June was the biggest month yet for Comms With AI. We won two awards at the inaugural AI Comms Awards, then put the recognition straight to work: Leader Comms With AI, the platform’s first vertical, went live with a free Leadership AI Governance Toolkit, the template library grew to 67, and you can now save the templates you use most. Here is what shipped, and what to do with it.
First, the news: a double win at the AI Comms Awards
On 18 June, Comms With AI won Gold for Best Innovation in AI Tools for Communications, and founder Michael MacLennan was named AI Communications Leader of the Year. The judges called the work “simple, specific and scalable”, and one described it as “an innovative tool grounded in strong communications use cases and delivering real results”. The full result is here, following the shortlist announcement in May.
What that recognises is the unglamorous part of the work: testing every prompt before it ships, documenting what does not work as carefully as what does, and building for the communicator with thirty minutes and a real deadline. The templates, toolkits and five-phase operating system that earned it remain free, with no registration. Browse the library.
Next week: live AI training with Big Fish, and a reader discount
On 7 and 8 July 2026, Comms With AI founder Michael MacLennan is running two half-day AI training sessions for communications professionals with Big Fish Training: one for account executives (7 July) and one for managers and directors (8 July). Both are practical and hands-on, built around the workflows in the library.
Use the code AI26 for £224 +VAT a session. The booking links below already have it applied, so the full price shows crossed out at checkout:
Places are limited, so book early.
New: Leader Comms With AI, and a free governance toolkit
The first vertical of the platform is now live. Leader Comms With AI is built for senior communicators rolling AI out across their teams, and it opens with a free Leadership AI Governance Toolkit: the practical starting point for a function that already has people using AI but has not yet agreed how it is governed.
The library grew to support it, expanding to 67 templates with a new governance set built to be kept current rather than written once and filed away. The standouts:
- A living AI Use Policy, covering what is permitted, what needs review, what is off-limits, and how AI use is disclosed.
- An AI Tool Register, recording what each tool is approved for, what data it may handle and who owns it.
- An AI Use Review and Risk Log, a simple quarterly cadence and running record that keeps the whole thing from going stale.
Sitting above them is a foundational AI Use Principles statement and a Comms Foundations Index to keep your canonical documents in one place. Two new toolkits pull it together: the Comms Foundations Playbook and the Manage AI Comms Toolkit.
Manage Comms With AI: the layer that keeps governance current
Governance is not a document you write once. Manage Comms With AI is a new service that keeps a team’s AI use governed over time: a living policy, a current tool register, and a simple review and risk cadence. It sits after Deploy as the recurring layer, and it completes a clear ladder.
That ladder now runs from the free Comms AI Readiness Diagnostic and library, where you self-serve, through a Consult session with a written advisory note, to a full Deploy build and ongoing Manage support. Wherever a team sits on it, the entry point is the same five-minute diagnostic, which routes each weakness to the right template and the right next step.
Two practical guides, and save your favourites
We also opened a new editorial collection at commswith.ai/articles, starting with two honest, tested comparisons. Best AI tools for internal communicators in 2026 is a straight roundup of what internal comms teams actually use for writing, video, newsletters and meeting capture, with real pricing. Meltwater vs Brand24 is a media-monitoring comparison for PR teams weighing coverage, analytics and cost.
And a small but useful change: you can now save any template as a favourite across the library and return to it from your favourites, so the pieces you rely on are one click away rather than a fresh search each time.
From Applied / Comms With AI
Applied had a full June. The five-part AI Agents Series reached its close, with “The Lag Problem: Comms With AI in the Monitor Phase” (10 June) on how fast a team can actually detect and respond, and the finale “The Pilot Trap: Comms With AI in the Transform Phase” (16 June), which argues most AI initiatives fade not because the tools fail but because nobody owned the change.
The month also brought a candid build story, “How I Built an Award-Winning AI Communications Tool in 3 Months (and What I Got Wrong)” (22 June), and a year-one stocktake, “One Year of Applied / Comms With AI” (29 June), whose diagnosis frames the rest of this issue: the demo is solved, the deployment is not. Earlier in the month, Ben Verinder made the case for “The Honesty Gap” (2 June) in AI and PR.
AI news in brief
- Cannes Lions crowns the “AI discovery era”, and human judgment still decides. VML’s “The KitKat Heist” took the PR Grand Prix and Mother London’s Super Bowl films for Claude won the Film Grand Prix, but the read from the Croisette was that the work which wins is still chosen by people, with AI one more thing in the kit. Read more
- OpenAI previews GPT-5.6. A new family, Sol, Terra and Luna, went to a limited preview from 26 June, initially to a small set of trusted partners at the US government’s request, with wider release to follow. Read more
- Anthropic launches Claude Tag, a shared AI teammate inside Slack. It gives everyone in a company a single Claude “identity” so colleagues can hand half-finished work to one another. In beta for Enterprise and Team. Read more
- “Governed AI” becomes the enterprise pitch. At Snowflake Summit, Snowflake and Anthropic pointed to rising demand for AI with proper controls, and TCS announced a partnership aimed at regulated sectors. Useful validation for anyone building AI governance now rather than later. Read more
- Google folds AI Overviews and AI Mode into one AI search. AI Overviews now reaches more than 2.5 billion people a month, a reminder to check how your brand shows up in AI-generated answers, not just in blue links. Read more
Where to start
If you read one thing on this page, make it the free Comms AI Readiness Diagnostic: five minutes, a scored picture across six dimensions, and a ranked list of where to begin. From there, the library and the new Leadership AI Governance Toolkit are free to use. When you want help acting on the result, a Consult session turns a score into a plan, and Deploy and Manage build and maintain the governance foundations for you.
Questions or feedback: michael@faur.site