It is now more than two years since I first saw GPT-4 and had a mini crisis of faith in my career choices. In this new world, one I’d had the fortune of seeing early, what was the role for me, and for this communications industry I’ve loved and thrived in? Reinvent ourselves and our work using these new tools, that was one, and great work has happened to remove drudgery, reduce the fear of the blank page, and develop new habits of productivity. But all this activity, it can obscure the second question, the more existential one: what is the core value we provide in this age of artificial intelligence?

The answer lies in the question, as is often the case. 

Our value is embedded in our humanity, our understanding of emotion and story and relationships, the interplay among all these things. Over the years, how we express these have changed but the value has remained. There were times when the stories were told via print only, once a day. Then they became stories over the air, radio and then television, all new skills and stories expressed in new ways. Technology brought us blogs and social media, long form and short form video, audiences established and persistent, audiences formed in a moment, more ephemeral in nature, here for a time, gone in the next.

This core truth shows where we have work to do, aided but not slowed by these new artificial intelligence tools. Story seeking, story finding, storytelling, grounded in our truth and understanding of the audiences we care about, the ones that matter most to the organizations for which we work. Our ability to convene the right people, internally and externally. To drive consensus for action, compromise where it can be found and commitment for next steps and actions. At our best, this is what we do, where we provide value. This has been consistent across my career, and the change has been about our ability to find new audiences and reach them in new ways, not in the core of what our function provides.

The pace of change, at the tactical level, that is new. This is where we feel stress in our systems, about the rapid evolution of influence and influencers, the increasingly prismatic nature of perception and image. We can look at technology, at AI, and blame them for these new stresses in our lives, for us and our teams. Or we can embrace them as new ways to better show our value. 

At Microsoft, we’ve taken several approaches to developing tools to help us embrace AI in our roles. Included in this report are two examples, one focused on our collaboration with Meltwater to develop a new tool designed to help make decision-making using data as accessible and responsive as chatting with a coworker. The second example is the work we’ve done internally to tackle the time-consuming work of transcribing and translating executive interviews, and most importantly, storing them in a single secure location. I’d encourage you to read the essays from Stephanie and Steve to learn more. 

There is a story out there that will shed light on the soul of Microsoft. My job is to find it, shape it, bring it into existence for an audience we care about. I have more tools today than yesterday, and will have even more next month, next year. 

There is a story for you, as well. Go find it.

Frank X. Shaw is the chief communications officer at Microsoft. Shaw is responsible for defining and managing communications strategies worldwide, company-wide storytelling, product PR, media and analyst relations, executive communications, employee communications, global agency management, and military affairs.