AI communication skills are becoming increasingly important as developers and leaders rely on artificial intelligence to summarize meetings, draft emails, organize ideas, and prepare for conversations. These tools can save time, but Salvatore Manzi warns that using AI to improve your communication is different from letting AI do your communicating for you.
In Part 2 of our Develpreneur conversation with leadership communication coach Salvatore Manzi, Rob Broadhead and Michael Meloche explore how communication changes as developers move into leadership roles and AI becomes part of everyday work. The discussion covers better meetings, keeping remote teams engaged, using AI without weakening your skills, and communicating technical ideas to people outside your technical world.
About Salvatore Manzi
Salvatore Manzi is a leadership communication coach whose work sits at the intersection of leadership, communication, and collaboration. He works with teams and analytical professionals to improve how they communicate so they can collaborate more effectively and move their ideas forward.
Salvatore is also the author of Clear and Compelling: Communication Strategies for Big Thinkers. During the Develpreneur interview, he explained that the book draws on twenty years of communication strategies and is aimed particularly at analytical, technology, and data-driven professionals with bold ideas.
His work fits closely with the theme of this season of Develpreneur: building a career beyond the code. Technical knowledge can help you develop the idea, but leadership communication helps you explain it, build support for it, and bring other people along with you.
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Website: Salvatore Manzi’s Website
AI Communication Skills Need Structure Without Becoming Rigid
Developers tend to appreciate systems, but nobody wants every conversation governed by a complicated set of rules. That creates an interesting challenge for leaders: How much structure does a team actually need?
Salvatore describes communication as an art rather than something with a perfect formula. However, he also points out that people need parameters. We need to understand the limits before we know how much freedom we have within them. In a meeting, those limits might involve time, the topic being discussed, or how long each person should speak.
The key is keeping those parameters flexible. Telling someone they can speak exactly seven words creates a new problem because everyone becomes focused on satisfying the rule. Asking people to keep their responses to one or two sentences establishes a useful boundary without turning the meeting into an exercise in compliance.
This same principle applies throughout leadership. Structure should help people communicate rather than becoming another obstacle they have to navigate.
Better Communication Starts With the Purpose of the Meeting
Many developers have experienced days where one meeting runs into another until there is almost no time left to do the work discussed in those meetings.
The problem is not necessarily whether a meeting lasts fifteen minutes, thirty minutes, or an hour. Salvatore recommends starting with a more fundamental question: What is this meeting supposed to accomplish?
Without a clear objective, a meeting can continue indefinitely without producing a useful result. When people understand the goal and receive the information they need beforehand, however, some discussions can be resolved in five or fifteen minutes.
That changes the way we think about meeting efficiency. Instead of automatically scheduling an hour and trying to fill it, define the outcome first. Then determine how much time the team actually needs to achieve it.
AI Communication Skills Require Human Engagement
AI has added another dimension to the meeting problem. We can now record conversations, generate transcripts, create summaries, identify action items, and return to the information later.
Those capabilities are useful, but they can also create an excuse to disengage.
Michael raised a scenario that is becoming increasingly familiar: people attend a meeting with their cameras off, barely participate, and depend on an AI-generated transcript or summary to tell them what happened afterward.
Salvatore argues that leaders have a responsibility to create engagement. His recommendation is the 3-5 rule: every three to five minutes, introduce some type of pattern disruption that brings people’s attention back into the conversation.
That disruption does not need to be dramatic. A leader can:
- Ask a question.
- Poll the group.
- Ask someone for their perspective.
- Introduce an interactive visual.
- Connect the discussion directly to someone’s current work.
- Change the way information is being presented.
One of the most effective approaches is relevance. If you connect a discussion directly to a project someone is working on, that person’s attention naturally increases. Instead of simply delivering information to a group, you are showing people why that information matters to them.
That may become even more important as AI makes passive participation easier.
Communication Skills Matter Even Without a Leadership Title
What happens when you recognize that a meeting is failing but you are not the person running it?
That is a common situation for developers. You may be sitting in a retrospective, refinement, stand-up, or project meeting where two or three people dominate the conversation while everyone else remains silent.
Salvatore suggests that participants can help create engagement without taking over the meeting. One approach is to respond directly to something another person shared. You might briefly explain what you appreciated about their contribution and how it connects to the work.
If the meeting consistently prevents important voices from being heard, that can also become a conversation with the facilitator before the next meeting. Explain what you need from the discussion and why hearing from more of the team matters to your ability to move forward.
This approach changes the interaction from criticism to a request. You are not simply saying that the meeting is bad. You are explaining what would make it more useful and why that change matters.
Better Team Communication Permits People to Challenge Ideas
Another problem appears when people have concerns but do not want to become known as the person who is always negative.
Salvatore described working with a startup that deliberately assigned roles such as the critic, negator, or contrarian during meetings. The roles rotated between people, which gave someone explicit permission to challenge an idea without being personally labeled as difficult.
Over time, something interesting happened. Team members reported feeling safer raising uncomfortable issues even when they were not officially assigned one of those roles.
For software teams, this concept has obvious applications. Projects need people willing to ask what happens when something fails. Testers need to challenge assumptions. Developers need to question architecture. Business analysts need to identify missing requirements. Security teams need to think about how a system could be abused.
The goal is not negativity. The goal is making constructive disagreement part of the process instead of treating disagreement as a personality problem.
Communication Skills Help Make Complex Ideas Easier to Process
Technical experts often struggle with another communication problem: we know too much.
When someone asks about a system we have spent months or years building, it is tempting to provide all the history, context, data, dependencies, and edge cases necessary to prove that we understand the problem.
The listener probably does not need all of it.
Salvatore recommends narrowing information into a small number of meaningful chunks. The underlying data still matters, but effective communication requires deciding which pieces another person needs to understand before moving forward.
That skill becomes increasingly important as developers move into leadership. Executives, customers, operations, marketing, legal, and other departments usually do not need the same technical depth that another developer needs.
The challenge is not knowing the information. It is knowing which information matters to the person in front of you.
Do Not Let AI Communication Replace Your Own Voice
This is where AI communication skills become particularly important.
AI can summarize a long email chain, draft a response, prepare meeting notes, and transform rough ideas into polished language. Salvatore sees value in those capabilities, but he also sees a risk when AI begins communicating back and forth while the people involved stop thinking for themselves.
Eventually, an email conversation becomes a real conversation.
At that point, you have to explain the ideas that supposedly came from you. You have to answer questions in real time, adapt to new information, defend decisions, and respond to a dynamic situation. If AI has been doing all of the thinking and communicating for you, you may discover that you are not prepared for that conversation.
Salvatore’s recommendation is straightforward: use AI, train it toward your voice, and take advantage of what it can do, but always read before you send.
Edit the output. Make sure it sounds like you. More importantly, make sure you understand and can stand behind what is being communicated.
AI should reduce unnecessary work. It should not remove you from your own communication.
Build AI Communication Skills One Problem at a Time
Avoiding AI entirely is not the answer either. The challenge is maintaining your own cognitive and communication abilities while taking advantage of increasingly capable tools.
Salvatore offers a simple exercise: one a day.
Once each day, take one problem and work through it yourself before asking AI for help. Think through the problem, develop your answer, and write out your reasoning. Then give it to AI and compare what it produces with your approach.
That creates a very different relationship with the technology.
Instead of asking AI to think so you do not have to, you are using it as another perspective against which you can test your thinking. You continue exercising the skill while also learning where AI can improve your work.
For developers, this should feel familiar. We do not become better programmers by copying code we do not understand. We improve by solving problems, reviewing alternatives, testing assumptions, and learning from the differences.
AI communication skills should develop the same way.
Communication Skills Help You Speak Outside the Technical Room
Technical professionals face another challenge as their careers progress. Eventually, the audience changes.
You may spend years discussing systems with developers who understand your terminology, assumptions, and data. Then you walk into a room with operations, HR, legal, sales, marketing, executives, or customers.
The same communication approach no longer works.
Salvatore recommends practicing metaphors because they force technical professionals to translate an idea into something another audience can visualize. He compares this to giving someone the blueprint for a house versus showing them a rendering of the finished house. The blueprint may contain more precise technical information, but the rendering makes the result easier to understand.
Developers can practice this before they ever enter the boardroom. Pick something familiar—a hobby, sport, cup of coffee, or everyday activity—and explain how your current project is similar to it.
The metaphor does not need to be perfect. The exercise teaches you to look at the same technical idea through a different lens.
That ability to switch communication styles is part of moving beyond the code. The more responsibility you gain, the more likely you are to communicate with people who do not share your technical background.
AI Communication Skills Are Career Skills
AI will continue getting better at writing, summarizing, organizing, and preparing information. That makes learning how to use these tools important, but it also increases the value of the skills that remain human.
Can you read the room? Can you recognize when someone has disengaged? Can you explain a technical problem to a nontechnical stakeholder? Can you challenge an idea without attacking the person who proposed it? Can you answer an unexpected question without waiting for an AI-generated response?
Those are communication skills, but they are also career skills.
Salvatore’s advice is not to reject AI. Use it for interview preparation. Use it to evaluate your communication. Use it to help generate new ways to explain an idea. Train it to better understand your voice.
Just do not stop developing your own.
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