Foregrounding human intercultural experiences: developing Critical Interactional Competence (CritIC) through Life Capital in AI-mediated professional communication

This paper responds to the rapidly expanding possibilities and concerns surrounding Generative AI in intercultural professional communication. Extending the concept of Critical Interactional Competence (CritIC, Dai et al., Citation2025a), we argue that professionals can draw on their Life Capital Consoli (Citation2022) to develop critical interactional abilities for moment-by-moment engagement with AI agents. Using Life Capital as an analytic lens, we show how reflecting on human-to-human intercultural experiences can help AI users cultivate the interactional criticality needed to move beyond the algorithmic confines of large language model training data. We conclude by proposing theoretical, methodological, and practical directions for more humanising AI-supported intercultural communication training.