Dan Gaynor on Using AI to Question Your Own Narrative

If you’re using AI primarily to write a little faster, polish a little tighter, or summarize a little smarter, you could be missing out on a major opportunity.

Dan Gaynor is an Executive Fellow at Harvard Business School and founder of Kelp—now Signal AI—a company whose data analytics platform helps enterprises to better understand where their reputation stands and how to strengthen it.

In this episode, Dan joins Kristen to talk about the journey from speechwriting at USAID to selling shoes at Nike to building an AI company before ChatGPT was publicly released—and how marketing and comms pros can move past surface-level prompting to use AI as a real strategic tool.

Watch or Listen to the Episode

Watch the full episode here or listen to it on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

The Big Idea: Stop Massaging the Message and Question the Story

Most communicators using AI today are using it to write a little faster, polish a little tighter, or summarize a little smarter. Dan argues that they’re leaving the most valuable application of the technology on the table. The real opportunity, he says, is to build synthetic audiences—virtual versions of journalists, analysts, employee groups, advocacy organizations, or political cohorts—trained on actual content from those audiences, and then have the courage to let them push back on the strategy itself.

Comms teams, Dan says, are prone to navel-gazing: the executive makes a decision about campaigning on innovation and sustainability, and the team goes off to massage the language. Using AI to its full potential means asking whether the narrative approach was right in the first place. To get there, communicators have to stop treating AI as a personal productivity tool and start treating it as a horizontal layer that unifies media, social, owned channels, and executive comms around a shared data foundation.

"The zenith of using synthetic audiences is to ask yourself the toughest question of all: is the narrative I've been campaigning on, and all the components of it, even the right thing? Do you have the courage to let the synthetic audience question your hard-fought judgment?"

Dan Gaynor

Executive Fellow at Harvard Business School and founder of Kelp—now Signal AI

Key Takeaways

Push synthetic audiences past content review into strategy. Use them to test whether you’re campaigning on the right storyline in the first place, not just whether a specific content asset lands.

Train synthetic audiences on real content from the audience itself: floor speeches and legislation for politicians, op-eds and newsroom posts for advocacy groups, eNPS data and town hall Q&A for employees.

Treat AI as a horizontal unifying layer across comms functions rather than a vertical tool each team trains in isolation. When every exec brings their own agent to a meeting, you get a Wild West standoff; when teams agree on shared data sets and applications, AI becomes a convening force.

Ways to Connect with Dan

If you’d like to connect with Dan, you can do so here:

Dan’s LinkedIn

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