The role of words in shaping the future of AI

Greg Coleshill, Chief Commercial and Operating Officer

If you want people to make sense of artificial intelligence, start with the words you use.

Language is not window dressing. It frames how people think and, importantly, it influences behaviour.

It decides whether colleagues picture a helpful teammate beside them or a black-box agent wandering off on its own.

Get the language right and you unlock adoption, value and safer outcomes. Get it wrong and you slow everything down.

Teammates, not mysterious agents

Most firms have rolled out horizontal gen-AI tools like chat and document copilots. Useful, yes, but value often feels unclear because leaders talk about a platform rather than a teammate with a clear job.

The shift under way is toward agentic systems that behave like proactive collaborators. The message that lands is simple: describe the colleague that helps a claims handler close a case or a merchandiser tune a range. Skip the abstract platform talk.

Independent studies say the same thing. Adoption is high while genuine transformation is patchy. Pilots stall when tools do not learn from feedback or fit everyday workflows. The fix is to put AI inside specific jobs to be done and measure success on business outcomes, not demo sparkle.

Language that earns trust

Teams follow words they trust.

  • “Copilot that drafts, checks and explains” invites people in.
  • “Agentic automation” can sound like a loss of control unless you pair it with clear rules and visible human oversight.

What works in practice: democratise access, co-design with the people who live the work, and strip out the process friction that blocks vertical use cases from scaling. The best performers keep humans at the centre, use AI to accelerate insight and lean into customer understanding.

The benefits, in plain English

Productivity gains land when you talk like a human.

  • Free up Tuesday afternoons from admin beats promising a thirty per cent uplift.
  • Show how AI moves people to higher value work sooner.
  • Tie every story to a line metric everyone recognises.

Risks deserve everyday words and real-time rails

Jargon does not calm risk. Specifics do. Be clear about what can go wrong and what is watching.

  • Model mistakes that scale fast
  • Quiet data leakage through prompts
  • Over-reliance on a single provider
  • Unclear accountability when agents act

The answer is real-time guard rails and auditable decisions, not policy binders no one reads.

What this looks like in our work

We are focusing on teammates that sit in real workflows and move numbers leaders already track.

Complaints Support Teammate

Drafts clear, plain-English responses that follow DISP rules and our updated procedures. Handlers remain in control and finalise replies. Early targets include higher accuracy, quicker case resolution and fewer reworks. The teammate learns from templates, standards and policy content, and is set up to reduce review time and weekly effort for the team.

Policy Guidance Teammate

Turns our policies and external sources into step-by-step guidance, checklists and examples. Outputs are drafts. Accountability stays with policy owners. The aim is faster, more consistent implementation and less reliance on one team for every question, while raising quality and speeding awareness across the business.

These are not side projects. They sit where work happens, show their sources, and leave an audit trail so risk and audit can see what changed and why.

What we believe

  • Put AI where people work. Build and describe AI as teammates inside frontline workflows. Start narrow with clear success metrics, then scale what works.
  • Make safety real time. Guard rails should be live, not after the fact. Think policy-aware prompts, pre-production red-teaming, continuous monitoring and a reversible button so humans stay in charge.
  • Democratise to teams, not just tech. Let cross-functional teams co-design use cases, own outcomes and iterate weekly. Measure adoption, satisfaction and risk alongside financials. Publish the numbers.
  • Frame agents as accountable colleagues. Define scope. Say what they can do alone, what they must ask, and how they show their working.

A simple operating script for leaders

  • Pick three work moments to transform, not ten. One per function is enough to prove the pattern.
  • Name the teammate, state the job, and publish the metric it will move.
  • Co-design with the team who lives the work, then reshape the workflow around the tool.
  • Switch on live guard rails, log decisions, and show managers what to watch every day.
  • Share the wins in human language so others can copy without a slide deck.

A little about Vigilant AI.ai

We deliver AI teammates for regulated businesses. We enable productivity, safely, with real-time guardrails.

We believe the future of work is AI teammates collaborating with humans to lift outcomes. Others share that belief. Where we differ is how it comes to life:

  • Do it in the flow. Real effectiveness happens inside your existing systems, not in yet another app.
  • Protect in real time. Protection should prevent issues as work happens, not sit in a log after the fact.
  • Empower teams. Give people the tools to shape teammates that solve real problems in their context.

We encourage leaders to see AI differently. Stop treating it like software. Treat it like a teammate. Like any new hire, it needs onboarding and coaching, and people need time and evidence to trust it before it reaches peak productivity.

Sources for further reading

Greg Coleshill, Chief Commercial and Operating Officer

If you want people to make sense of artificial intelligence, start with the words you use.

Language is not window dressing. It frames how people think and, importantly, it influences behaviour.

It decides whether colleagues picture a helpful teammate beside them or a black-box agent wandering off on its own.

Get the language right and you unlock adoption, value and safer outcomes. Get it wrong and you slow everything down.

Teammates, not mysterious agents

Most firms have rolled out horizontal gen-AI tools like chat and document copilots. Useful, yes, but value often feels unclear because leaders talk about a platform rather than a teammate with a clear job.

The shift under way is toward agentic systems that behave like proactive collaborators. The message that lands is simple: describe the colleague that helps a claims handler close a case or a merchandiser tune a range. Skip the abstract platform talk.

Independent studies say the same thing. Adoption is high while genuine transformation is patchy. Pilots stall when tools do not learn from feedback or fit everyday workflows. The fix is to put AI inside specific jobs to be done and measure success on business outcomes, not demo sparkle.

Language that earns trust

Teams follow words they trust.

  • “Copilot that drafts, checks and explains” invites people in.
  • “Agentic automation” can sound like a loss of control unless you pair it with clear rules and visible human oversight.

What works in practice: democratise access, co-design with the people who live the work, and strip out the process friction that blocks vertical use cases from scaling. The best performers keep humans at the centre, use AI to accelerate insight and lean into customer understanding.

The benefits, in plain English

Productivity gains land when you talk like a human.

  • Free up Tuesday afternoons from admin beats promising a thirty per cent uplift.
  • Show how AI moves people to higher value work sooner.
  • Tie every story to a line metric everyone recognises.

Risks deserve everyday words and real-time rails

Jargon does not calm risk. Specifics do. Be clear about what can go wrong and what is watching.

  • Model mistakes that scale fast
  • Quiet data leakage through prompts
  • Over-reliance on a single provider
  • Unclear accountability when agents act

The answer is real-time guard rails and auditable decisions, not policy binders no one reads.

What this looks like in our work

We are focusing on teammates that sit in real workflows and move numbers leaders already track.

Complaints Support Teammate

Drafts clear, plain-English responses that follow DISP rules and our updated procedures. Handlers remain in control and finalise replies. Early targets include higher accuracy, quicker case resolution and fewer reworks. The teammate learns from templates, standards and policy content, and is set up to reduce review time and weekly effort for the team.

Policy Guidance Teammate

Turns our policies and external sources into step-by-step guidance, checklists and examples. Outputs are drafts. Accountability stays with policy owners. The aim is faster, more consistent implementation and less reliance on one team for every question, while raising quality and speeding awareness across the business.

These are not side projects. They sit where work happens, show their sources, and leave an audit trail so risk and audit can see what changed and why.

What we believe

  • Put AI where people work. Build and describe AI as teammates inside frontline workflows. Start narrow with clear success metrics, then scale what works.
  • Make safety real time. Guard rails should be live, not after the fact. Think policy-aware prompts, pre-production red-teaming, continuous monitoring and a reversible button so humans stay in charge.
  • Democratise to teams, not just tech. Let cross-functional teams co-design use cases, own outcomes and iterate weekly. Measure adoption, satisfaction and risk alongside financials. Publish the numbers.
  • Frame agents as accountable colleagues. Define scope. Say what they can do alone, what they must ask, and how they show their working.

A simple operating script for leaders

  • Pick three work moments to transform, not ten. One per function is enough to prove the pattern.
  • Name the teammate, state the job, and publish the metric it will move.
  • Co-design with the team who lives the work, then reshape the workflow around the tool.
  • Switch on live guard rails, log decisions, and show managers what to watch every day.
  • Share the wins in human language so others can copy without a slide deck.

A little about Vigilant AI.ai

We deliver AI teammates for regulated businesses. We enable productivity, safely, with real-time guardrails.

We believe the future of work is AI teammates collaborating with humans to lift outcomes. Others share that belief. Where we differ is how it comes to life:

  • Do it in the flow. Real effectiveness happens inside your existing systems, not in yet another app.
  • Protect in real time. Protection should prevent issues as work happens, not sit in a log after the fact.
  • Empower teams. Give people the tools to shape teammates that solve real problems in their context.

We encourage leaders to see AI differently. Stop treating it like software. Treat it like a teammate. Like any new hire, it needs onboarding and coaching, and people need time and evidence to trust it before it reaches peak productivity.

Sources for further reading