#tbh - AI, Booking Emails, and the Risk of Losing Your Voice as an Agent

AI tools have quietly become part of everyday work in the music industry. Tools like ChatGPT help organise thoughts, speed things up, and sometimes offer a clearer way to express something that feels messy in our heads.

In many ways, that’s a gift.

But there’s another side to it that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, especially in booking work.

When AI becomes the default way we communicate, we risk losing something that’s much harder to replace: our own voice.

Using AI for emails can start to feel like standing behind a shield. Everything sounds correct, balanced, and neutral. A bit like applying the same filter to every photo. It works for a while, until you meet in real life and your actual personality comes through anyway.

In booking, that moment always arrives.

For this reason, AI has never been a core part of how I communicate with artists or promoters. There are rare situations where distance and formality are helpful, for example when an artist has to cancel and the message needs to be carefully framed. In those cases, AI can help keep things clear and contained.

But for day-to-day communication, choosing my own words matters to me.

I understand why people lean on AI, especially early on. Writing emails can feel intimidating. Tone is hard to judge. Grammar isn’t always perfect. There’s a fear of saying the wrong thing. But those small imperfections are also how you learn quickly. You see how people respond. You adjust. You develop a sense of timing and nuance that no tool can fully replicate.

There’s another question I keep coming back to.

What happens if both sides are using AI?

If one agent writes with ChatGPT and the other replies with ChatGPT, where is the person in that exchange? Who is actually communicating? And over time, what does that do to how replaceable we become?

Of course, it’s possible to train AI to sound more like you. And in some cases, that can work surprisingly well. But when I look closely at real email exchanges, the difference is still there. You can feel when something was written by a person. Even if the grammar is off. Even if the tone isn’t perfect.

That difference is personality.

Long-term relationships in booking rarely survive because of perfect communication. They survive because of how it feels to work together. Trust builds through tone, humour, honesty, and small human details that don’t show up in templates.

Many artists stay with agents for years not because everything was smooth, but because the relationship felt real. And even when they leave, that human layer is often what they miss.

This isn’t an argument against AI. I use it too, to reflect, to learn, to reframe ideas. Sometimes it offers a genuinely good way of looking at something. But tools should support thinking, not replace presence.

If you do use AI regularly, one simple rule helps.

Never send it as-is.

Change it. Rewrite it. Make it sound like you. Let your rhythm, your humour, your way of thinking come through. Otherwise, over time, you risk sounding like everyone else.

And in a profession built on relationships, that’s not a small thing to give up.

Where this fits into learning the work properly

Questions around communication, tone, and decision-making come up again and again when people start working in booking, or when they move into an agency environment more seriously.

Inside Become an Agent, I look at these topics from the agent’s point of view. Not as abstract ideas, but as part of the everyday reality of booking work. Writing emails, handling sensitive situations, negotiating, and building long-term relationships without losing your own voice in the process.

The course focuses on how booking agencies actually operate in practice, and how to develop structures and habits that support real working relationships over time.

If this article resonates, Become an Agent is where these ideas are explored further and applied to real booking situations.

👉 Become an Agent

AI will keep evolving. Booking will keep moving fast.

What doesn’t change is this: people remember how communication feels, long after they forget the exact words.

That’s where your voice still matters most.