By Karrie Van Belle and Chris Hogg
If you’re leading a content or communications team right now, you’re probably asking the same questions we hear everywhere. How do we keep up with demand without burning out our teams? How do we make room for strategy when every day is spent in tools, meetings, and inboxes? And what exactly do we do with AI?
There’s good reason to feel overwhelmed.
According to the 2025 report The Productivity Shift by Grammarly and The Harris Poll, knowledge workers now spend more than 28 hours per week on written communication across tools like Slack, Teams, and Google Docs. That’s a 13.2% increase from the previous year.
Despite this, just 5% of marketers identify as fluent in generative AI — the lowest of any team surveyed.
Why is this a big deal?
Because AI fluency directly impacts team performance.
Fluency doesn’t just mean knowing how to use the tools. It means knowing how to integrate them into real work. Teams with higher fluency are faster to adopt better workflows, more confident in experimenting, and better equipped to manage complexity.
Recent research from Harvard Business Publishing and Degreed shows that highly AI-fluent workers are more confident in their ability to use generative AI (57% vs. 10%), more likely to engage in daily learning (31% vs. 7%), and more effective at applying that learning on the job. In practice, this translates to teams that iterate faster, delegate better to AI, and maintain higher-quality output under pressure.
And when these tools are used well, the results are measurable.
A Grammarly-Harris Poll found that professionals spend nearly 19 hours per week on writing tasks, with time spent on reviewing and editing increasing 11% year over year. Among those who use generative AI regularly, 92% of leaders say it makes them more efficient and productive, with many also seeing gains in customer engagement.
These are performance wins that communicators and marketers can’t afford to ignore.
The very traits that drive strong AI adoption — confidence with tools, daily learning habits, and the ability to apply insights quickly — are also what define Canada’s top-performing innovation leaders.
According to Digital Journal’s own national study of the Canadian workforce, these capabilities are not just helpful — they are what separate game changers from everyone else.
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We met years ago through the overlapping circles of marketing, and strategic communications and both of us have built and led content teams inside organizations navigating intense change.
Karrie has held senior leadership and marketing and communications roles across a variety of industries including financial services and healthcare. She now works as a fractional CMO through her firm, Red Thread Junction Inc.
Chris has worked in journalism and content marketing, and today leads Digital Journal Group, where AI is integrated into client storytelling and operations. His team also provides AI training for communications leaders and teams, helping them build fluency and apply AI meaningfully inside their organizations.
Lately, we’ve both been reflecting on a simple but urgent question: What is this moment in AI really about for communications leaders?
This article is grounded in the practical lessons we’ve learned working alongside these teams. It’s not about sweeping automation or speculative disruption. It’s about rethinking how we build, lead, and support teams when AI becomes part of the mix. And it’s about ensuring those teams emerge stronger, not smaller.
Start with the team you have
There’s a common impulse in leadership discussions to assume AI adoption means hiring new talent. But more often than not, your current team has what it takes. They just haven’t been given the time or tools to adapt.
The risk is leaders skipping over the talent they already have in pursuit of elusive AI expertise.
Upskilling existing team members isn’t just cost-effective. It’s strategic. These are the people who already understand your audience, your tone, and your values. They know the history. They’ve been in the trenches. What they need is a safe environment to learn, experiment, and build confidence, and their institutional knowledge should not be underestimated.
In our experience, offering role-specific, hands-on AI training does more than build fluency. It builds momentum.
We’ve seen the most impact when teams are trained to use AI in ways that align with their existing strengths and voice.
When people are given the space to experiment with real tasks — like drafting messages, refining ideas, or scaling content — they quickly discover how to integrate AI meaningfully into their work. It’s not about outsourcing creativity, but enabling the people who already understand the audience to work faster and smarter.
But using AI well isn’t just about improving execution. It also requires clarity about what actually matters. Karrie has written about the importance of putting strategy before execution in this new era. As she outlines in Stop chasing deliverables: Why marketing needs a strategy-first approach, the ability to make intentional decisions about what matters, and where automation helps, is foundational.
Build AI into real workflows
Too much AI training is disconnected from day-to-day reality. That’s why we design every session around the actual tasks people are doing: writing thought leadership, preparing policy briefs, planning social campaigns, or editing articles.
The goal is not to teach a tool, but to build habits.
A common breakthrough moment comes when people stop seeing AI as a separate step and start integrating it into their natural workflow.
Instead of drafting alone and editing later, they begin using AI to brainstorm, structure, and refine in real time. This shift, from working before the computer to working with it, can dramatically increase output without sacrificing quality.
At Digital Journal Group, we use AI to speed up the thinking, not to replace it. It helps us organize background research, identify patterns across sources, and shape early outlines.
The real value comes in how we refine ideas, clarify the message, and connect it to what matters. We’ve applied this approach across B2B sectors including energy, consulting, software, financial services, and construction. AI supports the process, but it’s our standards, strategic thinking, and editorial discipline that guide the final story.
The same approach works across client projects. Once an AI model is trained on a company’s brand guidelines, tone of voice, and past content, it can support a wide range of deliverables. That might include summarizing a dense policy report, suggesting headlines, or drafting posts in a consistent tone.
The key is training the system well, then scaling its impact.
In case you missed it, Karrie explores how AI is reshaping team roles and structures in How B2B businesses should structure communications and marketing in the era of AI. It’s a helpful read for leaders considering how to evolve team capabilities without defaulting to external hires.
Make communications the owners of AI voice
As AI tools become more deeply integrated, they start touching every part of the content experience. That makes it essential for B2B comms and marketing professionals to lead the charge on voice, tone, and message integrity.
Too often, AI implementation is handed off to IT teams or external vendors who don’t understand brand nuance. But training AI to reflect your organization’s identity isn’t a technical task — it’s a communications one. That includes uploading editorial guidelines, inputting example content, defining the desired tone, and creating checks for consistency.
Think of it as the next evolution of brand management.
You wouldn’t let a freelancer write your CEO’s speech without a review. You shouldn’t let an untrained model publish content in your name either. Even trained models still require human oversight before publishing.
This is where communications can lead by developing governance models that support scale without compromising quality.
In Own your message or someone else will, Karrie makes a compelling case for why organizations can’t afford to let others define their narrative. Especially in an era when content is created at scale.
That same urgency applies when teaching AI to speak on your behalf.
What we’re seeing is that the most successful teams are the ones who treat AI not as a replacement, but as a collaborator. They recognize that automation can eliminate repetitive tasks, freeing up human capacity for the creative, strategic, and empathetic work that machines can’t replicate.
The future of communication teams isn’t smaller. It’s more capable — and AI fluency is a critical part of that shift.
Teams that understand how to use these tools (and we mean really use them), will be the ones that scale smartly, communicate clearly, and adapt quickly.
Leaders who prioritize fluency now are not just helping their teams keep up. They’re equipping them to lead through change.
That’s not just good tech strategy. It’s good leadership.
Karrie Van Belle is a thought leader in Digital Journal’s Insight Forum (become a member) and the founder of Red Thread Junction Inc. which offers fractional CMO services. Chris is the President and Founder of Digital Journal Group (learn more), a content marketing firm that focuses on B2B storytelling.
This article was created with the assistance of AI. Learn more about our AI ethics policy here.
