Identifying stakeholders and planning how to communicate with them is a critical—and often political—aspect of project management. An AI can help you brainstorm a list of potential stakeholders and draft an initial communication plan, especially when you provide it with an example of a successful plan from the past.

The Strategy: Template and Brainstorming

Here, we use the AI in two ways: first, to brainstorm who the stakeholders might be, and second, to use a past plan as a template for how to engage them.

Step 1: Anonymize Your Previous Communication Plan Find a simple communication plan from a past project. This could just be a table in a Word document or an Excel sheet. Anonymize it by removing names and specific project details.

Example Anonymized Template:

Project [Internal Code Name] Communication Plan

Stakeholder Group	Key Interest	Communication Method	Frequency
Executive Sponsor	ROI, Major Milestones	Bi-weekly Email Summary	Every 2 Weeks
Engineering Team	Technical Specs, Blockers	Daily Stand-up, Slack	Daily
Marketing Team	Launch Date, Key Features	Weekly Project Meeting	Weekly

Step 2: Craft Your Prompt Now, create a prompt that asks the AI to identify stakeholders for your new project and then use your template to structure a communication plan for them.

Example Prompt:

"Act as a Senior Communications Manager for a project to redesign our company's internal employee portal.

First, please brainstorm a list of potential stakeholder groups for this project.

Second, using that list, create a 'Stakeholder Communication Plan'.

CRITICAL: You must use the exact format and column headers from the example plan provided below. Fill in the table with appropriate communication methods and frequencies for the new employee portal project.

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EXAMPLE COMMUNICATION PLAN:

[Paste your anonymized template text here] ---"

Why This Works

The AI will first think broadly about who would be affected by an employee portal redesign (e.g., 'HR Department', 'IT Security', 'All Employees', 'Executive Leadership'). Then, it will use your proven template to organize its suggestions.

The result is a structured communication plan, tailored to your new project but consistent with your past successful strategies. You can copy this table into Word or Excel as a starting point for your official project documentation.