Your follow-up · Big Fish Training × Comms With AI · Tuesday 7 July 2026
AI for Account Executives
Thanks for spending the morning with me. This is your follow-up: a short recap of what we covered, and, more usefully, a curated set of links so the resources keep working for you long after today. Bookmark it, come back to it, and lean on the website rather than your memory.
Start here
Three things to try this week
The prompt library
Role-ready prompts for releases, pitches, research and email. The fastest way to feel the difference this week.
Open the library →
Tool reviews
Honest, tool-agnostic write-ups so you choose well, not by hype.
Browse the reviews →
The five-part prompt
Role · context · task · format · constraints, with placeholders for any facts. Brief AI like a sharp junior colleague.
Jargon, in plain English
Six terms worth being able to explain
You don't need the jargon to use AI well, but a client might ask.
Hallucination
when AI states something false, confidently. The reason you always verify.
Agentic AI
AI that does tasks, not just chats. "It’s just a chatbot" is out of date.
Context window / memory
how much it holds at once. Why long chats forget, and projects help.
Tokens
the chunks of text AI reads and writes in; roughly how limits are measured.
Multimodal
handles text, images, audio and video, not only words.
Shadow AI
the unsanctioned tools people quietly paste work into.
What we covered
The morning, and where to go next
The frame
AI is worth using when it makes a task faster, better, or differently, never instead of your judgement. If it's doing none of those three, that's your signal not to use it. Everything today sits inside a simple five-part operating system, Strategise, Create, Govern, Monitor, Transform, which you can explore at commswith.ai/os.
Prompting well
Most weak results come from vague prompts. Give AI the five parts, treat the first answer as a draft to react to, and iterate two or three rounds. Bank what works in your own prompt library; in a few weeks it's the most useful thing you own. Starter prompts live in the library.
Writing support
Hand AI the facts, the angle and the structure to beat the blank page, then angle one story three ways for different journalists, and, the bit that stays human, edit it back to your voice: cut the AI tells, check every fact. How I do it: when something matters, I run it through an AI stakeholder lens before I send, to see how a sceptical boss or client might read it. I wrote up exactly how in Speed-building a 'Will my boss hate this?' detector (Applied / Comms With AI).
Research, at pace then verified
AI turns an afternoon of desk research into minutes: summarise coverage round-ups, build a quick background on a journalist before a pitch call (Perplexity is a strong research tool here), and compare competitor positioning to find the unclaimed angle. For deeper work, ChatGPT's Deep Research is powerful; I put it through its paces for comms in We tested ChatGPT's Deep Research tool (Applied / Comms With AI).
The accuracy habit: AI is confident even when it's wrong. Verify every name, figure, date and quote. A practical trick: if you have two tools, paste one's answer into the other and ask each to fact-check it. It happens for real, too: Air Canada was ordered to honour a refund policy its own chatbot invented (2024), and a New York law firm was fined after ChatGPT produced six court cases that did not exist (2023).
Email & admin
This is where AI gives you your time back in 2026: draft the reply you've been avoiding, summarise a forty-email thread before you answer, turn messy notes into actions with owners and dates. Capture the call any way you like, typed notes or a voice note, and a tool like Granola will transcribe it for you. The thing that makes it all repeatable is structure; I keep client work, experiments and drafts in project folders, written up in How project folders supercharged my AI comms workflow (Applied / Comms With AI).
Judgement & good habits
Use AI for the legwork (drafts, summaries, variations, research starts) and own the call (final facts, anything confidential, the real judgement). Keep client-confidential material, personal data and unpublished information out of AI tools; if in doubt, leave it out. When you must work with something sensitive, sanitise rather than skip: draft in Word with [CLIENT] and [FIGURE] placeholders, let AI work on that, then find-and-replace the real detail back in yourself. On disclosure, the mood has shifted: where clients once worried about agencies using AI, many now expect it, used well.
A go-to line you can borrow if a client asks: "We use AI to work faster and sharper, but a person always owns the thinking and the final word."
Your 30-day plan
One quick win, one habit, one thing to explore
One quick win this week, one habit this month, one thing to explore. To get started, paste this into your AI tool:
You are my AI coach for communications work. I've just done an AI training course. Help me build a simple 30-day plan: one quick win I can use this week, one habit to build this month, and one thing to explore. Ask me three short questions about my role and my current AI use first, then give me the plan as a short checklist.
Worth a read, and a few sources to keep up
Stay current on twenty minutes a week
Worth a read
- →PRCA AI Green Paper (2026): the profession's reference on using AI responsibly.
- →Applied / Comms With AI: practical, tested write-ups, including the deep-research, project-folders and stakeholder-lens pieces above.
A few sources to keep up
- →The Comms With AI Monthly (sign up below) and Applied: tested prompts and tool reviews, built for comms.
- →CIPR and the PRCA: the profession's guidance on using AI responsibly.
- →Wadds Inc. (Stephen Waddington) and PRWeek: sharp, ongoing reads on how the industry is actually using AI.
Comms With AI Monthly
One email a month. New templates, tested prompts, one tool review.
The easiest way to keep the momentum from today. Free, no spam, unsubscribe anytime.
Take it further
Want your team's AI practice sorted?
When you want it done with you, Consult Comms With AI is a working session plus a written advisory note, to apply this to your own work.
Michael MacLennan · michael@faur.site · commswith.ai · Hosted by Big Fish Training
Your follow-up from the session on 7 July 2026. Free to use, adapt and share.