Khalil A. Cassimally is an audience consultant and coach who helps organisations align teams around change, user needs and AI. 

Audience and funnel work succeeds or fails on internal communication, yet few people get structured support to improve it. Drawing on recent research and his own practice, he shares a practical three-step way to use AI to:
> Understand your intervention style
> Identify strengths and gaps in how you communicate
> Take small, intentional steps to improve how your communication skills

Most audience and product work lives or dies on internal communication.

Yet, communication is also where many people struggle. Doing it well can be hard! And while senior executives may have access to coaching and leadership programmes, the people doing much of the day-to-day work rarely do.

This is where AI becomes interesting.

In an article published by Harvard Business Review (HBR) last year, researchers Katharina Lange and José Parra-Moyano explored whether AI could support intervention improvement in a way comparable to human coaching. Working with 167 global executives, they used AI to analyse real conversations and provide feedback, which participants then compared with feedback from human observers.

The results were telling. About 30% of participants received feedback that largely validated what they already believed about their intervention styles. More importantly, around 55% landed in what the researchers called the “zone of learning”: the feedback was both surprising and useful, sparking new insights.

My takeaway from this research isn’t that AI replaces human coaches but that reflective feedback can be made far more accessible than traditional coaching ever allows.

Inspired by their research, I built a repeatable process for using AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini to improve my own interventions.

The research-informed process breaks down improvement into three phases:

• Understanding intervention style
• Identifying strengths and gaps
• Taking steps to improve how to intervene

Phase 1: understand your intervention style

Understanding how you currently communicate is the first step to improvement. To achieve this, you have to understand your preferred style – which you can do systematically with some anonymised transcripts and specific prompts.

> Use a shared language: John Heron’s categories of intervention

Most of us have default patterns of intervention. We need to name those patterns otherwise “communicating better” remains vague. To do this well, we need a shared language.

The post Improve how you communicate with colleagues: an AI method tested by researchers appeared first on Audiencers.

Selma Stern is a strategic advisor helping media leaders transform their organizations for sustainable growth, drawing on 15+ years of experience in consulting and global news media. In particular, Selma bridges the gap between high-level strategy and the messy reality of execution, helping publishers fix the internal structures that hold them back.

In this article, Selma shares 5 recommendations for surviving in this gap as a subscription leader:
- Accept your real job: consensus builder, not decision maker
- Master internal storytelling
- Build cross-functional infrastructure
- Invest in human chemistry
- Give away the credit

If you are a digital subscriptions leader, you probably face a paradox every day: all the accountability, almost none of the control.

Having led subscription businesses at two US media companies, and now advising publishers on subscription growth in Europe, I see this everywhere, all the time. The head of subscriptions holds the P&L responsibility. But they rarely hold the assets—the CTO controls the dev queue, the Editor-in-Chief controls the headlines, and the CPO controls the UX. If the head of subs is lucky, they control email marketing and customer success.

If that’s you: To get anything done, you cannot just decide—you have to barter.

Because subscriptions sit at the exact intersection of business, product, editorial, and data, you are an elite player in a game of extreme cross-functional collaboration.

Here’s the playbook for surviving in that gap.

The post Alignment as an extreme sport: 5 things effective subscriptions leaders do appeared first on Audiencers.