August 13, 2026
August 13, 2026
Gab Ferree has led communications at tech leaders like Slack, Bumble, and Salesforce. She left that world to create Off the Record, a coaching and community platform for senior communicators who want to operate as true business advisors.
She joined me to talk about why storytelling isn’t the primary role of comms, how to earn a seat at the leadership table, and why AI's PR problem can’t be solved with PR alone.
Our conversation has been edited for this format.
You built Off the Record out of something you felt personally. What was that?
I’ve worked with some of the best Chief Communications Officers in the world. A CCO’s job is to manage executives and navigate the biggest business issues, not necessarily to coach their comms team. They don’t always have time to tell you what happened in the room you weren't in, or how your feedback actually landed. I also kept stumbling into head of comms roles far before I felt ready, and I knew I wasn’t alone.
Off the Record aims to fix that gap and equip top leaders in comms with training, support, and guidance to be better business partners. It’s real talk, coming from someone who cares enough to let them know where they have spinach in their teeth. Together we can lift the tide for all ships and get communications the leadership seat it deserves.
Is there a common thread across Off the Record members?
Three things.
First, making AI transformational. We use AI to automate systematic work so we can focus on strategic thinking. Second, providing business value. We are designing systems that stop talking about clips and impressions and start talking about sales, revenue, conversion, and business metrics. Third, positioning yourself not as a comms person who does comms things, but as a business person who uses communications to achieve business results.
Position yourself not as a comms person who does comms things, but as a business person who uses communications to achieve business results.
What does that shift actually look like in practice?
To quote Jennifer George, former CCO at Unilever, “Communications that can't drive business outcomes is just theater.” Sometimes theater is good, but we need to recognize it for what it is.
There have been so many times, especially earlier in my career, where I would be sitting in a meeting thinking, that's a really bad idea, somebody should do something about it. And then I'd look around and realize: I'm the person who should do something about it. One way communicators can really become business advisors is to not just flag the crisis, but to be the person who says, “I am going to help us fix this.”
Execs want solutions. However, no amount of words will change a broken business reality. Leading the initiative to fix it is one way comms people create genuine business value. Another is claiming our piece of revenue attribution and connecting communications work directly to sales and revenue. We can and should talk about our results in the language of the business.
You've talked about the power of friendships with executives. What does that actually look like?
Work is not your family, and friendships have boundaries. But your executives can be your friends, and partnership is a lot better when you consult them with the care and tact you would a friend.
One of the best CEOs is Lidianei Jones, who I worked with at Slack and Bumble. She told me, “Gab, I see you as a friend.” That shifted everything. The way I flagged things for her, helped her co-lead, and gathered cohorts to support her goals totally transformed our trust and effectiveness.
My biggest unlock was just being me. One of my favorite pieces of feedback was, “You play for the team on the front of the jersey, not the back.” When I stopped pretending to be somebody else I did better work, built better relationships, and naturally filtered out situations that weren't going to work for me.
When I stopped pretending to be somebody else I did better work, built better relationships, and naturally filtered out situations that weren't going to work for me.
You're skeptical of "storytelling" as the defining skill of a communicator. Say more.
I don't consider my job to be a “storyteller.” And I don't think storytelling is a communicator's primary objective. Kurt Vonnegut is a storyteller. Roald Dahl is a storyteller. I am a person who achieves business results through communications.
My tinfoil hat theory is that storytelling has surged because AI has gobbled up every CCO talk from the last ten years and keeps serving that buzzword back to us. At the same time, AI has lifted the sniff test on writing; it demands higher quality because anyone can produce generic text now. So while storytelling matters, it's no longer the differentiator.
The real differentiator is knowing your audience and speaking their language. Don’t ask, "Which Substacks should I pitch?" Ask, “Who are we trying to reach, what do they need to know for us to achieve our goals, and where do they get their information?” Once you inhabit the perspective of the person you're trying to reach—where they spend their time, who they trust—the story becomes secondary.
Where is AI most powerful for comms work right now?
Four core areas.
It’s genuinely strong in executive voice building. If you feed an AI high-quality examples of how an exec speaks, their voice, and what they never say, you build a consistent foundational baseline for product announcements, internal comms, and LinkedIn posts.
Media monitoring is another. People are replacing expensive vendor contracts by using RSS feeds, Zapier, and AI to ingest thousands of daily articles and distill them to the few that matter.
If you're still using PowerPoint, stop. Nobody wants static reports. People are building interactive HTML dashboards with tools like Lovable or Claude, with drop-downs and click-throughs, and delivering those instead.
Finally, Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). When people search AI instead of Google, where are those answers coming from? They come from your website, earned media, and digital footprint. If you're still reporting on clips and not talking about your influence on AI search results, you are missing the modern business conversation.
AI has a PR problem. What’s your advice for AI communicators?
AI is the most transformational technology of our lifetime, and systemic change always brings unrest. The difference is that this disruption is happening in an internet and video age where anxieties spread at scale. The concerns—job displacement, environmental strain, data center footprint—are legitimate.
Here is the reality problem: these models were built on the backs of 100 years of human creative work, creating trillion-dollar companies overnight. What everyday people got back was employment anxiety and a chatbot. That feels unfair, because it is.
The answer isn't writing op-eds or letters. AI companies need to start writing checks. Pay publishers. Pay creators. Fund the communities where data centers are being built. You have a PR problem because you have a reality problem. The only antidote to a reality problem is real action.
The only way to reach modern human beings is to earn our attention. Comms people own the most influential piece of the attention pie.
Traditional comms is dead. Long live...
Earned attention.
I watch Netflix because it has no ads. I skip podcast ads. I pay for YouTube Premium. Unless you are a billboard on the drive to my kids' school, I am not seeing your ad.
The only way to reach modern human beings is to earn our attention. Comms people own the most influential piece of the attention pie. Inside the scroll, not in the margins. Figure out where your target customers are, who they trust, and how they consume content. Deliver messages that earn attention. Attribute this work to business goals. That's the job.
Gab Ferree is Your Comms BFF and the founder of Off The Record. This interview is part of Signalmakers, a Mission North series exploring how modern communicators blend curiosity, critical thinking, and creativity to lead in an AI-driven world.
