About

Applied / Comms With AI is the publication arm of Comms With AI. It is written from inside the work: building the systems, running them with real organisations, and reporting what happened, including the parts that did not go to plan.

What you will find here

• Long-form articles on how communications work is changing, written to be useful rather than predictive.
• Transparent experiments, where the method and the results are published together so you can judge them.
• Tool reviews based on use against real briefs.
• And the Comms With AI Leader Interview series, live conversations with the people shaping how the profession thinks about this.

Who writes it

I am Michael MacLennan, a communications strategist based near Edinburgh. I have led communications at senior level for more than twenty years, including five as Director of Social Media Strategy, Digital and Comms at Brunswick Group, and earlier digital work at Red Bull and Barclaycard. My career started in newsrooms, at The Herald and STV.

In 2024 I founded Faur, and in 2026 launched Comms With AI, which won two awards at the inaugural AI Comms Awards: Gold for Best Innovation in AI Tools for Communications, and AI Communications Leader of the Year (Agency). The judges' words were "simple, specific and scalable", which is the standard everything here is held to.

I hold a Professional Certificate in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence from Imperial College London, completed in 2025. It matters for one reason: it means I can design, build and run the systems I write about, rather than describe other people's. I am also a director on the board of ScotlandIS, Scotland's digital technology industry body.

How the three brands fit together

Comms With AI is where the templates, workflows and tools live: things a communications team can put to use in fifteen to thirty minutes. Applied / Comms With AI is where the thinking behind them is worked out in public. Faur is the consultancy for organisations that need senior, human-led help with AI adoption across the whole business, from use policy and governance to rollout and measurement.

Most of what gets tested here ends up in the Comms With AI library, and most of what Faur learns in client work ends up here, with the client's details removed.

The ground rules

Nothing is recommended that has not been built and used. Where something did not work, that is what gets reported. Every experiment shows its method, so you can disagree with the conclusion on the evidence. The focus stays on communications: corporate, crisis, reputation, internal and public affairs. And AI-generated text is never passed off as mine; the ethics policy sets out how it is used and disclosed.

A note on uncertainty

Nobody has the full picture on AI in communications, and the practitioners worth reading are the ones who say so. What this publication can offer is direct implementation experience and a commitment to showing the work. If you are after confident predictions, there is no shortage of those elsewhere.

Get in touch

Find me on LinkedIn . The publication's own page is Applied / Comms With AI on LinkedIn.