Why Effective AI Communication Starts with the Recipient
September 23, 2026 - 1:46 pm
Credit: Jack_the_sparow via Shutterstock
I don’t know about you, but when I read something I can tell was clearly produced by a large language model, it puts me off immediately. I lose interest, and I sometimes lose trust in whoever sent it, especially when they clearly haven’t put any thought into it.
That reaction is becoming increasingly common. AI has made it cheaper than ever to produce words, slides, and plans, and people are drowning in “workslop,” content that looks polished at first glance but lacks substance.
It’s so prevalent that 40% of workers say they’ve received AI workslop in the past month, and dealing with it costs those workers an average of nearly two hours. That invisible tax adds up to millions of dollars a year for large organizations. Our CEO, Victor Riparbelli, recently coined another term for this: "AI-sloppification."
AI is making content cheaper to produce without making it any more useful to the recipient.
The Cost of “Workslop”
The root problem is that we often forget why we communicate in the first place. We don’t write memos, decks, or updates for their own sake; we create them to change something in the person on the other end: inform them, train them, get them to act, or draw insight out of them.
The recipient is who matters. The only real measure of successful communication is whether it accomplished that task for them, not how quickly or cheaply it was produced.
Once you take the recipient’s perspective, it becomes clear that AI cannot be viewed as a shortcut but as a test. This philosophy has led to two internal rules on my team.
Two Rules for Mindful AI Usage
Rule 1:
You cannot use AI for writing emails, reports, or decks unless what you produce is both shorter and richer than what you could have written without it. If a tool makes you faster but the result is longer or more generic, you haven’t saved any work; you’ve only shifted the work of distilling it onto the reader.
That’s exactly what the workslop survey finding illustrates: one person saving ten minutes editing can end up costing ten readers ten minutes each.
Rule 2:
Be intentional about the format that actually serves the message, not the fastest one to produce. Text is often right for something quick.
But through AI, we can now use richer formats for the things that really matter, and that’s when AI video can make a huge difference. A short walkthrough, a roleplay, or an interactive coaching moment can land something a written document never will.
How We’re Applying These Principles
We recently tested this with an internal employee survey on AI tools. Instead of sending people a form and asking them to rank or check off which tools they use, we ran it as a conversation with an AI avatar, asking people to talk through specific moments a tool actually helped them, followed up live on what they said.
We cared far less about the number of tools someone named than the texture behind it – why it helped, when it didn’t, and what almost worked. That conversation gave us richer insight than any survey form could have.
We've also used this approach in onboarding. All new employees get hands-on with the product from day one, but what matters more is the visibility that gives us into how people actually onboard: where they get stuck, what clicks fast, and what needs to be framed differently for different people.
That insight lets us shorten ramp-up time and get new hires up to speed faster.