Professor Zoran Tomić is launching a new research and writing project devoted to Intelligent Communication—the human capacity to understand oneself and others, create shared meaning, build trust, and shape interpersonal relationships responsibly.
Chapters from the forthcoming book will initially be published as a series of columns on the PR TOMIĆ portal.
Never before have human beings possessed so many opportunities to communicate. We exchange messages instantaneously, interact regardless of physical distance, and share our views with thousands of people. Artificial intelligence can help us write a letter, speech, social media post, analysis, or response to almost any question within seconds.
We communicate more frequently, more rapidly, and with greater technological efficiency than ever before.
However, does this mean that we communicate better?
Do we understand other people more deeply? Do we know how to listen to what lies behind their words? Can we recognise the emotions, needs, fears, and expectations that shape the meaning of a conversation? Do people feel heard, respected, and understood in our presence? These questions provide the starting point for a new research and book project entitled Intelligent Communication.
Continuing a Long-Term Inquiry into Human Communication
The project represents a theoretical and practical development of my previous books, Temelji međuljudske komunikacije (Foundations of Interpersonal Communication) and Umijeće komuniciranja (The Art of Communication). Foundations of Interpersonal Communication, co-authored with Damir Jugo, systematically examined the theoretical foundations of human Communication: the communication process, perception, verbal and non-verbal Communication, listening, emotions, identity, interpersonal relationships, and other factors that determine how people exchange messages and create meaning.
The Art of Communication brought this theoretical knowledge closer to everyday, professional, and public communication situations. It focused on developing practical competencies such as clear expression, active listening, understanding one's interlocutor, asking questions, argumentation, public speaking, negotiation, and responsible influence.
Intelligent Communication continues this intellectual and authorial trajectory while introducing a new research question: what lies beyond individual communication knowledge and skills? What makes Communication not only effective and successful, but genuinely intelligent? Knowledge of communication techniques is not sufficient. A person may speak persuasively without understanding others. One may attract attention yet lose trust, win an argument while permanently damaging a relationship, or achieve an immediate objective while producing long-term consequences that were neither anticipated nor intended.
Intelligent Communication is therefore not merely a question of what we know how to say. It is a question of whether we understand what we are doing through our words.
Revealing the Hidden Mechanisms of Interpersonal Relationships
Numerous invisible communication processes operate between people. We bring into every conversation not only words, but also our experiences, emotions, values, expectations, fears, and perceptions of ourselves and others. The same sentence may signify support to one person and criticism to another. Silence may be interpreted as respect, indifference, insecurity, or hostility.
Meaning, therefore, does not reside solely in words.
It emerges through the encounter between people.
The purpose of the Intelligent Communication project is to investigate precisely these hidden mechanisms and "secrets" of interpersonal relationships: why people who speak the same language so often fail to understand one another; why some words create closeness while others produce distance; how trust develops; why conversations escalate into conflict; how emotions shape our interpretation of messages; what may be concealed behind silence; and how different perspectives can be brought together to establish a sufficient degree of shared understanding. The intention is not to offer a collection of persuasive tricks or another manual of communication cunning. Intelligent Communication is not a more sophisticated way to manipulate people. Its purpose is to understand people so that we can build clearer, more responsible, and more meaningful relationships with them.
What Is Intelligent Communication?
Within this project, Intelligent Communication is defined as a conscious, reflective, empathetic, context-sensitive, and ethically responsible process through which people seek to understand themselves and others, co-create meaning, and build trust, high-quality relationships, and responsible action. On this basis, the project develops the Model of Intelligent Communication, comprising six interconnected dimensions:
understanding oneself;
understanding the other;
understanding the context;
intelligent dialogue;
the co-creation of meaning;
responsible action.
The model begins from the premise that high-quality Communication starts with self-awareness. Before we can understand another person, we must recognise our own emotions, needs, prejudices, expectations, and communication habits.
The next dimension involves an effort to understand the other person and the perspective from which they speak. This does not mean that we must agree with them. Understanding is not the same as acceptance, but responsible disagreement is impossible without understanding. The third dimension is context. No message arises in a vacuum. Its meaning depends on the relationship between the people involved, as well as on time, place, culture, communication channel, and previous experience.
These three levels of understanding are expressed through intelligent dialogue—a conversation in which we do not merely wait for an opportunity to respond, but listen, ask questions, and verify whether we have understood correctly.
Such dialogue enables the co-creation of meaning. The objective is not for everyone to think alike, but to achieve a sufficient degree of shared understanding for trust and responsible collective action to become possible.
The Project's Place in International Literature
International scholarly and professional literature has developed several important approaches that come close to the idea of Intelligent Communication.
Brian Spitzberg and William Cupach's theory of communication competence emphasises the effectiveness and appropriateness of Communication, connecting motivation, knowledge, skills, context, and communication outcomes. The concept of emotional intelligence focuses on understanding and regulating one's own emotions and recognising others' emotions. Social intelligence concerns understanding social relationships and navigating interactions with other people successfully.
In Conversational Intelligence, Judith E. Glaser connects the quality of conversation with trust, partnership, empathy, and effective leadership. In Communication Intelligence, Claude D'Val Morgan emphasises identifying personal communication strengths and styles, as well as the capacity to adapt to the people with whom we work. Literature on mindful Communication connects attention, deep listening, compassion, and presence in interpersonal relationships. The Intelligent Communication project enters into dialogue with all these approaches while seeking to integrate them into a broader processual framework.
Its distinctiveness does not rest on the assertion that self-awareness, empathy, context, listening, dialogue, meaning, or responsibility are individually new concepts. Rather, it lies in their integration into a unified model that progresses from understanding oneself to responsible action.
In this way, the concept moves beyond communication skills to the broader idea of communication intelligence. It is not enough to determine whether a message has achieved its intended objective. We must also consider the meaning it has produced, the relationship it has shaped, whether it has contributed to trust, and what long-term consequences it may generate. Intelligent Communication in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
The project's title deliberately emerges at a time of rapid advances in artificial intelligence. Nevertheless, Intelligent Communication is not a book about artificial intelligence. It is a book about human beings and the capacities that become even more important precisely because technology can assume an increasing share of communication-content production.
Artificial intelligence can generate a grammatically correct, stylistically polished, and persuasive message. It can analyse reactions, adjust tone, and propose a response. Human beings, however, must still determine whether that message is truthful, appropriate, ethical, and responsible.
Technology can suggest words, but it cannot assume moral responsibility for their consequences on behalf of a human being.
The value of capacities that cannot be reduced to the automated production of messages will therefore continue to grow: understanding people, listening deeply, interpreting context, exercising ethical judgement, building trust, and managing meaning responsibly. Artificial intelligence may be the author of a proposal. The human being remains the author of the decision.
PR TOMIĆ as an Open Space for Research
The project will not emerge all at once, nor will it be developed behind closed doors. Its chapters and central ideas will initially be published as a series of columns on the PR TOMIĆ portal.
These columns will examine self-understanding and understanding others, intelligent listening, empathy, emotions, communication context, non-verbal Communication, dialogue, trust, conflict, manipulation, intimate and professional relationships, intelligent leadership, the co-creation of meaning, and the relationship between human beings and artificial intelligence.
This approach will transform the portal into an open research space. Each column will constitute an independent contribution while simultaneously forming part of a broader conceptual framework that will be progressively developed, examined, supplemented, and theoretically integrated.
Readers' responses, professional experiences, everyday examples, and scholarly discussions may help identify new questions and communication challenges. Following an appropriate period of research, the published texts will be revised, expanded, and integrated into the book Intelligent Communication. The book will therefore not be a simple collection of previously published columns. The columns will represent the initial phase of the research. At the same time, the book will present a comprehensive theoretical model, a system of communication competencies, practical applications, and a broader interpretation of human relationships in the age of artificial intelligence.
Towards More Humanly Intelligent Communication
The future of Communication will not depend solely on the speed of information transmission, the number of available platforms, or the capacity of artificial intelligence to generate content. It will also depend on whether people can learn once again how to listen, understand, converse, and accept responsibility for the meanings they create.
Intelligent Communication does not always mean finding the perfect words. Sometimes it means pausing before responding, asking a question before concluding, attempting to understand before judging, acknowledging one's own mistake, hearing what another person has been unable to express clearly, and considering not only what we wish to achieve but also the kind of relationship we are creating through our words.
The new research project Intelligent Communication is founded on the conviction that the quality of human relationships can be transformed through learning, understanding, and responsible Communication.
The most important question of the future will therefore not be merely how intelligently our machines can communicate.
The more important question will be whether, with all the assistance they provide, we have learned to communicate more intelligently ourselves.