AI as Gatekeepers
Gatekeepers have been the most toughest hurdle to cross from time immemorial before one can reach out to the powers that maybe. Be it the Kotwal in the courts of the emperor or the king, or the celestial guards of the gods or meeting the modern day corporate czars.
I started my career in sales. My first job was going door to door and canvas for newspaper subscriptions. Well, that was the easy part of the job. The tougher part was Institutional Sales. It was a time when every institution worth its salt had its own hierarchy of barriers. To reach the boss, one had to first cross the darban, then the receptionist, then the chaprasi, and if you were lucky (and well-dressed), the secretary. These human gatekeepers didn’t just regulate access—they defined power. Gatekeeping was not just functional, it was theatrical. A ritual of deferral that reminded you where you stood.
Today, something eerily similar is happening—except the gatekeepers wear no uniforms, have no expressions, and sit not at desks, but in code. Artificial Intelligence has quietly slipped into the corridors of marketing and communication, assuming the role of the modern-day gatekeeper. And like all good gatekeepers, it controls both entry and exit—but with none of the drama.
Let’s start with the sender. A marketer today drafts an email to a client. Before it even reaches human eyes, AI has stepped in. It corrects grammar, flags tone, suggests simpler words, checks for spam triggers, and optimises the subject line to maximise open rates. What we send out is no longer purely us. It’s us—after machine approval.
Now shift to the receiver’s end. That same email is greeted not by the client’s curiosity, but by a machine’s suspicion. Algorithms evaluate whether the email should land in the inbox or the junk folder. AI filters assess whether it’s relevant, promotional, or potentially intrusive. What once was a direct line of communication is now a minefield of automated judgment.
The same holds true for social media. Posts are curated by algorithms, visibility dictated by engagement predictions, language analysed for sentiment. As communicators, we now perform for an audience of one—the AI gatekeeper—long before we perform for the actual audience.
In the old world, you knew who the gatekeeper was. You could smile at the receptionist, strike a conversation with the chaprasi, send a Diwali gift to the secretary. Access was transactional, yes, but it was also human.
Today, you don’t even know what stopped your message from getting through. The gatekeeper is invisible and un-bribeable. It has no ego to flatter and no tea breaks to exploit. And yet, it shapes your success of your message delivery.
Yes, AI makes us more efficient, but it also makes us less original. When AI suggests subject lines, corrects tone, and predicts virality, we all risk sounding the same—inoffensive, hyper-optimised, and devoid of texture. Just as bureaucracy once flattened the human spirit, AI may be flattening our voice—one autocorrect at a time.
Talking about bureaucracy, I strongly believe that AI can easily replace their work…at least a lot of their work. Let’s look at the commonalities of both:
Bureaucracy has rules, forms, protocols. So does AI. Bureaucracy evaluates, approves, rejects, escalates. So does AI. Bureaucracy hides behind opaque systems, doesn’t explain itself, and—most importantly—it doesn’t listen. So does AI :)
The only key difference is, earlier, bureaucracy stifled by slowing us down due to processes. AI speeds things up.
AI as a new kind of bureaucracy means, like I mentioned above, that it dulls creativity. We start crafting messages and making sure to pass through filters—linguistic, visual, emotional, then we all sound the same. But the most powerful communication is often the one that breaks form—not fits it. It surprises, it irritates, it sticks out like a sore thumb. The very things AI is designed to smoothen out.
In a world where every message passes through silent filters, maybe the new rebellion is not bypassing the gatekeeper—but reminding it that sometimes, a human knocking out of turn deserves to be let in.
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