The Invisible Cost of the “Quick Update”
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The Invisible Cost of the “Quick Update”
It always starts the same way.
“Can we send a quick update?”
Anyone who has worked in Internal Comms knows what happens next. Quick is never quick. What begins as a simple request turns into a maze of clarifications, rewrites, approvals, and redesigns. Hours—sometimes days—are consumed by something that was supposed to take minutes.
This is the invisible cost of Internal Comms: the constant demand for speed colliding with the reality of clarity, tone, and culture.
The Quick Update Spiral
The pattern is painfully familiar:
- Someone asks for a “quick update.”
- You spend time clarifying the “quick” part with 17 follow-up questions.
- You draft.
- Legal rewrites.
- Leaders reframe.
- Channels demand redesigns.
- Approvals drag on.
- Only then does the message finally land.
By then, it’s rarely quick—and often stripped of its original intent.
Reframing the Quick Update
The problem isn’t urgency itself. Internal Comms thrives on urgency—we are, after all, the first responders of organizational narrative. The problem is when urgency replaces strategy.
A “quick update” that doesn’t connect to purpose, culture, or clarity doesn’t just waste time. It erodes trust. Employees learn to tune out messages that feel rushed, inconsistent, or irrelevant.
How AI Can Help Break the “Quick Update” Cycle
The irony is that many of the steps that slow down Internal Comms are repetitive and predictable: clarifying basic details, formatting for multiple channels, or analyzing how employees respond. This is exactly where Generative AI can step in as an ally—not as a replacement, but as an amplifier of strategic work.
- Drafting clarity: GPT models can create structured first drafts based on prompts that include context, audience, and tone. That means less time spent re-explaining the basics.
- Multi-channel adaptation: instead of redesigning the same message for email, intranet, and mobile, AI can generate adapted versions instantly.
- Feedback loops: sentiment analysis and cultural pulse-reading help detect whether “quick updates” are creating trust—or confusion.
The key, of course, is training AI with the organization’s voice and purpose. Without that, it’s just another tool producing noise.
“AI won’t stop people from asking for a ‘quick update.’ But it can help Internal Comms deliver faster without sacrificing clarity, tone, or trust.”
Closing Thought
The real cost of “quick updates” is not time. It’s credibility. Every rushed message chips away at the cultural muscle Internal Comms works so hard to sustain.
Generative AI won’t erase the phrase from leaders’ vocabularies. But it can give us leverage: the ability to respond faster, with more clarity, while keeping purpose intact.
The challenge is not whether we can communicate quickly. The challenge is whether we can communicate quickly and still be believed.