Book Reviews: Emerging Technologies and Digital Communication
Topics: Document design, structured authoring, content strategy, and data/visual communication
AI Meets Strategy: A Product Manager’s Guide to Leading Innovation
Anshuman Srivastava, Abhinav Garg, and Anshuman Mishra. New York, NY: Apress Media LLC (Springer Nature). 2026. 670 pages, including index.
Index Terms — AI product management, digital transformation, professional communication, organizational strategy, responsible AI
Reviewed by Bhavya Lahari Bommireddy, Senior Software Engineer, Microsoft, (bhavyalahari1497@gmail.com)
Review posted 25 March 2026
AI Meets Strategy: A Product Manager’s Guide to Leading Innovation presents itself as a guide for product managers navigating the growing influence of artificial intelligence (AI). In practice, the book speaks to a much broader audience. As a senior software engineer working closely with product, data, and leadership teams, I found the book relevant to anyone involved in building, scaling, or governing AI‑driven systems in real organizations.
What distinguishes this book from many AI‑for‑business titles is its refusal to treat AI as either a purely technical problem or a strategic one. Instead, the authors convincingly argue that AI success emerges from the interaction between technology, data, organizational design, and communication. That framing aligns well with the lived reality of large engineering organizations and makes the book particularly appropriate for an IEEE Professional Communication audience.
The authors structured the book into four major parts, progressing from foundational concepts to operational practice and real‑world case studies. Early chapters establish why AI changes the nature of product leadership, drawing on cognitive science, data economics, and decision theory. These sections may feel abstract at first, but they serve an important role: they make explicit assumptions that often remain implicit in engineering and product discussions.
The middle sections focus on data platforms, operating models, and machine‑learning delivery. Here, the book is at its strongest. The authors treat data as a product, emphasizing ownership, contracts, quality, and governance. The End-to-End Data for Growth and Enablement (EDGE) data operating model reflects a practical understanding of how data systems fail in practice—not due to algorithms, but due to unclear accountability and misaligned incentives.
The final sections synthesize strategy, ethics, and execution through maturity models, checklists, and industry case studies. While dense, these chapters provide a shared vocabulary that can help cross‑functional teams reason more clearly and consistently about AI initiatives.
The central contribution of AI Meets Strategy is its system-level view of AI adoption. Rather than focusing on model performance or tooling alone, the book emphasizes:
- Clarity of purpose: AI initiatives should be driven by well‑articulated business and user outcomes, not technological novelty.
- Data as infrastructure and communication: Data contracts, semantic layers, and governance models function as communication mechanisms as much as technical ones.
- Operational realism: The book is candid about why proofs‑of‑concept fail to scale and why many AI programs stall after initial success.
- Responsible AI: Ethical considerations are woven throughout the lifecycle, not treated as an afterthought.
From an engineering perspective, this framing resonates strongly. Many AI failures I’ve encountered stem not from technical limitations, but from unclear problem definitions, poor communication across roles, and unexamined assumptions about data and decision‑making.
Although not explicitly marketed as a professional communication text, AI Meets Strategy is fundamentally about professional communication in complex technical systems. The authors repeatedly highlight the need for shared language, explicit assumptions, and traceable decisions across engineering, product, legal, and leadership teams.
Concepts such as data ownership, governance frameworks, and AI maturity models serve a communicative function: they make invisible dependencies visible. The book implicitly argues that AI literacy is less about everyone understanding algorithms, and more about enabling organizations to reason clearly about uncertainty, risk, and trade‑offs.
The book’s ambition is also its main limitation. The volume of frameworks, diagrams, and checklists can feel overwhelming, particularly for experienced practitioners who already operate with informal versions of these models. At times, the material could benefit from stronger prioritization or clearer guidance on tailoring the frameworks to organizational context.
Additionally, while the treatment of responsible AI is thoughtful and practical, it remains procedural. The book explains what organizations should do but spends less time engaging with the deeper ethical tensions and value conflicts that arise in real deployments. For an academic audience, this may feel incomplete; for practitioners, it is sufficient.
These critiques, however, do not significantly diminish the book’s value. The authors are clearly optimizing for usefulness in real organizations rather than theoretical completeness.
AI Meets Strategy succeeds because it reflects how AI work unfolds in practice. It acknowledges that technology alone is not the bottleneck, but communication, organizational structure, and shared understanding are.
For senior engineers, the book provides something rare: a structured way to explain engineering realities to non‑technical stakeholders without oversimplifying them. It does not replace deep technical literature, but it complements it by addressing the organizational and communicative layer where many AI initiatives succeed or fail.
This book offers a concrete, industry‑grounded perspective on how communication shapes the design, governance, and impact of complex technical systems. It is a valuable reference for anyone concerned with making AI not just powerful, but understandable, trustworthy, and effective at scale.
The Emotional Intelligence Advantage: Mastering Change and Difficult Conversations
Amy Jacobson. Melbourne, Australia: John Wiley & Sons, Australia, Ltd. 2025. 240 pages.
Index Terms — dealing with change; emotions; management style
Reviewed by Ginny Redish, IEEE Goldsmith Award winner and a consultant in plain language and usability (ginny@redish.net).
Review posted 4 Feb 2026
As Amy Jacobson writes in her chatty, conversational book, The Emotional Intelligence Advantage: Mastering Change and Difficult Conversation, “Whenever there are human beings involved in any situation, there are also emotions” (p. xvi). However, knowing what emotion you or the people you interact with are feeling at a given moment in a given situation may not come naturally. Jacobson cites research that only 36% of people accurately identify emotions as they occur.
So, Jacobson teaches Emotional Intelligence (EI)—a set of concepts and a specific process for helping us hone our “ability to recognise these emotions, manage the emotions as they play out, and understand the impact they have on the people around us and the outcome of the situation” (p. xvi).
This book is a “how-to” with a specific process for recognizing and working through emotional reactions. Although the primary audience for Jacobson’s book is “leaders” (managers and executives), everyone will benefit from learning about and practicing the steps in the EI process.
In Chapter I, Jacobson describes the EI process using three examples: system changes, a new job, and reading her book. While her first example—system changes—could be a workplace example where executives mandate a change for workers, it could also apply to a personal example like adapting to an unwanted software update.
Jacobson’s EI process has 5 steps:
- Own it: The situation is happening. It is your new reality. Become self-aware. Understand yourself —your past, your values, and how you react to situations.
- Face it: What emotions are you feeling? (There’s no such thing as a bad emotion. The question is whether the emotion is appropriate in this situation.) For a workplace change, these first two steps may focus on the leaders who must understand themselves and their emotions before working with others.
- Feel it: Consider what other people who must deal with this change are feeling.
- Ask it: Listen to those people. Let them ask questions. Work through answers together.
- Drive it: Resolve the situation, which often means accepting the change—but now with emotions externalized, acknowledged, and discussed.
In The Emotional Intelligence Advantage, Jacobson has many useful insights about change and emotions. For example, she points out that change always means losing something. Even when you welcome the change and are happy about it, you have lost something. So, it is important to acknowledge that loss and the feelings of loss before moving forward in the new situation.
For those of us who are technical and practical, understanding and dealing with emotions, especially in the workplace, may feel strange. But emotions are there. And that leads Jacobson to remind us, “It is okay to feel emotions. It is not okay to ignore or downplay them” (p. 83).
Knowing that the EI concepts and process will be new to many people, Jacobson has specific advice, even possible wording, for how to have the difficult conversations that arise as people deal with change in policies, in procedures, in staffing, in assignments, in the tools they must use for their work.
She shares stories of organizations where change went smoothly because leaders and workers went carefully through the entire 5-step process and stories of less successful organizations that ignored or missed steps. You may want to think about your own experiences in different situations, considering how your organization (or you, yourself) used something like Jacobson’s EI process or could have benefited by doing so.
The Emotional Intelligence Advantage is both easy to read and deep in its ideas. I particularly like that Jacobson has worked to make the book interactive. She intersperses her teaching with shaded sections labeled Ask, where she speaks directly to us with questions to consider.
For example, early on, she asks: “How well do you know the people you work with (especially those you lead)?…What can you work on today to better understand how other people are feeling?” (p. 18).
Later, as she talks about the excuses (justifications, limitations) we use to avoid difficult conversations or tasks, Jacobson asks us to consider, “What is ultimately stopping me from doing this? What is the potential outcome that I struggle with the most should it happen? What will I do if this does happen?” (p. 128).
Combining Jacobson’s teaching and insights with using her Ask sections as a workbook can help us all improve our emotional intelligence.
Creativity in PR and Communications: Concepts and Practices for Innovation
Jon Cope and Stuart Mayell. New York, NY: Kogan Page Limited. 2026. 374 pages, including indexes.
Index Terms — Creative processes, creativity in PR, ethics and AI, innovative practices, professional applications
Reviewed by Mickella Rast (mickellarast@gmail.com).
Review posted 4 Feb 2026
Creativity in PR and Communications: Concepts and practices for innovation is a text that is upfront about what it presents and delivers in every way. Jon Cope and Stuart Mayell discuss clear creative concepts, a plethora of creative and innovative practices, and propose a multitude of applications across public relations (PR), communications, and other relevant fields.
The authors break the book into three sections: (1) Introduction to creativity; (2) Creativity in practice; and (3) Issues in creativity. The subject matter in each section remains true to its name. All chapters open with a succinct outline and, with the exception of Section One, Chapter 01: What is creativity?, all chapters close with a breakdown of concluding thoughts, questions, exercises, glossary, and notes. The authors also provide two appendices for further reading and assistance: a creative thinking checklist and an inventory of creative stimuli.
Section One starts with a brief overview of what the book is about, who it’s for, and how it’s organized. The second chapter contextualizes creativity and lays the foundation for the rest of the book. It covers relevant creativity theory, history, and definitions. Spoiler alert: Cope and Mayell do not provide a single definition for “creativity,” but instead review several definitions and famous quotes that readers could find useful. By introducing creativity from several angles, readers can apply whichever approach(es) work best for their personal processes and professional needs.
The remainder of Section One argues about why creativity is necessary in PR and communications and explains how audiences can position themselves creatively. “Creativity” and “innovation” are terms that are vague and may be difficult to reconcile with professional settings, given that they are based in imagination and, often, a lack of precedence or reference. But Cope and Mayell clearly identify how creativity has been tied with PR and communications since the advent of those fields. The heart of this section focuses on the argument that “creativity isn’t just for artists or specialists — it’s a mindset and a skill that belongs at the heart of modern PR practice” (p. 45).
Section Two is a practical walkthrough of the steps Cope and Mayell identify for implementing creativity into your work: research, brief and plan, acquire insight, generate ideas, and evaluate. Section Three is a much-needed and frank address of the current issues with creativity, which are likely to continue into the future: artificial intelligence (AI), ethics, and global communications. Cope and Mayell outline how creativity can be a powerful force, whether for effecting legal change, changing public opinion, spreading knowledge, generating profit, or another goal. At the same time, the authors are upfront about complicating factors like misinformation, political and religious influences, and eroding public trust. Further keeping Creativity in PR and Communications grounded in reality are real-world examples of campaigns, interviews with PR professionals, creative exercises, and tips and thought prompts about your own creative processes.
Notably, the information has a wide range of potential applications, mirroring the overlap between PR and communications and other professional fields that opens Creativity in PR and Communications up to a wide range of audiences. The culmination of these chapters is a final text that is thoughtfully-curated and filled with practical, feasible solutions for integrating creative processes into your work.