Contacts

People you interact with during the workday

The people you interact with during the workday are part of the context AI needs to navigate your communications and relationships well.

Work is relational. Most of what you do involves people: making requests, answering questions, negotiating, coordinating, advising, updating. Each of those people has a context, a relationship history, and a set of expectations that shape how you communicate with them. AI drafting on your behalf needs to understand that, or it writes in a register that does not fit.

A contact map does not need to be elaborate. A short description of who you regularly interact with, what your relationship with each is, and how you typically communicate is enough for a tool to start adjusting its output appropriately. The difference between writing to a long-term colleague and a new client is significant and invisible to a tool that does not know the relationship.

Contact context also matters for routing decisions. When AI is helping you decide what to do with information, it needs to know who the relevant people are and what their stake is. Without that, it cannot give advice that fits the actual situation.

Make it visibleList the ten people you communicate with most in a typical week. For each, write one sentence: the relationship, the typical mode of communication, and one note about what matters when you are writing to them. Keep this reference where you can paste it into a prompt when AI is drafting on your behalf.

Why AI needs this

Each part of your work matters to AI in a specific way. Some of it is context a tool needs before it can help, some of it is work a tool can take on, and some of it is judgment that should stay with you.

Tone and register calibration

The right tone with a client is not the same as with a close colleague, and a tool needs to know the relationship before it can get the register right in a draft.

Who has what stake

When AI is helping you plan a communication or navigate a situation, it needs to know who the people involved are and what they care about, or its suggestions will miss the political reality.

Relationship history that shapes the present

A long relationship carries history: past agreements, old tensions, established patterns. A tool cannot read that history without a prompt, but knowing it exists matters for any communication it helps with.

Internal versus external contacts

Communications with colleagues, clients, partners, and regulators all have different norms and stakes. Distinguishing them lets a tool apply the right care and framing to each.

Questions to explore

Use these on your own or in a group. There are no right answers, only better conversations.

Who are the five people you communicate with most during the workday, and what is your relationship with each?
Which relationships require the most careful calibration in how you communicate, and why?
Are there people whose history with you or the team shapes how you handle every interaction with them?
Where does AI-generated communication feel most risky to send, and who is it usually going to?
Who are the people you interact with where getting the tone slightly wrong has real consequences?

Readiness traps

Contact lists give names and titles, not relationships. A tool that knows someone is the Head of Finance but does not know your history with that person is only partially equipped to help.
External relationships (clients, partners, regulators) often carry expectations and sensitivities that are not written down anywhere. If those are left out of the context, AI drafts can land wrong in ways that are hard to undo.
The most sensitive communications are often the most tempting to hand to AI for a first draft. Handle those with care and review the output closely before it goes anywhere near the recipient.