Yesterday I participated as a speaker in a round table at the Col·legi de Periodistes de Catalunya. The event, organized by the Artificial Intelligence Working Group, brought together professionals from radio, television, digital press, and consultancies like Maco&Co to share real experiences about the impact of AI on communication.
The format was practical, without theories. And that, for someone coming from journalism, is already good news.
What was discussed: AI as a work tool
Most of the interventions revolved around something we already suspected but confirmed out loud: AI has integrated into the daily lives of many communication professionals. Transcription of interviews, drafting of documents, information search, summaries of documents.
Useful, without a doubt. But as I listened to the interventions, something caught my attention. Everyone spoke of AI as a tool to do the job better. No one was talking about AI as a new environment where companies exist or cease to exist.
And that was when I asked to speak.
The question no one expected
I posed something simple: do you know how ChatGPT describes your clients?
Silence.
It was not a rhetorical question. It is the question I am most often asked when I talk to companies and that generates the most surprise. Because there is a huge difference between using AI to work and working so that AI recommends you. And most companies, and consultancies, have not yet taken that second step.
Today, when a potential client, a journalist, or an investor wants to know who is a reference in a sector, they increasingly turn to a generative AI before Google. And what they receive is not a list of links, but a constructed, synthesized response that prioritizes some companies over others.
If your company does not appear in that response, or is described in a vague and generic way, you have a visibility problem that traditional KPIs are not measuring.
The difference between using AI and being visible in AI
This distinction is what I believe is still lacking in most corporate communication strategies.
We use AI to write faster, to transcribe, to search. That’s fine. But if we do not work to ensure that AI finds us, recognizes us, and recommends us, we are losing a layer of visibility that is already influencing real decisions.
How does AI decide which companies to recommend? It is based on what it finds online. Media presence, quality content, message coherence, authority on a specific topic. Everything that has always mattered in communication, but now with a new intermediary that synthesizes and prioritizes without us seeing it.
The good news is that this has a solution. And the solution is not technological; it is communicative. It is worked on from the strategy, from the narrative, from constant presence in the places where AI learns.
What I take away from yesterday
I left the event with something I really like: the confirmation that I am in the right place at the right time. The debate on AI in communication is very focused on tools. The next step, the one that still few are taking, is to think of AI as a visibility ecosystem.
And that, interestingly, is not resolved by technology. It is resolved by well-executed communication.
Have you ever searched for how AI describes you or your company? I encourage you to do it today.
The answer may surprise you.