Reporting, Resilience & Remote Realities

Chuck: Welcome to Frequency, I’m Chuck Gose.

Jenni: And I’m Jenni Field. Frequency is your go-to for real talk about comms, culture, and employee experience — beyond the buzzwords and straight to what matters. Chuck, you’re not at home today — where are you?

Chuck: New York City — I’m recording with my laptop propped on a suitcase, since the hotel room’s luggage rack wasn’t sturdy enough and there’s no room to move furniture around in here.

Jenni: It looks great. To kick us off — I’m spending two hours a day right now in a machine treating a shoulder injury, with zero access to technology, so I’ve been reading printed reports and books the whole time. It’s made me realize how much better I read things on paper, and it’s got me wanting to carve out more dedicated reading time generally. How much time do you spend reading things you need to read in a given day or week?

Chuck: Honestly, close to zero dedicated time — I read things as they come across my radar, and if I don’t read a report right when it lands, I probably won’t come back to that PDF unless it comes up again. I love the idea of you using that forced offline time productively, since it’s exactly the kind of two hours your phone would otherwise swallow.

Jenni: Everyone locally who’s had the same treatment tells me they just nap through it — I ran out of things to read one day and just lay there for an hour, which I guess counts as mindfulness now. What’s on your list this week?

Chuck: Before we get to Duolingo’s “AI-first” memo — I realized we didn’t mention AI once in our last episode, possibly a first. So this week I’m tripling down: after Duolingo, we’ll dig into an MIT report showing 95% of corporate AI pilots are failing to deliver results, Fast Company’s piece on AI data poisoning, evidence that remote work is quietly outlasting office mandates, and Shel Holtz revisiting where internal comms should report. Duolingo’s CEO announced the company would go “AI-first,” and it read to employees and outsiders as a declaration the company was trading human creativity for algorithms. Within days the company clarified it meant AI supporting, not replacing, employees. When leaders reach for phrases like “AI-first,” what’s the communicator’s role in shaping that message so it doesn’t scare the audience that matters most?

Jenni: This is such a classic case of a leader reaching for a buzzword phrase without thinking through its implications. As the communicator, you’re left scrambling to answer: what does this actually mean, does it change hiring, does it change training and development, does it change how we get from A to B? The CEO says internally it landed fine, but the implication people naturally draw is still “I’m choosing technology over a person.” The job of the communicator is asking all those questions upfront and digging underneath rather than assuming.

Chuck: This feels like marketing language bleeding into internal comms — “AI-first” makes sense externally, but internally an employee naturally asks “well, what’s second?” Companies like Southwest have always said “employees first, customers second,” so employees instantly know where they stand. “AI-first” invites exactly the kind of fear employees are primed to feel given everything else in the news about AI eliminating jobs.

Jenni: And it’s a sign you haven’t invested the planning time a message like this deserves — employees are a far more emotionally invested stakeholder group than customers, so the reaction is always going to be sharper if you haven’t done the work.

Chuck: Let’s move to the MIT research — a staggering 95% of corporate generative AI pilots are failing to deliver measurable impact, and CFOs are especially frustrated after months of investment. Should communicators be the ones pushing back on inflated AI expectations, even if it dampens executive enthusiasm?

Jenni: This ties back to our earlier conversation about whether it’s comms’ job to be “judgy.” I don’t think asking grounding questions about measurable impact and realistic goals is dampening anything that shouldn’t be questioned — we’d ask the same of any other project. This tracks with what I hear at industry events too: we’re not where some people think we are with AI in organizations, and this research is a useful reality check.

Chuck: One data point that stood out to me: purchased, ready-made AI tools succeed at roughly double the rate of homegrown, do-it-yourself AI projects. It’s the classic build-versus-buy debate playing out again — companies that specialize in this have already learned lessons organizations building their first AI project haven’t yet hit.

Jenni: That mirrors what IT teams went through with early intranets — build your own first, then eventually move to an off-the-shelf solution once you realize the specialists have already solved the hard problems.

Chuck: Next, a darker AI story: Fast Company on “data poisoning,” where bad actors deliberately corrupt the data AI systems train on, undermining trust in the resulting systems. How proactive should communicators be about explaining risks like this versus focusing on AI’s benefits?

Jenni: This connects to a role communicators have always had and often forget: verifying and validating information before it goes out. As a global head of comms, I used to push back hard on claims like “we’re the market leader” by asking exactly which measure that claim was based on. I think a lot of “poisoned” data has already spread through our own profession — like the false claim that human attention spans are shorter than a goldfish’s — and part of our job is refusing to keep repeating things once we know they’re inaccurate.

Chuck: Exactly — I think of “data poisoning” as something that already runs through internal comms broadly, not just AI specifically: stats like the goldfish attention-span claim, or dubious figures about how many hours employees spend searching for information, keep getting repeated even after being debunked.

Jenni: Same with the old “93% of communication is tone and body language” statistic — traced back to the original researcher, who said that’s a total misuse of the study. I’d love a running list of all the poisoned data points our industry keeps recycling.

Chuck: Let’s move to one of our favorite ping-pong topics: remote work. The World Financial Review argues remote work is quietly winning despite executive obsession with office mandates, pointing to steady productivity and retention struggles at companies enforcing rigid return policies. Is remote work now a permanent fixture, or will executive pressure eventually reshape the balance?

Jenni: My issue is with the headline itself — buried in the article is the actual finding that team-negotiated hybrid models are the most effective approach, not remote work alone. That tracks with the Gallup data I’m still working through in Culture Shock. I think hybrid is going to win, genuinely — it suits people who like some office time and some at-home time, and it’s good for social connection. What I don’t buy is vague claims that people are “more effective” at home without any real definition of what that means or how it’s measured. I expect the pendulum to keep swinging in both directions for another three to five years before we land on a real happy medium.

Chuck: I agree hybrid is the real answer, but that’s not what’s making headlines — AT&T and Chevron are demanding five days a week. I wonder how much enforcement is actually happening behind those mandates versus just symbolic policy, especially with things like “coffee badging” where people badge in and immediately leave. Hybrid wins because most roles genuinely don’t require being in-office five days a week anymore, given how secure remote technology has become — this feels like leaders defaulting to command-and-control instead of empowering teams to find what works.

Jenni: It’s a textbook case of addressing symptoms rather than root causes — low morale, weak collaboration, disappointing engagement scores — by forcing everyone back together rather than diagnosing why those symptoms exist in the first place. I’ll dig more into what the actual engagement numbers show next week.

Chuck: We had a call this week with iCology members, and one dialed in from an office that was completely empty behind her despite a mandated four-days-a-week policy — nobody else was even there.

Jenni: A friend of mine is contractually required to be in three days a week, while newer colleagues doing the same job aren’t bound by the same terms — that fairness gap alone tells you the execution hasn’t been thought through.

Chuck: Let’s close with maybe the most evergreen — and exhausting — debate in our field: Shel Holtz revisiting whether internal comms should report into HR, corporate comms, or directly to the CEO. Do you think this fixation on reporting lines says more about our profession’s identity crisis than about where the function should actually sit?

Jenni: I agree reporting lines shape influence and resources, as Shel argues, but I don’t think where you sit dictates your relationships internally — I’ve reported into marketing, HR, and commercial at different points, and it made no real difference. I think this conversation is really a symptom of people feeling shut out of the right rooms at the right time, and the actual fix is looking at your own relationships, credibility, and influence rather than the org chart.

Chuck: What bothers me is we’re debating something almost nobody actually controls — nobody gets to pick their own reporting structure. I’d love a universal “we get it, let’s move on” response for whenever this debate resurfaces on LinkedIn.

Jenni: Maybe the solution is just sending people this episode’s timestamp.

Chuck: That wraps this week’s stories. What’s your freak-out, live from New York?

Jenni: Leaders leading. I keep having conversations with leadership teams where it becomes clear some directors are still looking upward for permission instead of taking proactive action within their own scope. If you’re a director, you have to move, take initiative, and not wait to be told.

Chuck: Here for that — I’ve been guilty of looking upward myself, less for permission and more for validation. My freak-out: I wrote a grateful LinkedIn post about Rocky Walls and a discussion on story-listening, then ran it through an AI-detection tool out of curiosity — it came back 88% likely AI-written, even though I wrote every word. It’s left me wondering whether AI is quietly training how we all write now, to the point that even AI detectors get confused.

Jenni: We need a baseline — if every post you write comes back between 80-90%, that just tells us where the tool’s threshold sits, not anything meaningful about your writing. And of course the tool then offered to rewrite it to “pass” AI checks — for a subscription fee.

Chuck: I fell for it completely.

Jenni: Total marketing nonsense — of course it says 88%; it’s not going to tell you “you’re human, goodbye” for free. Thank you all for joining us this week. All the articles that inspired this conversation are in the show notes — rate and review after you’ve listened, subscribe so you don’t miss an episode, and pass this along to someone who’d enjoy it; find us on YouTube too. Thank you to Poet Ali for contributing the music to the show, and we’ll be back next week with more news, insights and opinions about comms and leadership in workplaces today. Keep tuning in and turning up.