Amy Cronin DiCaprio

Curiosity, mostly—and a willingness to ask annoying questions. I’m always trying to understand how things connect: people, systems, policy, language, power. I want to know why we’re doing something, who it serves, what assumptions we’re making, and whether there’s a better way to do it. I’ve also been willing to move between disciplines and learn new things rather than staying in one professional lane. I think that combination of curiosity, adaptability, and asking the questions other people may not be asking has shaped both my career and the way I approach my work.

Being good at something doesn’t mean you have to keep doing it forever. Competence can become a trap, particularly for women: when you’re reliable and capable, people keep giving you the work they know you can do well, whether or not it’s where your greatest strengths lie—or where you want to spend your time. I’ve learned to ask myself not just, “Can I do this?” but “Is this where I do my best work, and is this where I want to be spending my time?”

Learn how to write. And by that I don’t just mean grammar or producing polished sentences. Learn how to think clearly and strategically, identify what matters, understand an audience, build an argument, and make deliberate choices about language and message. AI can generate perfectly competent prose in seconds, which makes those deeper skills more important, not less. The value you bring isn’t simply your ability to produce words; it’s your judgment about what should be said, how it should be said, who needs to hear it, whose perspective might be missing, and what you’re trying to accomplish. Technology will keep changing. Learn to use it—but don’t outsource your thinking to it.

One of the biggest opportunities is for communications to move upstream and become much more deeply integrated into how organizations make decisions, rather than functioning primarily as dissemination after decisions have already been made. Communications strategy should begin much earlier, with questions about audience, purpose, potential confusion, missing perspectives, access, and whose voices are represented.

AI makes that both more possible and more urgent. We now have tools that can generate enormous amounts of content very quickly, but producing more content isn’t necessarily better communication. The opportunity is to use AI to strengthen the strategic work that happens before the writing—to help us interrogate assumptions, identify gaps, consider audiences and perspectives we may have missed, and test how messages might be understood. But that requires communicators to remain responsible for the judgment, context, relationships, and ethical decisions that technology can’t make for us.

<blockquote>Authenticity is probably my number one value. I think people trust people who are honest and accountable, not people who pretend to be perfect. Equity is a very close second, and for me that means much more than representation in the finished product. It has to be built into the process from the beginning: who gets to be an expert, whose knowledge and experience we value, who gets listened to, who has access to information, and who gets to participate in making decisions.</blockquote>