Get in touch with Tommy Gibbs, our Head of Corporate Communications, to find out how we can help you reach and influence the audiences that matter, both human and AI.
AI engines scrape through interview transcripts and use them to describe your business. Tommy Gibbs, Head of Corporate Communications at Speed shared some thoughts on how to train leaders to give clear, quotable answers that still sound like them.
As AI changes how businesses communicate, the most valuable thing a company can offer is a credible human voice. People want to hear from the leaders behind the brand: those with a clear point of view, who know their stuff and sound natural rather than rehearsed.
Media profiling gives those leaders a platform to show the personality behind the corporate façade. But visibility alone is not enough. Leaders also need to be competent communicators if they want to come across as authentic, and that is where media training earns its place.
But there is now a further reason to get those interviews right, and it’s something not all leadership teams have yet considered.
Large Language models (LLMs) don’t just read your website; they scrape transcripts of the video and audio your leaders appear in and use that to help describe your company to anyone who asks them.
Indeed, Bluefish research reported by Adweek found YouTube cited in 16% of LLM answers over six months, ahead of Reddit at 10%, helped by the transcripts and explainers that make video easy for machines to read. More recently, Meltwater data reported by Digiday named YouTube the most cited platform across eight AI systems.
So, an interview clip is no longer a moment that passes once the news cycle moves on. It is a transcript that sits in the record, waiting to be pulled into an AI-generated answer about your business, your sector or your leader.
AI engines favour answers they can lift cleanly. A spokesperson who takes two minutes to warm up, dodges every point and buries the real answer in jargon gives them nothing to extract, so the engine may quote someone else, or paraphrase you badly.
A leader who gives a direct answer early gives LLMs a sentence that stands alone. In practice that means:
This last point is incredibly important. The challenge for spokespeople now is that they need to get to the point for the LLMs, but at the same time they need to be natural and engaging for a human audience. If you’re too direct and you don’t flavour your responses with stories, you’ll come across as too corporate and unengaging. The trick is to balance it by providing a natural, confident answer, in your own words.
Our media training at Speed helps executives handle interviews in a way that feels natural to them. Working with former and current journalists, we use realistic scenarios filmed to camera with playback, so every participant sees how their answers land and gets tailored feedback to take away.
We help leaders find their own voice amid the corporate speak and we now add a second test to every practice answer: if an AI engine lifted information from the transcript, would it describe your company accurately? That shapes how we coach:
The leaders who stand out in the AI era will be the ones who sound like real people and answer like subject matter experts.
Our latest media training packages can be found here on our website and we can build a bespoke programme around your spokespeople.