AI and comms: The evolution has only begun

It hasn’t even been 24 months since the launch of ChatGPT. And as underscored by the leaders who joined this Burson-hosted roundtable, generative AI has fundamentally changed the discipline like no technology before it — and we’ve only scratched the surface.

PARTICIPANTS

-Joao Belo, SVP, head of global communications, Takeda Pharmaceuticals
-Laura Brusca, CCO, Forbes
-Stephanie Cohen Glass, head of comms insights and strategy, Microsoft
-Brian Cookstra, director of communications, Clinton Foundation/Clinton Global Initiative
-Charlie DiPasquale, head of public affairs, Siemens USA
-Michael Kaye, director, head of brand marketing, communications & social media, Match Group
-Leslie Koch, SVP of creators and social strategy, TelevisaUnivision
-Chad Latz, chief innovation officer, Burson
-Josh Levin, cofounder, Limbik
-Meghan Marschall, VP, global employee experience communications, Johnson & Johnson
-Christin Miller, director of strategic communications, Bayer
-Nicole Moreo, head of customer insights, North America, LinkedIn
-Tina Mulqueen, SVP, digital transformation, Burson
-David Murawski, director of digital strategy and operations, Bayer
-Andy Pharoah, VP, corporate affairs & sustainability, Mars

From the moment ChatGPT hit the scene, the way we all engage with information changed forever. Types and amounts of data and intelligence that seemed impossible are now the normal expectation.Bottom line: AI will reshape entire industries, if it hasn’t already. As for communications, the impact is undeniable. In fact, advancements and evolution are happening at such warp speed, there’s almost no time to reflect.

However, taking a step back is absolutely crucial to not only assess where we’ve arrived, but to truly get a handle on where this technology can take the industry. Perhaps more importantly, where communicators need to flourish in order to fulfill the promise that AI can indeed make them even more valuable to their brands.So, how can communicators — and the brands they represent — ride this massive wave of innovation without being swallowed up? Ideas and inspiration abounded during this lunchtime roundtable at the inaugural AI Deciphered conference.

The seminal moment

With every major evolution, you can point to a specific turning point. When it comes to generative AI and its impact on broader business, comms included, Burson’s Chad Latz has no problem identifying that moment.

“The big seismic shift we saw was when the models dropped in November 2022 out of OpenAI's ChatGPT,” he asserts. “But from there, we’ve seen brands at various levels of adoption, depending largely on their access to talent, propensity for creative innovation and appetite for risk.”

With its arrival, AI suddenly became a key agenda item for many organizations. That’s certainly the case for Takeda Pharmaceuticals, where accelerating data in digital has been integrated into the culture.

“Having that in the corporate philosophy means that it's a huge priority for all the divisions of the company,” asserts Joao Belo. And it allows for more experimentation, learnings and insights at all levels.

In fact, it’s not hyperbole to say generative AI is changing organizational mindsets across the board.

That cultural shift has primed some organizations to expand their previously established tactical use of AI.

Having utilized AI for moderation and safety for years, Match Group has now “partnered with Open AI to help improve workflows for teams across all our brands,” Kaye says.

In fact, many organizations are now looking beyond the functional applications of AI to scaling it across their entire companies.

“In the past 18 months, AI moved from being a functional to an enterprise topic,” explains Mars’ Andy Pharoah. This evolution contrasts with earlier technologies, such as the Metaverse, which captured widespread attention “but was never on the leadership agenda.”

Of course, with opportunity comes responsibility, much of it falling on the comms teams. Bayer’s David Murawski understands that part of the journey now is about educating people about “the responsible application of the innovation.”

Even greater impact

With all emerging technologies, there are many unknowns. Much education — and inspiration — is required to get everyone on board. In the case of AI, many communicators are finding themselves in a position where they can impact their organizations even more than ever.

“We're touching so many different parts of our companies that we haven't been able to access in the past,” notes Burson’s Tina Mulqueen. “[It has become the] responsibility of the communications function to steward the adoption of the technology.”

Part of that stewardship is bridging different areas of the business going forward, something PR is uniquely equipped to do.

“As strategic communicators, we are differentiated by our understanding of how different segments of the business work together holistically,” she continues. Communicators can become more integral to business strategy and operations by focusing on this “holistic perspective of the business and how that changes the function altogether.”

“A lot of the employees that I work with come to me as their strategic advisor on this,” reports Bayer’s Christin Miller. “They just need the permission to engage in a lot of ways.”

Being in the position of AI champion, however, does present new challenges to comms pros. Forbes’ Laura Brusca sees this firsthand.

A question she constantly asks herself: “How do you streamline responsible AI usage a little better while encouraging people to try things?”

It is indeed a tricky balance, but a good place to start is with the broader realization that AI is about so much more than improving productivity. It represents a shift in mindset requiring new skills and behaviors.

In fact, Takeda’s Belo is not a fan of equating AI with the word “tool.”“It’s not really just a tool,” he insists. “If you are a communicator, it’s a new way of thinking. There are more foundational things that completely changed the game, namely, our ability to measure impact that we've never been able to do until now. With AI, you can measure in real time. The level of insights that gives us implies a change in how we do things.”

And with those real-time insights, Microsoft’s Stephanie Cohen Glass makes sure her team is focused on “shortening that time between action and learning and then putting it back into practice.”

Creating solutions with AI — and humans

AI is also transforming the concepts of interaction and collaboration — with internal and external shareholders alike. For example, says LinkedIn’s Nicole Moreo, her company is leveraging AI to “connect marketers, buyers, sellers, the community more than we ever have before.” That orchestration helps break down silos between teams, fostering greater efficiency.

“In comms, everybody wants a quick measurement,” she adds, “but if our job is to change perception, to change how people are interacting or thinking — that's long term.”

In a recent analysis of 230 daily tasks performed by communicators, Burson found that generative AI could boost efficiency by 20% to 30%.

“Putting the right level of scrutiny on a human-plus-technology solution is going to elevate the strategic, the orchestration,” predicts Latz.

An interesting application of AI is the creation of synthetic audiences to simulate how people will respond to new content.

According to Limbik’s Josh Levin, it’s important to note that not all synthetic audiences are created equal. Limbik and Burson teamed up on a solution that goes beyond LLM-powered synthetic audiences by incorporating cognitive AI into their Decipher product. The crucial distinction is that Decipher is trained by the reactions of real people.

“To truly understand how an audience is going to think about something they've never seen before,” counsels Levin, “you need to have spoken to that audience at some point. Ideally, you will continuously speak to them because their opinions and their way of thinking evolve as time goes on.”

According to Levin, this way of training AI is crucial for both accuracy and bias reduction.

“One of the challenges for AI is that it can reflect the biases of its developers or the data it is trained on,” notes TelevisaUnivision’s Leslie Koch. If an organization asks AI to create content for a specific community, human oversight is necessary to ensure cultural nuances are reflected.

A new cognitive AI solution from Burson, Decipher Health, is designed to “predict how any audience across the health stakeholder ecosystem will react to any piece of content that they're shown,” explains Latz. Interestingly, “health companies, which are historically more risk averse, tend to be some of the fastest ones to take up some of these new AI solutions.”

And the impact of AI extends beyond audience engagement and measurement. It played a significant role in the brand transition at Johnson & Johnson.

“We started to talk about how to change the voice of the company quickly on a global scale in different languages,” recalls J&J’s Meghan Marschall. Initially, the company conducted workshops to train communicators, but eventually turned to AI to expedite the process.

“We focused on training the AI tool to recognize the right tone, the right verbs, the right tonality,” she continues. “It helped us accelerate that movement into that new brand positioning much faster.”

Beyond brand evolution, AI is streamlining other areas of operations.

“We've used it for brand compliance,” notes Mars’ Pharoah. “Compliance is something that used to take us a lot of time. It’s now done by digital workers in an afternoon.”

And some really good news for brands: Consumers are noticing these improvements.

“A lot of our customers have [been impressed by] what we're doing with generative AI with things such as simulation,” shares Siemens USA’s Charlie DiPasquale. For companies to fully harness these opportunities, it’s important to understand “how the worlds of generative AI and industrial AI interact and how they can be super beneficial to each other.”

The potential for so much more

AI is increasingly driving efficiency gains in day-to-day operations across companies. Clearly, communications can benefit from that.

For example, before executing a task, Latz suggests you take a few moments to evaluate whether AI could improve the process.

“If you organically place it into your workflow on all of the daily tasks you would otherwise accomplish, you start to get the hang of that very quickly,” he says, noting that he uses AI to streamline up to 100 transactions a day.

We all use email. Many could say they live on email. Using AI to prioritize emails is another practical approach to integrating the technology into the day-to-day.

“Tell me what the most important thing is and who's asking me to get back to them,” adds Microsoft’s Cohen Glass. “Copilot in Outlook will do that for you.”

And AI is not only changing the way we work. It’s also reshaping our world and how audiences communicate.  

“It’s changing the behavior of our audiences,” observes Mulqueen. “So, it’s imperative to think about that shift and stay ahead of audience expectations.”

For example, a challenge arises when our content landscape is inundated with AI-generated content. Mulqueen points out the importance of differentiating content by incorporating human expertise and abstract thinking into prompt engineering.

Latz doubles down on that point. As AI advances, he advises, it’s essential to maintain a focus on critical thinking and ensure “that the next generation of professionals are putting the right level of critical lens on a thought.”

In an incredibly short amount of time, AI's role has evolved from theoretical discussions about how it might make a difference in the future to practical applications with tangible impacts that are making a difference — in real lives.

The Clinton Foundation’s Brian Cookstra highlights the use of AI in disaster response to enhance aid deployment.

“Those applications, especially for doing good results, become clearer and more specific,” he concludes. “[There are many people] you can talk to whose lives are being improved because of AI.”