S3: Ep 1 | Season 3 Starts Here: Ownership, Attention & AI

Fresh Perspectives returns for a third season, and for the first time it has a theme running through it: ownership. David Bowman and Jarbas Horst open the season by unpicking what ownership actually asks of you. Owning a space; comms, IT, HR, a team, usually ends up meaning you add to it. More content, more channels, more announcements. David’s argument is that real ownership works the other way round: it’s the ability to reduce, remove and say no. The conversation runs straight into Fresh’s research report, the Employee Attention Recession, which surveyed internal comms professionals and employees across the UK and US. Only 12% of employees said they read internal communications in full. The rest skim, read headlines, hand it to AI, or ignore it entirely and the number one reason given was cumulative volume rather than anything about the content itself. David and Jarbas work through the report’s central paradox, where 95% of employees are confident AI captures the key points of their internal comms while 92% of comms professionals worry those same summaries are distorting meaning and tone. They cover the levers the report offers, from treating attention as a finite budget you negotiate over, to writing content that can survive being compressed, to the governance gap where employees are using AI to interpret content that comms teams have no visibility of.