In June 1982, a British Airways 747 flew into a cloud of volcanic ash over Indonesia and all four engines stopped. Captain Eric Moody picked up the microphone and told his passengers: “We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped.” Everybody landed safely, and the announcement has gone down as the most British sentence ever spoken at 37,000 feet. We’re rather proud of this sort of thing in England. We say “quite good” when we mean disappointing, and “I only have a few minor comments” when we mean please start again. There’s a wonderful table that has been passed round offices for years, called the Anglo-Dutch Translation Guide, which sets out what the British say, what a Dutch colleague taking us at our word thinks he’s just been told, and what we actually meant. The Dutch live at the other end of the scale. Erin Meyer at INSEAD has spent years mapping how different countries deliver bad news, and she puts the Dutch among the bluntest people on earth, alongside the Russians and the Israelis. South Africans, in my experience, aren’t far behind. The British hide behind “perhaps” and “a bit”, and in Japan or Thailand even more is left unsaid. None of this mattered much to a computer while we were typing. Typing is hard work, so nobody bothers to type “perhaps you might have another little look at this”, and we all get to the point. But I now talk to AI far more than I type, using Wispr Flow to turn my voice into text, and what comes out is me, complete with every “sort of” and “maybe” I’d use in a meeting. I think most of us will be working this way within a couple of years, which means the way your country talks is about to become the way your country prompts. And an AI is the Dutch colleague in that table. Tell it a draft is “quite good, but maybe have another look at the second half” and it will thank you and change three words, when what you meant was that the second half is dreadful and needs writing again. So I suspect the people who get the most out of AI will be the ones who find it easy to say exactly what they want: what the thing is for, who’s going to read it, what was wrong with the last version and what a good one looks like. A Dutch manager does that without thinking. I have to remind myself. Plain doesn’t have to mean rude, by the way. Meyer tells the story of a Korean manager, Kwang Young-Su, who moved to the Netherlands and decided to be as blunt as the locals. His Dutch colleagues complained that he was so aggressive they could barely work with him. Even the Dutch can tell the difference between being clear and being unpleasant. English speakers do get one unfair advantage. Before an AI can help, the software has to hear you properly, and it has had far more practice with English. When OpenAI built Whisper, one of the best-known speech recognition models, about two thirds of the 680,000 hours of audio it learned from were in English. The other 96 languages shared 117,000 hours between them. So the ideal AI user may well be a Dutch person speaking English, which, having met a few, is most of them. I do wonder what years of this will do to the rest of us. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute went through more than 700,000 hours of podcasts and talks and found that ChatGPT’s favourite words, like “delve”, are already turning up more often in everyday speech. If its vocabulary can rub off on us, its taste for plain speaking probably will too, and British offices may end up sounding a little more Dutch. I’d miss the understatement if it went completely, but Captain Moody got the balance right. While he was telling the cabin about his small problem, his co-pilot was on the radio to Jakarta saying, “Mayday, mayday. We have lost all four engines.” The passengers got the charm, and air traffic control got the facts, and your AI is air traffic control.