As a communications expert helping teams at Meta, Netflix, and Airbnb over the past decade, I have spent my career teaching people how to speak effectively. We focused on structures like Problem / Solution / Result or Point / Reason / Example / Point Punctuated.

These tools helped executives and their teams communicate clearly and concisely. They helped us cut through the noise of a busy workday to reach a shared understanding quickly. They were the gold standard for human-to-human clarity.

But as I watch the emergence of agentic AI, I have started to wonder: what happens when the very structures that made us clear reveal how reductive our human to human communication actually is?

We are moving into an era where the basic assumptions of how we exchange information at work are being questioned. 1:1 meetings, team meetings, memos, slidedocs, and presentations might be artifacts of a bygone era. In my last article, AI in Our Everyday Language, I showcased new terms that are emerging in conversation because of AI. Let’s go deeper. I believe Agentic AI won’t just change what we say, but how we think about communication itself. Because, as you already know, the medium is the message.

Here are a few hypotheses about what work communication will look like in an Agentic World:

The thought structures I’ve taught for years were designed for human constraints. We have limited time and limited context windows. We use linear structures to punctuate our ideas because they are easy for a human brain to digest. Leaders love concision!

In an agentic workflow, those structures become bottlenecks. An AI agent doesn't need a "bottom line." Instead, it craves systems. As Jensen Huang put it when describing the "plumbing" of these new frameworks, like OpenClaw, the future is structured data and architecture. With it, it can run endless simulations until it finds what we need.

So, instead of describing a "pain point" and contrasting it with the relief of a tactical solution, we will describe how to train systems to increase valuable output. Leaders will move from being clarity makers to being system mappers.

In the near future, you won't just "use" an agent; you will have a relationship with it. Like any friend, AI meets you where you are. It will become sycophantic if you want it to be agreeable. It will become a trusted confidant if you need one. It will become something you can push against if that is what you require. This requires a level of communication sophistication we haven't needed before. If you fail to build depth with your agent, you will be left with a co-dependent assistant that only reflects your keeping-up-with-appearances surface. Not your messy, true interior that longs for growth.

I’m exploring this concept right now as I build JourneyLoop, a community to help coaches step into our agentic AI future. You can learn more about what my cofounder and I are doing in this talk we recently gave.

Here is the speculative future that actually keeps me up at night: What happens to human connection when information no longer travels from human to human?

Human communication is famously messy. It is full of ego, nuance, and friction. My goal is to help leaders embrace friction, reject reductive thinking, and embrace uncertainity. But, like many good businesses, they thrive by helping humans reduce friction. As agents become more sophisticated, the technology will be built to give your agent the ability to start talking to other agents on your behalf. Slide decks, memos, and even meetings could simply disappear. Your agent will understand your intent, talk to your colleague’s agent, and translate the data into a format they can easily access.

In that world, is human connection a luxury or a necessity? We can learn a lot from how AI works, but if information travels seamlessly between machines, we have to ask what is left for us to steer.

I am exploring these questions because I don’t want us to be caught off guard. From clients and friends in the industry, I am watching what is unfolding. Let’s steer this ship toward a future that is still agreeable to the way humans connect. Follow along as I experiment with these technologies and the mindsets they require. Let's find out what is around the corner together.