Here’s an uncomfortable truth: most of us are clearer when talking to a machine than when talking to our colleagues.
I noticed it a few months ago. When I write a prompt for an AI, I’m specific. I define the audience. I state the goal. I explain what good looks like. But when I send a brief to my team? Half the time it’s a vague Slack message and a prayer. A recent piece from Eikhart puts a name to what’s happening here — they call it “utility writing,” and the argument is straightforward: if your content doesn’t carry explicit structure and clear meaning, it’s becoming invisible to the systems that now curate, surface, and distribute information.
The Real Opportunity Isn’t About Machines
The Eikhart piece focuses on making content legible to large language models — embedding structured meaning directly into your language so AI can actually parse it. That matters. But I think the bigger win is what happens to your human communication when you start thinking this way.
When you write a prompt, you can’t hide behind assumptions. There’s no shared context, no body language, no “you know what I mean.” You have to say exactly what you want, why you want it, and how you’ll know it’s right. That discipline — stripping out ambiguity, making relationships between ideas explicit, front-loading the answer before the explanation — is exactly what makes internal communication fall apart when it’s missing.
Think about the last strategy brief that went sideways. Odds are the problem wasn’t the strategy. It was that three people read the same document and walked away with three different interpretations. Utility writing fixes that, not because it’s optimized for algorithms, but because it forces you to close the gaps that ambiguity creates.
What This Means for Marketing Leaders
If you run a team that produces content — whether that’s customer-facing copy, internal decks, or product briefs — this shift has real implications. Your content now serves two audiences simultaneously: humans who need to understand it and AI systems that need to index, summarize, and recommend it. The good news is that serving both well looks nearly identical. Clear structure. Explicit meaning. Direct answers before supporting detail.
The teams that will struggle are the ones still writing for vibes — long, wandering paragraphs that bury the point three layers deep. That style was already inefficient for human readers. Now it’s also invisible to the AI tools your audience increasingly relies on to find answers.
Start With Your Own Habits
Here’s the concrete shift: treat every piece of communication — every email, every brief, every Slack thread — like a prompt. State the objective first. Define what success looks like. Make the structure do the work so your reader doesn’t have to guess. You’ll be surprised how much faster your team moves when they stop spending energy on interpretation.
I’m curious whether anyone else has noticed this pattern. The more I work with AI, the better my human communication gets. That feels like the real story here — not that machines need us to write differently, but that we always should have been.
