With ChatGPT’s public release, artificial intelligence (AI) has had a profound effect on professional communication. Although clearly beneficial in manipulating large volumes of information, AI cannot provide the insights into each company’s uniqueness—its culture, organizational dynamics, and operational controls—factors defining the character, precision, and tailoring demanded in professional communications. Those attributes depend on the creativity, reasoning, and theory-based causal logic of human cognition. By reexamining the process of developing professional communications, from discovering embedded purposes through final product, we can demonstrate to students how AI can be applied to encourage creativity and promote the powers of human intellect.

An innovative communication exercise is presented that develops students’ ability to craft responses to behavioral-based job interview questions that assess whether a candidate’s personality is a fit with the job and company values. Synthesized from a range of historical biographical models, the techniques discussed furnish students with a critical skill: By tactfully employing anecdotes and vignettes in response to questions regarding personality, personal interests, and professional attitudes, students are taught how to add character and dimension to their credentials, direct the flow and direction of the interview, and vividly bolster their arguments for differentiation and selection.

Job interviews require applicants to demonstrate two things: experience with direct value to the company and a fit with the team and company culture. A technique is detailed demonstrating how to develop this argument based on aligning credentials with corporate interests, developing advocacy-based themes, and synthesizing material into a convenient study guide. Designed for instruction in either the college classroom or corporate training center, the approach provides professional communication students with a unique, practical, and personally meaningful learning exercise assessing rhetorical situations, examining rhetorical constructs, and delivering persuasive arguments.