This week, my team used AI to do something really useful.
We had a backlog of initiative proposals — good ideas, drafted by different people, in different formats and structures. AI applied a consistent structure across all of them and summarised each under two lenses: what it is, and what value it brings.
The output was good. A few things needed adjusting, of course — but the owners reviewed them, made their changes, approved them.
That part worked. The review worked.
Then, as we were preparing to send, the em dash hunt began. A skim through each one to see if the sentence should be reshaped around it, and then a find-and-replace, em dash to hyphen, for whatever was left.
But it’s still a dash breaking a sentence, just a shorter one. A reader spots it at a glance. And here’s the trap: once everyone swaps the em dash for a hyphen, the hyphen becomes the tell. Do we now just assume a search-and-replace has happened?
It got me thinking.
Nothing was wrong with the content. The logic was clear, it landed, the dashes were structurally sound. But the instinct to cover up that AI was involved won anyway.
We were spending time hiding the tool we’re encouraged to use. And therein lies the irony — the paradox.
We’re lucky to be empowered to use AI at work. We’re rising to the new benchmark of humans assisted by AI, and that’s right. So in an AI-friendly workplace, sending internal comms, how should we feel about an em dash?
The Spent Minutes
It sounds like a quick job. But anything more than a blind find-and-replace means reviewing each sentence for the right alternative: comma, colon, semicolon, full stop, hyphen. And it carries a quiet overhead — the deciding, the second-guessing, the questioning of whether those precious seconds are worth it at all.
AI had given us time back and got us further, faster. Much faster, in this case: aligning all that content into one consistent structure by hand would have cost real drafting and review time.
The Reader
The more I sat with it, the more the answer pointed at one thing. The audience. The reader. Who are we sending this to, and who actually reads it?
As the drafters, reviewers, and approvers, we should embrace that we used AI — it’s a powerful tool. Our focus should be the content: is it accurate, is it clear, is it brief. Accountability lands when we put our names to it and send. And not only the person who clicks send — everyone who reviewed and approved it attached their name along the way. That’s what the reader is trusting: that we did the work, and that it’s fit to serve its purpose.
Which, tying it back to product management, is just knowing your stakeholder. Who receives this, and how will they read it — em dash and all?
Inside a company that encourages AI, that bar holds. The reader can safely assume that a sent, signed communication is a good one. But out in public — where perception and social forces reign supreme — that’s where you might have to pay back some of the time AI saved you, smoothing over the ‘tells’ that arrive with each new model.
Nike found the edge of this. They posted a caption celebrating Jannik Sinner: ‘This isn’t just history—it’s his story in the making.’ The internet called it ChatGPT — not because it was wrong, unclear, or off-brand, but because of a single em dash. The caption was fine. That’s exactly the point: in public, fine isn’t always enough.
The Canary
The astute reader will object: in an organisation embracing AI, a mature workflow handles this upstream — context engineering, skills, prompting that instructs the model never to use an em dash, removing the problem entirely.
But as we’ve all found, that isn’t reliable. They creep in. As the context window fills, the style guide is the first thing quietly dropped. And when a dash slips through a process built to stop it, we get nervous about what else slipped with it.
That nervousness is the useful part. The em dash is highly visible; the things that actually matter — a wrong number, a missed caveat — are not. So don’t read the dash as something to hide. Read it as the prompt to go looking for the misses you can’t see.
Own It
So own it. Own the work, and spend the minutes making sure it’s accurate, clear, and brief. Know who you’re sending it to, and how they’ll read it. Then let the dash fall where it does.
The em dash can stay. Most of the time.