Communication is not for everyone

Enough with the niceties.
Modern society is unable to accept the simplest objective truths, in the light of a craving for the spotlight to which it is now enslaved.

Why this happened does not interest me. How, I do not know. But it is true, and it is objective: either we acknowledge it, or it will end up consuming us as a society. Communication. Is not. For everyone.

The internet, social media and AI have put the tools of communication in everyone’s hands. This gives rise to a simple misunderstanding: access is mistaken for competence. But it is not.

Let us talk about football, because (for better or worse) everyone understands it. Every Sunday millions of people follow overpaid professionals chasing a ball. They watch the matches, debate line-ups and transfers. They pass judgement. Yet they are not the athletes. And yes, talking about it is legitimate, indeed sacrosanct. But one thing is certain: those people (armchair fans and those in the stands alike) will not be taking to the pitch that Sunday.
They will talk, and that is enough.

In communication, this particular paradox has taken hold: the idea that anyone can be Messi, or Cristiano Ronaldo. That anyone can communicate like those who do it for a living. Because, after all, talking is easy. And today, with GPT and Claude, writing is even easier (or so it seems). But communication is not a prompt, and it never will be.

Even though social media gives anyone a platform, even though Canva lets you create a graphic in minutes, and even though ChatGPT can generate a draft at any hour of the day, defining criteria is still a task of human excellence. That is why what gets produced today is plentiful, while everything else is scarce.
Let us talk about it.

Confusing the tool with the skill

In 1999, Justin Kruger and David Dunning identified a problem of self-assessment: in the tests they analysed, the lowest-performing participants in their study tended to markedly overestimate their own results. The research therefore highlighted how difficult it is to judge a skill accurately when one possesses it only in part.

In other words, we all believe we are on top of the world until we set foot on the path.
It is only as we climb, however, that we realise how insignificant we are next to the true summits.

AI makes this difficulty more interesting because it lowers the technical threshold. Today a text can appear orderly, correct and professional even when it lacks thought (but we have already discussed this in AI slop on LinkedIn, so we will not labour the point).

Strong communication stems from a sequence of coherent choices: themes, priorities, voice, frequency, audience, the words worth using and the words the brand decides to leave to others. The same logic applies to building a recognisable voice. A manual, a prompt or a template works well when there is already a criterion capable of guiding it.

The cost of communication without direction

When production is treated as the main part of the work, the first cost falls on the voice.
Every piece of content occupies space in the audience’s memory and helps build an idea of the company. A sequence of generic content consumes attention and makes it harder to understand what that organisation truly stands for.

The second cost is inconsistency. Teams, agencies, sales staff, managers and generative tools can produce materials that are formally correct and, at the same time, pointed in different directions. After months, the market receives many messages and struggles to recognise a shared meaning.

The third cost arrives when the course needs correcting. Confused positioning settles in. Subsequent campaigns must first recover clarity, then build new memory. The work grows precisely because the company has already communicated so much.

These are costs that rarely appear under the “communications” line of the budget. They show up in customer acquisition, in brand recognition, in employees’ difficulty explaining what the company stands for and in the gap between what management thinks it is communicating and what the market retains. For a broader definition of the levels on which corporate communication operates, our guide to communication may be useful.

What really matters when anyone can produce

Production costs less and less. That is precisely why direction, selection and discipline are gaining value.

A CEO must know which topics merit a public position, which conversations serve the brand and which can be allowed to pass. An organisation must recognise a sentence that belongs to it and notice when a piece of content could be published under any competitor’s logo.

Technology multiplies the capacity for execution. Clear direction makes it possible to use that capacity without multiplying indistinguishability as well.

Even though everyone talks about football, Serie A clubs keep on undeterred in their search for good players. The same holds true in communication, where the need for people who can give words meaning before producing them is extremely high.

Not everyone can communicate professionally.
The sooner this problem is accepted, the less costly the solution will be.