TL;DR

Communications should claim AI reputation before someone else grabs it. That’s the right call. But “should own it” and “is ready to own it” are two very different things. The ownership gap isn’t a willpower problem or an org-chart problem. It’s a capability problem, and you don’t close a capability gap by assigning it. You close it by building it.

Key Insights

• The reputation blog makes the case that comms is the only function trained to keep a story accurate and credible, so comms should own what AI says about your brand. Agreed.
• The sticking point is the line “nobody’s trained for that.” That’s not a rallying cry. It’s a literal description of the problem that has to be solved first.
• Awareness, knowledge, and application are three different things, and most organizations stop at awareness and then act surprised when nothing changes.
• Handing someone a responsibility is not the same as making them ready for it. My mother has a banking app she has never once used to prove it.
• Readiness is built through structured practice and repetition, not a one-time handoff or a “read and sign.”
• Monday’s move: before you claim the responsibility in the leadership meeting, map the actual skills it requires and build the path to them. Then claim it.

You Can’t Assign a Skill Nobody Has

Every time I visit my parents, I’m greeted not with lots of hugs and kisses but with an armful of technology that “isn’t working.” Phones, e-readers, the smartwatch, the computer that’s “doing the thing again.” Usually it’s a reset, a cleared cache, a download someone abandoned halfway, or a mysterious setting changed by nobody, according to everyone. 

To me, five minutes of tech support. To them, a foreign language. An all-day affair filled with lots of questioning and frustration. And likely, a few choice words. Unfortunately, I live a few hours away, which adds a certain urgency to the whole operation.

One visit, I did a mobile check deposit from their kitchen table. My mom watched like I was David Copperfield performing a magic trick. Snap a pic of the front, snap the back, tap the button, done, no drive to the bank. She actually called my dad in to witness it, as though he’d later be asked to testify. 

So, being the teacher I am, I installed her banking app, set the whole thing up, and walked her through checking balances, depositing checks, paying bills, all from her chair. She was thrilled.

She hasn’t touched it since.

Not because she couldn’t follow the steps. She followed them fine. But a demonstration isn’t readiness. In my thirty-second magic trick, she gained awareness that mobile deposit exists, and even a little knowledge of how it works, but the thing that would’ve made it hers- actually doing it, nervously, a few times, until the fear wore off- never happened. 

Was it safe? Would the money land in the right account? Would someone steal it? 

Awareness, knowledge, and true application are three very different animals, and we constantly mistake the first two for the third.

I thought about my mom and her perfectly good, perfectly unused banking app after reading our latest blog post on what AI says about your brand.

Why the Hard Part is Hard

In “Reputation Management Now Includes What AI Says About Your Brand,”there’s a sharp, important argument. AI is already answering questions about your brand, confidently, whether or not what it says is true. 

It points to a Minnesota company that watched an AI Overview invent a lawsuit that never existed and traced real, enormous losses to it. It cites the uncomfortable numbers: about a third of organizations have no one who owns AI visibility, and nearly four in 10 aren’t measuring it at all. And it makes the case that communications is the one function whose entire job is keeping the story accurate, credible, and coherent, so communications should claim this. The closing line is a dare, basically. 

Be the person who owns the answer.

I love that dare. I want people to take it.

But there’s a sentence tucked inside the argument that I can’t stop looking at, because it’s doing more work than it lets on. “Nobody else in your organization is trained for that.”

It’s meant as a reason comms should step up, and that’s right. I read it a second way, though, the way a learning person can’t help but read it. As a flat statement of fact. 

Nobody’s trained for that. 

Not comms, not legal, not the SEO team, not the person who’ll get voluntold for it in the next reorg. And if nobody’s trained for it, then “go claim it” is step two of a plan whose step one hasn’t happened yet.

That ownership gap in the data? It’s not that people don’t want the responsibility. It’s that wanting it and being able to do it are separated by a stretch of actual, unglamorous skill-building that no leadership meeting can skip past.

Assigning Isn’t Building

Here’s the move I watch organizations make, and it never works. Someone reads an article or a blog post, listens to a TED Talk or the latest business audio, nods vigorously, and announces at the next meeting that comms now owns AI’s reputation. 

Ownership assigned. Box checked. 

Everyone feels forward-leaning, modern, and suspiciously accomplished for having done almost nothing.

Six months later, nothing has changed, and everyone’s quietly confused about why. Leadership is frustrated that nothing’s moved.

It’s the banking app all over again. We confused the demonstration with the capability. We confused “you’re responsible for this now” with “you’re able to do this now.” 

Those are not the same sentence, and the gap between them is where good intentions go to die.

I learned this most vividly and most tenderly while taking care of my aging parents. I used to think the hard part of a doctor’s appointment was the logistics, the day off, the three-hour drive each way to “the city” because small-town Indiana doesn’t come with specialists. The real challenge is that I can’t go every time. 

With solo appointments, it turns out, it starts after the appointment. “How’d it go?” “Fine.” “What’d the doctor say?” “Nothing really.” 

And then a text from the pharmacy about a prescription nobody can explain. “What’s the new medicine for?” “I don’t know.” “Are you taking your medicines?” 

Meanwhile, every pill bottle sits three-quarters full, as if the medications have entered witness protection.

For a while I treated my inquiries like an investigation, which went about as well as you’d imagine, because nobody enjoys feeling supervised, least of all by their own kid. What actually helped was changing the whole approach. The patient portal became my teammate so I could read the visit summary myself. And instead of “did you take your medicine,” I started asking “can you help me understand your routine?” 

I stopped trying to control the outcome and started trying to build their capability, gently and repeatedly, in a way that left their dignity intact. Caring for aging parents, it turns out, is less about managing healthcare and more about coaching. 

You’re not there to take over the game. You’re there on the sideline, helping someone succeed without stripping away their confidence or independence.

That’s the difference between assigning a responsibility and creating readiness. One is a sentence you say in a meeting. The other is a process you commit to, with repetition, support, and the patience to let someone be clumsy at it before they’re good.

Feeling Ready Isn’t Being Ready

The sneaky version of this gap is the one where people genuinely believe they’re prepared, right up until reality gets a vote. I dug into exactly this in my last article, Why You Rate Your PESO Model® Maturity One Stage Too High, about why teams tend to rate their own readiness a notch higher than it’s earned.

I speak from experience. A few years ago, I was on a two-week work trip in France and thought I would spend a day in Versailles. I had taken years of French in college. (Did I mention the Forgetting Curve?) I did my research; I knew exactly which two event passes I needed for a day trip to Versailles, and I walked up to that ticket window, brimming with confidence and a well-rehearsed “Je voudrais acheter des billets pour Versailles…” I got the most magnificently French woman alive, think Emily in Paris, the kind of person who could make a sigh sound like a performance review. 

She insisted she spoke no English (I’d just heard her speaking fluent English to the customer ahead of me). After much drama, she sold me my tickets, and I felt victorious right up until the next day when, three trains deep and standing at Versailles, I learned she’d sold me the wrong tickets entirely, ones that couldn’t even be used on a weekend. A very kind young woman fixed it. My confidence was left somewhere between Platform 3 and Versailles.

Years of study. Real preparation. Still the wrong tickets. Feeling ready had almost nothing to do with being ready, and the only reason I ever got better at navigating a language barrier was doing it, getting it wrong, and adjusting.

In my pharma years, we never confused those two. When the company launched a new therapeutic class, nobody stood up and announced the reps “now owned” the new conversation and left it there. That would’ve been disastrous. 

We built the enablement. The training, the practice scenarios, the role-plays, the certification before anyone went customer-facing, because the stakes were too high to send someone out armed with awareness and a great attitude. 

“Read and sign” never made a single person competent. Application did.

AI reputation is exactly that kind of moment. New category, high stakes, real money attached, and a whole lot of people who feel ready because they read a good post. Reading that post is awareness. Understanding the plays is knowledge. Being able to run them when your brand is the one getting invented? That’s application, and application is built, not assigned.

Create the Journey

Before you claim anything in the leadership meeting, get honest about the distance between awareness and application. You just read a compelling article. Wonderful. That’s the starting line, not the finish.

Then map the capability, not just the responsibility. Write down what the job actually requires: auditing what AI currently says about you, maintaining the owned and earned foundation that corrects the record, measuring whether any of it is moving. Those are learnable skills, which is the good news. They are not absorbable by osmosis, which is the news people skip.

Then build the path, and build it with enough repetition that it sticks. This is the honest reason the PESO Model Certification® exists, and it’s where that same blog lands at the end, too. It’s the structured version of readiness, the integration discipline, and the measurement framework practiced until they’re yours, so you’re not improvising when it counts. If you want the longer fix, our university partnership is where the next wave of practitioners learns this as a foundation instead of a scramble. Either way, the move is the same: deliberately close the capability gap, then step forward.

And here’s the part I’d gently insist on, as the learning person in the room. Don’t shame anyone for not already knowing this. Nobody’s trained for it. That’s not a character flaw; it’s a true sentence about a brand-new problem, and the only useful response to a true sentence like that is to go do something about it.

My parents still have that banking app. Every so often I think about the version of that visit where I didn’t just perform the magic trick and leave, where instead I sat with them while they did it themselves, badly, a few times, until the fear wore off. 

They might be using it today. The goal was never to install the app. The goal was to make sure it actually got used, dignity and confidence intact.

Be the person who owns the answer. Absolutely. Just become the person who’s ready to, first.

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