her newsletter, and her blog. She also uses it to transform her POV into byline submissions and abstracts for publication. It’s working.
She doesn’t sound like any other exec because the engine uses her own content – her words, her frameworks, her conversations – as its foundational and operational sources. The extensive and proprietary frameworks that create system prompts and contextual instructions are filled with her information. It’s as unique as a fingerprint.
But here’s the crucial part: the human prompting AI for those drafts, reviewing them, and iterating until the draft is ready MUST BE a skilled communicator, editor, thinker, and writer. That’s me. I personally make sure the edge, the personality, the humanity is in the output. Then I provide it to my client and she’ll inject more of her own personality as she reviews and edits.
I can’t reveal my client’s specific successes yet because this is all so new. But I can tell you she’s rapidly increasing her engagement, increasing her media appearances – including podcast interviews – and her discoverability is sure to follow. The engagement and media appearances are the right leading indicators. Any fool can buy followers or manufacture buzz, but if she’s getting invited to more tables where real conversations happen, that’s the real deal.
Exactly. The secret sauce isn’t the technology – it’s still the human judgment. I’m the one making sure her content sounds like it’s her. Compelling. Edgy. Smart and provocative when it needs to be. Not some generic, written-by-committee, AI slop.
Every exec already has access to multiple tools and bright people can put something similar together. But it doesn’t really matter because of the uniqueness of the engine for each person. Authenticity is baked in, but it won’t become a commodity because if someone has been inauthentic so far, the Engine won’t make them suddenly authentic.
And I think it’s fair to say that if quality content spreads, that’s good for everyone – better content equals better information equals better decisions.
If this goes mainstream, we get better discourse. But sure, we also get noise. The engine can’t turn years of garbage into a rose garden – it’s not a compost engine – but it can help those execs see that they’ve been peddling crap and now have the chance to offer something real and compelling.
In the end, audiences will decide.
More valuable than ever. Because what I’m describing requires exactly what you’ve been doing for decades – understanding what makes compelling content, knowing how to maintain authentic voice, and having the editorial judgment to know when something works and when it doesn’t.
The AI can help us work faster and more systematically, but it can’t replace the strategic thinking and communications expertise that separates professionals from amateurs. If anything, it makes those skills more valuable because now they can operate at scale.
Start with one AI tool and experiment smartly. Don’t try to replace everything at once. Use the “human in the loop” approach – let AI assist, but maintain your strategic oversight and editorial judgment.
The goal isn’t to automate communications – it’s to amplify the expertise and authenticity you already have. The future belongs to those who can harmonize AI capabilities with uniquely human skills like strategic thinking, authentic storytelling, and ethical judgment.
Curiosity is our greatest superpower in this new landscape. Stay curious, experiment intelligently, and remember – the technology should serve your strategic objectives, not the other way around.
*The “Veteran PR Correspondent” is an invention of Claude. Following the example of Mark Schaefer’s recent blog post, “My All-Time Best Interviewer was an AI Bot,” I took a similar approach, but in my case, my AI interviewer was a 1970s-era PR hack who’d just lost a few clients and was too busy kowtowing to newspaper editors to spend time with me.
