When AI Took Over Content, Olga Lany Doubled Down on Being Human [Interview]

Part of an ongoing series exploring how women are experiencing the rise of AI in their work and personal lives.

One of the biggest fears surrounding AI is that it will eventually replace the work humans have spent years mastering. Writers worry about writing. Designers worry about design. Marketers worry about content. Communications professionals worry about messaging.

But the professionals getting the most value from AI aren't the ones trying to compete with it. They're the ones who have become even more intentional about the uniquely human parts of their work. That's exactly what stood out during my conversation with Olga Lany.

Working in public relations and partnerships means your reputation is built on credibility, communication, and authentic human connections. At first glance, it might seem like AI would threaten that kind of work. Instead, Olga sees the opposite happening. By taking repetitive tasks off her plate, AI allows her to spend more time where she creates the greatest value. She focused on building relationships, thinking strategically, and focusing on meaningful conversations rather than administrative work.

Meet the Interviewee

Olga Lany is a PR & Partnerships Manager at Admind Branding and Communications, a global branding agency headquartered in Poland that works with brands across Europe and beyond.

Interview

Before AI became widely adopted, how would you describe your work and daily responsibilities?

Throughout most of my career, I have worked in the fields of language and human connection rather than with tools.

As a Senior PR & Partnerships Manager at Admind, a global branding and communications agency, my days revolved around media relations across Poland and Europe, building partnerships, organising events and conferences, and shaping how our experts present themselves publicly, particularly on LinkedIn.

I placed enormous value on the work of journalists, their judgement, credibility and the relationships I built with them, ideally face-to-face, formed the real foundation of what I did.

Everything else was manual, too: I drafted pitches and press materials by hand, did my own research and wrote and rewrote copy until the voice felt right. This approach was slower, but it meant that every text carried a point of view that I had shaped myself, and every relationship was built in person.

How does AI currently intersect with your work or personal life?

It of course touches almost everything I do, but in a variety of ways.

In practice, it has become my daily work partner. I use it to structure texts, speed up research and free up hours that I previously lost to repetitive tasks. This has taken me in a direction I never expected: I taught myself to 'vibe code'. Within a few days, I had built my first small app: one that reads several of my Outlook newsletters, filters the content and sends me Slack notifications with the important information. I had no idea what an API was before, so I'm genuinely proud of that achievement.

On the professional side, however, AI also forces me to confront some uncomfortable questions about my own field. Creating an authentic presence on LinkedIn is part of my job, so when I come across a post that is entirely AI-generated (AI headshot, AI comments, and the author replying to all of it via ChatGPT), I don't just notice it as a user; as a PR professional, I feel it too.

The flood of AI-generated 'slop' is impossible to ignore: many journalists have lost their jobs, and much of today's content is produced mainly to game SEO and SERP rankings rather than to express real opinion or expertise.

However, I see a silver lining in this. In a world flooded with synthetic content, building credibility for brands and individuals has to happen differently, and PR value and a genuinely authentic voice are becoming valuable again. That credibility increasingly comes from real human judgement, not volume. I think people in my profession, copywriters and others whose work is based on relationships and a genuine network rather than just output, are entering the most valuable period we have seen.

In my personal life, I mostly use AI to research family trips and to create quizzes and learning tools to help my daughter with her schoolwork.

It's funny, though, that I still don't have a single AI app or tool installed on my phone.

What AI tools, if any, do you regularly use?

I started with ChatGPT, mainly to help me structure texts and speed up my research. I also regularly use other tools to reformat or rework text outside the ChatGPT environment. I use Perplexity for research and Copilot and Gemini to compare results across models.

However, I feel most at home with Claude, together with all its connectors. I'm not a developer by background, so these tools aren't about replacing expertise for me — they're about giving someone without a technical background the confidence to build something useful anyway.

A recent example that I'm still excited about is as follows: I used a single prompt in Claude to automatically create a FigJam board, ran a live workshop with my team on that board and then asked Claude to read the board, summarise it and automatically send the summary to every workshop participant. Ultimately, it transformed the essence of the framework we had developed into a PowerPoint presentation for the management board.

My Claude is connected to pretty much every tool I use day to day, including Microsoft (especially Outlook), Slack, Canva, Google Drive, FigJam and more, which is exactly why it's become my go-to tool, including for the newsletter-to-Slack app I mentioned.

Can you describe a specific moment when you realized AI was directly affecting your work, career, or personal life?

To be honest, I can't pinpoint one specific moment. It all happened organically. I'm still hit with that mix of amazement and shock almost every week. Just today, for example, I watched Adobe Firefly transform two photos and a single prompt into an impressive short animation with great resolution, the idea for which I wouldn't necessarily have come up with myself.

What was your initial reaction? Please explain why you experienced that emotion?

Excitement

That mix of fascination and unease stems from two different sources, but fascination has always been the stronger of the two for me.

I've never been afraid of technology, and I think that dates back to my childhood. My father was an electrical engineer who finished his studies around 1979, when computers first started appearing in Poland, and I grew up with Ataris and Commodores at home. I still remember experimenting with the earliest 'drawing' features on the Atari text editor on our old TV's black-and-white monitor...

I'm genuinely curious about change and enjoy streamlining my work so that I can devote more time and energy to creativity and the skills that depend on real human interaction - the tasks that only a person can perform.

I've never feared that technology would take my job or opportunities away. Quite the opposite, in fact, I see technology as something that expands my capabilities. I'm also happy (and a little proud) that I get to be the technology expert for my teenage daughter. As any parent of a teenager knows, that's not necessarily guaranteed!

But it is also important to recognise how much power something so exciting could carry and how quickly the line between 'creative tool' and 'tool that can manipulate reality' can blur. Change excites me and I enjoy learning new things, but that doesn't mean I stop considering what's at stake.

What has been the biggest positive impact AI has had on your life or work?

Honestly, the biggest impact has been the confidence it has given me to build things myself.

However, the real value isn't just the time saved, but it's what that time gets reinvested into. Every hour that AI takes off research, formatting or repetitive admin is an hour that I can spend on the things that I still think matter most in PR: building real relationships, reading a room and telling a story that lands because it was shaped by a human.

For me, that's the biggest positive impact: AI hasn't replaced the human part of my work; it's protected it.

What has been the biggest challenge, frustration, or downside?

What frustrates me most is the flood of poor-quality AI-generated content.

The hardest part is the impact on trust. My job is to build credibility for brands and individuals, and credibility used to be earned through consistency and authenticity over time. Now, I have to assume that a significant proportion of what I read, including comments and replies, may not be written by a real person. This makes distinguishing a genuine voice from a synthetic one more difficult and exhausting than it used to be, and it's frustrating to see something that's supposed to bring people closer together making us more sceptical of each other instead.

There's also a more personal, and almost amusing, downside that I've experienced a few times: a small wave of panic when I run out of tokens in Claude mid-task or when ChatGPT freezes. In those moments, I have to remind myself consciously that I have the competence, knowledge and know-how to do this work without AI. I did it for nearly two decades before any of these tools existed. Although, to be fair, without a computer or phone, I'd have zero chance of producing any results these days!

Has AI changed how you think about your skills, value, creativity, or professional identity?

AI has made me more aware of where my actual value lies.

Seeing content flooded with poor-quality AI-generated material and journalists losing work to it has made me far more deliberate about what I can offer that machines can't: real relationships, judgement about the meaning of a story, and a distinctive voice.

I used to take some of these things for granted as just 'part of the job'. Now, however, I recognise these as my core assets - things that will become more valuable as everything around them becomes automated.

So, if anything, AI has clarified my professional identity rather than diminishing it. My job isn't to compete with AI on speed or output volume. My job is to be the human credibility behind the work, the part that can't be prompted into existence.

Have you ever felt pressure to learn or adapt to AI faster than you were comfortable with?

No, I've never actually felt that kind of pressure. In fact, it's usually the other way around. I'm often the one encouraging my team to experiment with new tools and ways of using them, rather than being pushed to keep up.

At Admind, the branding and communications agency where I work, everyone (designers, strategists and marketers) is encouraged to use AI.

However, the approach feels more inspirational than mandatory. Nobody sets you a deadline to 'learn AI by Friday'; people share what they've found useful and show each other what's worked, and this curiosity spreads naturally throughout the team.

Honestly, my own curiosity and excitement about new tools has always outweighed any external pressure. By the time anyone might think to encourage me to try something new, I've usually already been experimenting with it for a while. :)

Have you experienced any situations where AI created unfairness, bias, exclusion, or unexpected opportunities?

While I haven't personally experienced AI creating direct bias or exclusion against me, I have definitely seen unfair practices play out in my industry. The clearest example of this is what has already happened to journalists. Many have lost their jobs as AI-generated, SEO/GEO-optimised content has flooded the space that used to belong to real reporting and expertise.

It feels genuinely unfair that people with real judgement and credibility are losing ground to content produced by a machine.

Do you think AI has affected expectations at work (productivity, speed, output, hiring, promotions, etc.)?

Definitely, particularly with regard to productivity and speed. Tasks that used to take hours, such as drafting a first version of a text, doing research or summarising a workshop, now take minutes, and this naturally resets expectations. Nobody has explicitly told me to 'do more, faster', but once you have experienced how much AI can compress, it becomes the new baseline against which you measure yourself, and probably what others expect from you too.

I see this most clearly in terms of output volume and turnaround time. Whereas a press pitch or a recap deck used to take a day, it is now expected within hours simply because the tools make that possible. The flip side is that this speed sets the floor, not the ceiling. You're still expected to contribute strategic judgement, relationships and polish. Output alone isn't enough anymore; it has to be both fast and genuinely good.

What advice would you give other women navigating AI's growing influence in their careers or lives?

My biggest piece of advice is not to wait until you feel 'technical enough' to start. Curiosity matters far more than a technical background ever will.

Secondly, focus on what makes you irreplaceable rather than trying to compete with AI on its own terms. AI can write and summarise quickly and produce a lot, but it can't build real relationships, read a room or earn someone's trust over time.

These are the very skills that many people have built entire careers on - communication, empathy and judgement - and they're becoming increasingly valuable as the internet fills up with synthetic content. Don't see AI as a threat to these skills; see it as something that finally frees up time to utilise them more.

Start exploring, stay curious, and never stop :)

Are you more optimistic or more concerned about AI's future impact? Why?

To be honest, I'd say I'm more optimistic than concerned.

Not in a naive way. I've seen the real downsides.

However, I'm optimistic because I think the flood of synthetic content makes real human voices more valuable, not less. For any of this to keep working, something has to stay real - these models need real stories, real data and real trust to train on.

People get tired of sameness. So I think the demand for authenticity will only grow.

For people like me, whose work is based on relationships and judgement, I believe there will always be a place. So yes, I'm optimistic, but this optimism depends on people choosing to continue building the human element rather than assuming AI will do it for them.

Complete this sentence: "AI has changed my life by __________."

...turning me, completely unexpectedly, into a confident "vibe coder" and giving me back the time to focus on the human relationships and creativity that originally attracted me to this line of work.

Final Thoughts

What I found most compelling about Olga's story is that it flips one of the biggest narratives around AI on its head.

We're constantly told that AI will replace writers, marketers, designers, communicators, and creative professionals. Yet Olga's experience points in a different direction.

The more AI takes over repetitive execution, the more valuable distinctly human qualities become.

Trust cannot be generated with a prompt.

Relationships cannot be automated.

Credibility cannot be synthesized.

These are things that are earned over years through judgment, consistency, empathy, and genuine human interaction. AI may accelerate the mechanics of communication, but it still relies on people to decide what is worth saying, who needs to hear it, and why it matters.

Are you a woman using AI in your work, business, studies, or daily life? I'd love to hear your perspective. If AI has changed how you work, create, learn, lead, or think about your future, share your story in the comments. I'm always looking for new voices and would be happy to interview you for a future edition of this series.