Complexity of Purpose Revisited: AI-Assisted Cognition in Professional Communication

With ChatGPT’s public release, artificial intelligence (AI) has had a profound effect on professional communication. Although clearly beneficial in manipulating large volumes of information, AI cannot provide the insights into each company’s uniqueness—its culture, organizational dynamics, and operational controls—factors defining the character, precision, and tailoring demanded in professional communications. Those attributes depend on the creativity, reasoning, and theory-based causal logic of human cognition. By reexamining the process of developing professional communications, from discovering embedded purposes through final product, we can demonstrate to students how AI can be applied to encourage creativity and promote the powers of human intellect.