July was about making the platform easier to walk into. Plan Comms With AI, the tool that turns a comms need into a brief, a route and a ready prompt, came out of beta and is now open to everyone. The library grew again, every template now shows its worked example up front, and the tools directory added fresh coverage of the AI-search visibility space. Here is what shipped, and how to use it.
Plan Comms With AI is out of beta
Plan Comms With AI is the fastest way into the whole platform, and as of July it is fully live rather than in preview. Describe what you need to communicate, by typing or by voice, and you get three things back: a complete brief, a route through the free library, and a copy-ready prompt you can paste into any AI tool. Your first plan takes about two minutes, start to finish.
It runs on the Comms With AI OS, the same five phases the whole library is organised around, so the route it hands you is a set of real templates in the right order, not a generic checklist. Guests can build one plan a day. A free account, no card needed, lifts that to three a day, and members build without limits under fair use. If you tried it during the beta, it is worth another look now the account tiers are settled.
New in the library: a bench test for your AI tools
The template library has grown to 68 templates, and the newest one settles an argument most teams are having. The Bench Test: Tool Map for Comms Teams is a repeatable, blind comparison you run across the AI tools you already pay for, to decide which one your team should use for which recurring task. You score real briefs with confidential details removed, then turn the result into a one-page Tool Map that gives everyone a default answer to “which one should I use for this?”. It takes about an hour, and it helps with governance too: when the sanctioned tool is visibly the better one for the job, shadow AI has less room to grow. It sits in the Transform phase alongside the tool-evaluation and workflow-audit templates.
Two smaller changes make the whole library easier to trust at a glance. Every template now shows its worked example in a clear card near the top, so you can see what the output looks like before you invest any time. And there is a new section on the OS page on rolling the five phases out across a team, for agencies and in-house functions that want a repeatable system rather than a handful of prompts.
Tools directory: the AI-search visibility space
The tools directory review for July focused on how brands show up in AI-generated answers, plus wider media intelligence. Three tools joined as full listings: Onclusive GEO Analytics (onclusive.com), which tracks a brand’s presence in AI search results; Lumina (vuelio.com), Vuelio’s media database and monitoring platform; and Everhaze Lú (everhaze.com), a newer entrant in research and intelligence. A fourth, Agentcy (agentcy.com.pr), goes on the watchlist while we wait to see real traction. As ever, the notes say what each tool is actually good for, and who should skip it.
The ladder, from free to done-with-you
Everything above is free and needs no registration. When a team wants to go further, the route is the same one every time. Start with the free Comms AI Readiness Diagnostic, a five-minute scored self-assessment across six dimensions that points each weakness at the right templates and the right next step. From there, a Consult session is a short, paid conversation with a written advisory note; Deploy is the productised build of your foundation documents, AI use policy, governance and tool instructions; and Manage keeps all of that current over time. In July we also ran two hands-on AI training sessions for communications professionals with Big Fish Training, one for account executives and one for managers and directors, which is the same material in a live room.
From Applied / Comms With AI
Applied spent July on the awkward middle of AI adoption, the gap between using the tools and getting real value from them. “The 20 roadblocks between comms and useful AI, and what to do about them” (7 July) goes past the usual two answers of “it makes things up” and “the lawyers will not allow it” to map the full set of things that actually stop teams, and what to do about each. Then “Why is AI losing the communications and PR war?” (20 July) argues that AI’s leading voices are winning the publicity war and losing the communications one, spending on the message while neglecting the fundamentals.
AI news in brief
- AI-search visibility becomes a discipline you can measure. Tracking how often your brand appears in AI-generated answers has moved from experiment to standard practice, and it matters because Google’s AI Mode and Perplexity draw most of their citations from conventional top-ten results while ChatGPT pulls far fewer, so ranking on Google no longer guarantees you are visible where buyers ask. Read more
- The UN’s telecoms agency starts writing the rules for agentic AI. On 9 July the ITU launched a Focus Group on Trust and Identity for Humans and Agentic AI, to set common standards for identifying AI agents and keeping their actions accountable. Governance is moving from in-house policy to international standard. Read more
- OpenAI opens up GPT-5.6, and Anthropic answers. The GPT-5.6 family, Sol, Terra and Luna, moved from a government-gated preview to broad availability on 9 July, while Anthropic extended access to Claude Fable 5 in the same window. The frontier keeps moving, which is exactly why a settled Tool Map beats chasing each release. Read more
- The adoption-to-integration gap, in numbers. Ragan’s State of AI and Communications finds 98 per cent of comms teams now use AI in some form, yet fewer than 20 per cent have it built into their workflows and strategy. The demo is solved; the deployment is not. Read more
Where to start
If you only do one thing, build a plan: describe your next comms task and get a brief, a route and a ready prompt in about two minutes, free. To see where your team stands, run the five-minute Readiness Diagnostic, then work through the free library. When you are ready to turn that into agreed foundations and policy, a Consult session and a Deploy build are the next steps, both built on the same tested templates that won at the AI Comms Awards.
Questions or feedback: michael@faur.site