AI is not adding a tool to communication work. It is rebuilding the function itself: narrative development, content systems, research, campaign design, team structure, and governance. Programs are being asked to teach that, and quickly.
This is one body of work built for exactly that problem. It runs on a single six-module spine and is offered at three depths: a graduate course, an undergraduate course, and a standalone lecture. All three were developed for a graduate program in digital communication leadership and approved for delivery. They have not been taught yet.
Students leave with real command of the tools, because a leader who cannot do the work cannot direct it, and with judgment that holds when the tools change.
What most programs are offered
A tools survey with a shelf life of about a semester, or a seminar about what it all means. The first is obsolete before the second cohort takes it. The second reads to students as an evasion of the part where they have to be employable, and they are right to hear it that way.
What this is instead
A curriculum that refuses the choice. Every module pairs working command of the systems the field is actually using with the framework underneath it, so students can do the work now and evaluate whatever arrives next.
Three Depths, One Spine
The same six-module architecture, pitched at three altitudes. The graduate version addresses the person accountable for the function. The undergraduate version addresses the person doing the work. The lecture is a self-contained argument that works as a guest session or a pilot for either course.
Graduate Course
AI-Driven Communication Strategy & Leadership
Leading a communication function through technological change: workflow design at organizational scale, leading AI-fluent teams, decisions under real uncertainty, and governance that survives scrutiny. Online, synchronous, full term.
Undergraduate Course
AI and the Communicator’s Craft
A practitioner course. Hands-on content creation, research, campaign design, and multi-channel execution with AI across each, paired with the judgment that makes the skill transfer when the tools change. Online, synchronous, full term.
Guest Lecture
The Editor Still Wins
One documented professional project, told by the person who ran its communications, used to make a specific argument about what the work now requires. 35 minutes plus 10 minutes of questions, in person or remote.
The Lecture
The Editor Still Wins: A Story About AI, a Horror Movie, and What Communication Work Requires Now
In 2016, IBM Watson watched 100 horror films, tagged 22,000 categories of emotional and visual data, and returned 10 scenes for the trailer of a film called Morgan. It did this in 24 hours, and the work was real. No human team could have done it at that speed or that scale.
What the system did not do was decide which of those scenes mattered, or in what order, or what an audience should carry out of the theater with them. A human editor did that, working from what Watson found. The trailer that resulted was neither the machine’s nor the editor’s alone, and figuring out how to describe that honestly turned out to be harder than making it.
That project was a small and unusually clear picture of what is now happening across the entire communication function. Narrative development, content systems, research, campaign design, team structure, governance: none of it is being replaced, and all of it is being rebuilt.
The people who will lead that work need two things at the same time. They need genuine fluency with the tools. And they need judgment that survives the tools, because the systems in front of you today will not be the ones you are using in five years.
I was the communications and marketing lead on the Morgan project, so the account is first-hand rather than assembled from coverage.
The Six-Module Spine
Both courses move through the same sequence: how the function is changing, then command of the craft, then meaning and narrative, then building and running the systems, then leading the culture through it, then governing it responsibly.
1 · AI and the Evolution of Communication StrategyHow the function is being rebuilt, and what a leader has to decide about it.
2 · Prompting as Stylistic and Rhetorical PracticeWorking command of the tools, taught as a rhetorical discipline.
3 · Narrative and Meaning-Making in an AI EnvironmentWhat makes a message land when the supply of competent content is unlimited.
4 · AI in Content Systems, Campaign Design and Team LeadershipWorkflow design at scale, campaign execution, research and audience intelligence.
5 · AI, Organizational Culture and Leading Through ChangeAdoption, decisions under uncertainty, and staying current in a moving field.
6 · Ethics, Trust and GovernancePolicy, risk, bias, transparency, and accountability that hold up under scrutiny.
Why Module Two Matters
Prompting is usually taught as a technical skill, which is why most of what students learn about it expires. Treated instead as a rhetorical practice, it becomes a question of register, audience, authority, and voice, and it connects directly to what a communication department already teaches. Students get working fluency and the reason it will still hold in five years. I have not found another program teaching it that way.
About Adrienne Sabilia
In 2016, IBM Watson analyzed 100 horror films and returned ten scenes for the trailer of the film Morgan. I was the communications and marketing lead on that project. I championed it internally, brought it to leadership, prepared the scientists who spoke about it publicly, ran the media strategy and all of the pitching, and sat in the editor’s office while the trailer was cut. The human editor did the editing. My job was everything around it, which turned out to include explaining to a lot of reporters what the machine had and had not done.
Most recently I was Director of Content Marketing and Brand at Komodo Health. Before that I held leadership roles at IBM Watson Health and IBM Research, where I built a science communications program that scaled to IBM’s global THINK conference and an internal communications hub that lifted employee engagement by 46 percent.
I now run Twin Bayonets, a fractional marketing and content strategy practice serving healthcare, life sciences, and pharma, where I design and run AI-assisted content systems for regulated clients. That work is why this material is current practice rather than recalled experience.
Education
M.A. Science Writing
Johns Hopkins University
M.A. Integrated Marketing and Communications
Marist College
B.S. Business Administration
Marist College
Selected Coverage
Work I have led has appeared in TechCrunch, Quartz, Time, the Washington Post, and Axios.
Practice
Sixteen years in strategic communications across healthcare, life sciences, pharma, and technology.
Formats and Availability
Guest Lecture
35 minutes plus 10 minutes of Q&A. In person or synchronous remote. Calibrated for undergraduate or graduate audiences.
Courses
Both built for online synchronous delivery, full semester. Suitable as a special topics offering or a standing catalog course.
Also Available
Faculty workshops and curriculum consultation on AI in communication programs.
For availability, syllabi, or a conversation about how this might fit a specific program, write to [email protected]. If you are working against a curriculum committee deadline, say so in the subject line and I will prioritize accordingly.