Communication is How We Create Meaning

Our human ability to build trust, understand nuance, truly see each other, and create meaning is our most powerful answer to AI anxiety. As algorithms and automation reshape everything from creative work to customer service, this distinctly human capacity for meaningful connection and connective labour isn't just a remnant of our pre-AI past—it’s the key to our future.

I've spent my career using numbers to shape stories. Analytics, metrics, optimization - these are the tools of modern communications and marketing. And now, with AI transforming our industry, these tools promise an almost supernatural ability to reach and engage audiences with precision and scale. Yet as I experience the rush into an AI future and world leaders attend the AI Action Summit in Paris, I think more and more about what we might be losing.

Scholar Allison Pugh offers an answer in her ideas about “connective labour”, the distinctly human work of building trust and creating meaning.

What is the value of being seen by another human being, outside of your friends and family? What happens when people connect with one another in the everyday encounters of civic life or commerce, and why is that important? Amid the spread of efficiency campaigns, ceaseless data-collecting and AI in connecting jobs such as therapy or teaching, these questions have never been more urgent.

We see it everywhere that matters: when a doctor connects with a patient, when a leader activates the energy of a team, when anyone recounts their best experience with a facilitator, colleague, customer, or client. You see it when a story touches hearts and changes minds. We saw concerns laid bare in 2023's labor actions across North America. Port workers fought to preserve human judgment in automated systems. Hollywood writers and actors shut down their industry to secure protections against AI replacing creative work. Behind each strike was a fundamental question: what aspects of work should remain human?

Here's what keeps me up at night: in our embrace of AI efficiency, we risk losing the essential human element in communications, in marketing, in any initiative to engage, drive change, or spur action. When every message is algorithmically optimized and AI-generated, are we all just racing toward the same safe middle ground, no matter how clever our prompt? What great leaders do so well, and the most empowering organizations, is let the light in on the insight, the human need, the emotion that inspires, gives pause, lifts up. That's the art within our science.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman paints a seductive vision, predicting that Artificial General Intelligence will lead to "economic growth [that] looks astonishing," where we can "cure all diseases, have more time with our families, and fully realize our creative potential." Yet it's hard to reconcile this utopia with the diminishing of human connectivity that comes from the very act of working, serving others, solving problems, celebrating, striving. Within the Altman ilk, tech titan Ben Horowitz argues, “What You Do is Who You Are”. The unsettling question arises: what becomes of our work cultures—and ourselves—when AI increasingly defines what we do and how we communicate?

Irish poet John O'Donohue wrote about the “sacredness” of work, how it should "bring healing, light and renewal to those who work with you and to those who see and receive your work." More pragmatically, Allison Pugh warns that weakening connective labour steals the benefits of human interactions that are essential to meaningful lives; the humanity that helps students learn, patients heal, or consumers buy.

The work of communicating is the work of making meaning. It is a privilege of being human, and the essence of how we connect, create, and become. I'd like to think we are more than what we measure, even as we embrace these extraordinary tools. What and how we communicate is the meaning we create for each other in a world that craves it.

I’m the Managing Partner for NATIONAL in Eastern Canada, an integrated marketing and public affairs firm. Throughout my career, I’ve been privileged to lead and work on marketing communications initiatives of unique scope and depth, and I write about things like The Imperative of Purpose at Work and AI and the Knowledge Economy. Lately we’ve been helping clients navigate brittle Canada-U.S. relations.

Originally published on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/communication-isnt-just-transmitting-informationits-how-kevin-mccann-u95be/