Managing workplace communication is a challenge for anyone: How do you make sure your boss knows what you’ve achieved without seeming to brag? How do you kindly convey corrective feedback to a direct report? And what about all that jargon—“moving the needle,” “building the plane while flying it,” and the incessant talk of back and front burners?
But for neurodivergent workers, navigating the nuances of workplace communication can become a daily source of stress and anxiety.
When Billy Hendry, who has dyslexia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and autism was laid off from his job as a project manager at a New Zealand information technology company, he was daunted. In the past, Hendry has struggled with some of the key tasks necessary for getting a job: writing a well-crafted cover letter and résumé, for example, and communicating with a potential employer by email. “I believe I’m able to interview really well, but it’s that initial selling myself on a piece of paper that I struggle with,” he says.
But this time, he tells Fortune, he had a secret weapon: ChatGPT.
Since its release in November 2022, ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, and other artificial-intelligence-powered large language models have overhauled the way we work. And an increasing number of people with ADHD, autism, and dyslexia are turning to these tools to create or fine-tune text—helping them to get along in a world that can be unforgiving to those whose behaviors and communication styles don’t come across as “neurotypical.” One in 50 people in the United States lives with autism spectrum disorder and the social, communication, and behavioral challenges it can present, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
In neurodivergent circles, there’s much discussion of “masking”—suppressing traits to fit into the norms of a workplace or society dominated by neurotypical people—as another burden that neurodivergent people have to shoulder when they shouldn’t have to. But for Hendry, the use of AI isn’t about hiding who he is. “I don’t believe in masking my neurodivergence,” he says. “However, I would say that [AI] has allowed me to communicate more easily with people around me.”
Hendry had previously used online tools like Grammarly, which reviews and corrects spelling and grammatical errors, to aid his writing, but AI-powered tools take it a step further. He was able to type into ChatGPT’s prompt box what he would like to include in a cover letter, alongside his CV, and receive wording that accentuated his positives in a way that made clear to recruiters where his skills lie.
Hendry found that the AI sometimes shifted his tone, turning up the volume of his exuberance about the job opportunity, for example. “To whom it may concern, I am writing to apply for the position of project manager” became “Dear Hiring Manager, I am excited to apply for the project manager position at your esteemed organization.”
Hendry’s AI-drafted cover letter got him an interview with New Zealand’s Ministry of Business, Innovation, and Employment. From there he aced the interview and landed a job as a senior project coordinator. But without the assist from AI, he reckons he wouldn’t have even made it into the interview room.
On the job, Hendry is also utilizing AI for communications, but in a much more circumspect manner. Given concerns about incidents of employees putting confidential and proprietary data into the text generator and losing control of its use, Hendry sticks to using it as a work email polisher. He has a Google Sheet of around 15 predefined keywords he regularly uses to prompt ChatGPT, ranging from “professional” to “polite” to “formal” and “direct.”
Outside of work the tool helps Hendry, too, with communications in dating and socializing. “I’ve been playing a little bit with ‘flirty,’ which is less work-related, but has been quite good,” he says. “With autism, I don’t really get how to flirt, so putting it in there and it giving me what to say has been useful.” He can turn three short sentences asking to catch up for coffee into a confident, if perhaps overly earnest, missive asking for a date, he tells Fortune.
Jennifer Cairns, who has autism and ADHD, says she uses ChatGPT to enforce brevity in her email communication. The founder of the Lady Rebel Club movement, a U.K.-based group for creatives who are neurodivergent or have disabilities, Cairns says she can tie herself up in knots trying to send a simple note. “If I’m writing an email or trying to think what to say, I can overthink things,” she tells Fortune. Cairns will ask the AI tool to generate five bullet points she needs to get across in an email—and then stick to them.
Christina Philippe, a senior digital strategist at the advertising agency Ogilvy in Berlin, who has ADHD, says she has found AI can take some of the anxiety out of communication. She had struggled with a long-standing issue with her landlord, for example, and she used ChatGPT to outline, without emotion, the frustrations she felt and a request to fix the problems. “I’d been trying to write this email for weeks,” she tells Fortune. With AI, it took minutes.
And, Philippe tells Fortune, she has found uses for AI that go beyond communication. She has found it can help her stay focused and engaged with the task at hand. She first used the tool when working on a project for a client that was full of tech-heavy lingo. “I had no idea what it actually meant,” she says. “I knew if I was going to get this project finished, I had to get into all the meanings of this.” The problem was that ADHD can lead people quickly down rabbit holes: Philippe worried that she’d become fixated on knowing everything about the technology, rather than gathering just what she needed to know to complete the project.
So she began asking ChatGPT to explain key concepts in the field to her as if she were 5 years old—a common prompt. The actual wording she used was “explain quantum computing to me like I am new to it.” Then she asked the large language learning model to give an overview of areas she should research further, and a structure in which to do so. The whole process took just 20 minutes, she says, and she completed the project without drifting off to something else.
Large language models can be a game changer for neurodivergent people in the workplace, says Cary Cooper, a professor of organizational psychology at the University of Manchester in the U.K., and a former president of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), a U.K. human resources industry association. “For people with autism, this would be very helpful,” he says. (Cooper has a grandson with severe autism.) “They don’t have a lack of social skills, but they do have difficulty putting constructs together in a logical way.”
This isn’t about using AI to shirk work or to replace human labor, Hendry says. It’s about helping neurodivergent people do their best work, and to overcome the communication gaps that many of them struggle with. “I think there’s a lot of people like myself that will use it as an aid to help with their disabilities,” says Hendry. “AI tools like ChatGPT and Google Bard … provide me with the means to bridge these gaps, helping me navigate social situations more smoothly, and potentially reducing the stigmatization that often comes with being neurodivergent.”
