Why I'm doubling down on my communication skills in the era of AI
During my years as a fresh graduate in Stockholm, I spent around 12 hours a day in a startup hub coworking space. It was the era of the boom of startups in the Nordic capital, and everyday I would watch countless CEOs pitching their product to investors.
One thing I quickly learned is that you can have the best product, the best tech stack and the best team in the world, but if in the key moment you cannot communicate the value clearly, you will likely fail - or at least underachieve.
Those years made me fall in love with effective communication and public speaking and, for the past 10+ years as a Product Manager, I cultivated that passion as a core component of who I am, both professionally and in personal life. This is why I’m noticing an interesting pattern emerging in the business world: the more we embed AI into the workplace, the less people focus on improving their communication skills.
Here’s the take I keep hearing: AI can write for you now, so communication is becoming less of a skill and more of a commodity. Why spend years getting good at explaining ideas when a model can produce a clean paragraph in seconds?
Here’s my take: this could’t be more wrong (sorry Sheldon). AI makes communication skills more valuable, not less. Here’s why I think that.
AI raised the floor, not the ceiling
There are 2 kind of cars: those with manual transmission and those with automatic one. If you are a bad driver with manual, chances are you will be the same with automatic - only a little bit less bad. In other words, automatic transmission made it easier for unskilled drivers to avoid basic mistakes - such as letting the engine turn off during an uphill start.
But if someone is a hectic driver, doesn’t coast but brakes hard just before hitting the car in front, speeds too much in turns… their passengers will be sick, no matter the automatic transmission!
The first thing AI did was compress the distance between a decent communicator and a poor one. A mediocre writer can now produce a passable email. A nervous presenter can rehearse with a chatbot. The floor went up.
But the ceiling didn’t move.
What separates good communication from average communication was never grammar or polish. It is clarity of thought, the ability to structure an argument your audience actually follows, the judgment to know what to say and what to leave out. AI can’t give you that. It can dress up whatever you hand it. If you hand it muddy thinking, you get polished mud.
Your best product will fall flat with bad communication
Every single day at work I see people presenting their amazing vibe coded products. I’d say that around 80-90% deserve the spotlight, either because they are solving real customers problems or internal organization problems. Unfortunately, too many of these demos are hard to follow, messy, and I’m sorry to say, boring.
This happens because all the effort went into building the product, and not enough towards make sure that the audience actually understands the value and is onboard with the idea. This is particularly important when presenting to executives: they are pitched ideas every day, and not always they have the time to read all the additional material you prepare to support your idea. It’s there or never: either your presentation is impactful, or your idea gets overlooked.
AI can help us prepare as much content as we want, but when it’s our time to present, to engage the audience, to sell our idea… that’s when great communicators shine and maximize their results.
In business, the best idea doesn’t always win. The best communicated idea does.
More complexity requires more clarity
If your job involves any kind of live communication, you will find yourself in situations where someone asks you a difficult question that you don’t have a ready answer for. Or they ask you to explain a complex concept in simple term, right there on the spot.
Engineers can relate to this big time - remember that time when you were asked to explain microservices vs monolith to a CFO? - but it usually happens to every worker on a regular basis.
The risk in these moments is falling into the “Processing Gap.” Because the human brain is wired to solve problems, we often start talking the second the gears begin to turn. We subject our audience to a messy, unfiltered stream of consciousness - the verbal equivalent of a rough draft. In a pre-AI world, this was a nuisance; in the AI era, it is a career liability.
An AI can summarize a 50-page document into three bullet points in seconds. If you take five minutes to explain a single concept and still leave your audience confused, you are providing “negative value” compared to a digital assistant.
To double down on communication means mastering the Mental Funnel. It’s the ability to pause for three seconds, run your messy thoughts through a structured framework, and deliver a “distilled” response.
The human moments are still human
Few days ago I attended an internal presentation where a very talented colleague of mine was pitching a brand new product to C-suite. The slides were perfect - thanks to Google Gemini - and the flow of the talk was smooth and easy to follow. The story however was not very compelling, I could sense that this product was not really addressing our core customers’ needs directly. And the executives saw that too, and started “grilling” the presenter with deep dive questions from different angles. He was not prepared for this amount of off-script interaction.
AI is not in the room when you’re presenting to a skeptical executive team. It’s not there when the conversation goes sideways and you need to read the room, adjust in real time, and bring people back onside. It’s not making the difficult call in a one-on-one or leading the alignment meeting where three teams disagree and someone needs to synthesize a path forward.
The higher you go in an organization, the more your job is persuasion and alignment. Not production. Those situations are not being automated. And in my experience coaching people through them, the gap between someone who’s good at this and someone who isn’t is enormous, and it has almost nothing to do with intelligence.
Conclusion
So, if you’re thinking that because AI exists you should spend less time polishing your communication skills, think again. Because the people who can think clearly and communicate that thinking in a way that moves other people, those people are rarer and more valuable in an environment where everyone else has access to the same tools.
AI commoditized output. It made clear thinking the differentiator.
That’s not a reason to stop. It’s a reason to go harder.