May was the month the AI platforms turned firmly towards agents, and the month the communications industry finally got a credible way to measure AI search. Closer to home, we shipped a new diagnostic, brought Consult and Deploy alongside the free library, and refreshed the tools directory. Here is what changed, and what is worth your time.
New: Score Your AI Readiness in Five Minutes
The Comms AI Readiness Diagnostic is now live. It is a five-minute, 24-question self-assessment that scores your communications function from 0 to 100 across six dimensions: Strategise, Create, Govern, Monitor, Transform, and People and culture. You get an instant score and a radar chart against the comms-sector benchmark, with no signup needed to see your result.
What makes it more than a quiz is the routing. Every weak dimension points to specific templates in the library and to the right next step, so you finish with a ranked list of where to start rather than a number you forget by lunchtime. The weakest areas for most comms functions tend to be Monitor and Transform, and the diagnostic links each gap straight to the templates that close it. Finish it and you can have the full written report, with a 90-day plan, emailed over. Score your readiness now.
Consult and Deploy: The Productised Next Steps
For teams that want help acting on a diagnostic result, two services now sit alongside the free library. Consult Comms With AI is a focused session with a written advisory note, the quickest way to turn a score into a plan. Deploy Comms With AI is the build itself: foundation documents, an AI use policy, governance, and tool instructions for ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot and Gemini. The diagnostic, the library, Consult and Deploy now form one ladder, from self-serve to done-with-you.
Four New Tools in the Directory
The commswith.ai tools directory gained four entries this month, each chosen to fill a gap practitioners had been asking about.
Peec AI (peec.ai) tracks how a brand appears across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, and is built for agencies: unlimited seats, per-client projects and Looker Studio reporting. Its Actions module turns visibility data into a prioritised to-do list, which makes it a natural fit for teams starting to treat generative engine optimisation as core work rather than an SEO afterthought.
Granola (granola.ai) is a bot-free meeting notetaker that captures audio from your device and shapes your own notes into client-ready summaries, rather than dropping a raw transcript on you. Mac-first, and a strong option for practitioners who live in external client meetings.
Nano Banana Pro (gemini.google.com) is Google’s Gemini 3 Pro image model, notable for reliable text inside images and accurate multilingual rendering at 2K and 4K. Useful for quote cards, stat graphics and international work where most image tools still mangle the words.
Recraft (recraft.ai) generates images and true vector (SVG) output with brand-style locking, for repeatable on-brand sets rather than one-off visuals. Its V4 release added MCP support for Claude.
We also updated three existing entries: HeyGen (heygen.com) now integrates third-party video models (Sora, Veo, Kling) in one workspace; Midjourney (midjourney.com) shipped V8.1 to the web app with faster generation and native 2K HD; and ChatGPT (openai.com) moved native image generation to GPT Image 2, replacing DALL·E.
Seven more tools are on the watchlist: GEOAnalyzer Pro, Shadow, Riverside, Runway, Kling, Postiz and Poppulo. As ever, pricing is vendor-stated and none of these are Faur-tested yet, so treat the directory scores as directional. For the GEO and AI-visibility tools especially, reach for the new AMEC GEO Principles (below) before you report numbers to a client.
Applied Comms AI: The Govern Phase
Applied Comms AI is working through the five phases of the Comms With AI Operating System, one AI agents article at a time. The May instalment, The Cost of a Miss: Comms With AI in the Govern Phase (27 May), makes a sharp point: every efficiency gain in the Create phase lands as a workload increase in Govern. More content, produced faster, still has to be checked, approved and stood behind.
It follows The Volume Problem: Comms With AI in the Create Phase (5 May), which asks whether agent-assisted work actually meets the standard senior communicators would trust in public. Both are at appliedcomms.ai, with the series continuing through Monitor and Transform.
AI News in Brief
Google makes agents the main event at I/O 2026: On 19 May, Sundar Pichai opened “the agentic Gemini era”, led by Gemini Spark, a persistent agent that runs in the cloud and acts within set permissions rather than waiting for prompts, alongside the Omni world model and the faster, cheaper Gemini 3.5 Flash. Read Google’s I/O 2026 keynote recap
Microsoft pipes live third-party data into Copilot: New federated connectors let Copilot query outside systems live at the moment you ask, with the first wave including Canva, HubSpot, Notion, Intercom and Linear. Read the Microsoft 365 Copilot connectors update
Anthropic becomes the most valuable AI startup: A reported $65bn raise at a $965bn valuation, alongside Opus 4.7, a model positioned as more literal and more controlled, useful framing for anyone who has to stand behind AI output in public. Read the Axios report on Anthropic’s raise
Adobe ships an agentic Firefly Assistant: Firefly gained an AI assistant that carries out multi-step creative tasks from a single prompt, pushing agents into design workflows. Read the coverage of Adobe’s Firefly Assistant
AMEC launches GEO Principles: At its Dublin summit on 20 May, AMEC published the first measurement framework for generative engine optimisation, covering how organisations are found, interpreted and represented in AI-generated answers. This is the standard to reach for before reporting AI-visibility numbers to clients. Read AMEC’s GEO Principles announcement
Start With Your Score
The fastest way to act on everything above is to find out where you stand. Take the Comms AI Readiness Diagnostic: it scores your function in five minutes and points each gap to the right templates, and, if you want hands-on help, to Consult or Deploy. Everything that earned our AI Comms Awards shortlist is free to use, so browse the full library while you are there.
Questions or feedback: michael@faur.site