Amidst the AI revolution, e27 presents a new series showcasing how organisations embrace AI in their operations.
Jon Howard is the General Manager at Bud, a PR and content agency. Specialising in company reputation management, he’s directed full corporate rebrands, delivered multi-year B2B comms strategies and has worked with and reported to multiple C-suite types.
Howard originally hails from the UK’s south coast and worked in Germany and Finland before moving to Singapore. After studying journalism, his big break in PR came managing a press office for one of the UK’s biggest consumer lobby groups.
In this edition, Howard shares how Bud has embraced Artificial Intelligence.
Edited excerpts:
How do you perceive the AI revolution and its potential impact on your industry and workforce?
When I started my career in PR 15 years ago, we still had a workflow that involved physically scanning newspaper clippings and sending them via post. Since then, we’ve vastly more sophisticated AI-powered ways of breaking down who is reading/watching a piece of news and how they’re acting.
Likewise, the emergence of large language models (LLMs) now lightens the load on a PR pro if they, for example, ask ChatGPT to summarise a report’s key findings for a briefing document or devise a more catchy headline for an upcoming op-ed.
The question remains: Does this new technology help free up more time in a PR pro’s day to create meaningful relationships and tell powerful human stories relevant to the current news agenda? So far, many proof points suggest this is the case, hence the positivity from our side.
In what ways has your company embraced AI technologies to improve operational efficiency or enhance business processes?
Earlier this year, we saw many media outlets publishing their framework on how they’ll be using generative AI in their editorial. We got inspired and realised we shared a similar responsibility to do the same with our clients and partners.
Last month, therefore, we published our generative AI framework on our website. This took two months to produce and is a living document, meaning it will change over time as the technology (primarily LLMs like ChatGPT and Bard) evolves. Our use cases are divided into Ideation, Research, Writing and Editing.
Can you share specific examples of how AI has been integrated into your workforce to streamline operations or drive innovation?
Where to start?! Some examples include:
As a PR agency, we’re naturally very conscious of how our time is spent, so we have a time management tool that notifies us when we’re exceeding a planned amount of time on a task or going over budget.
We also need to react fast to the news agenda, which means getting to grips with the key points of a breaking story. By using ChatGPT to condense the key points of breaking news, we can align faster as a team and consider how any of our clients might comment on the story.
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As a more fun example, our company meetings no longer (on the whole) contain boring corporate stock photos! With Canva’s generative AI functionality, it’s now effortless to generate an image that fits the message you want to convey. This is great for internal engagement.
What challenges or concerns did you encounter when implementing AI technologies within your organisation, and how did you address them?
When we introduced LLM usage within the agency, our clients were our biggest concern. We needed to ensure that our generative AI framework respects the trust (including any formal confidentiality agreement) our clients have placed in us.
More broadly, any usage is needed to represent their best interests and demonstrate an uplift in the overall quality of work. The challenging part came when finalising a framework to achieve that balance.
How do you ensure transparency and uphold ethical considerations in using AI technologies within your organisation to mitigate privacy concerns?
We published our generative AI framework on our website to give our clients and partners transparency. We also want to create a dialogue within the communications and PR industry.
A potential industry-wide framework would create a positive upside for all PR agencies and in-house teams. We’re very keen to speak to teams who think the same.
As for ethical considerations, the most important one is never inputting any confidential information into an LLM. This is the same best practice we’ve followed for years with search engine inputs, but it is now all the more important.
In short, think twice before inputting any sensitive information into ChatGPT, especially as specific prompts cannot be deleted from your history.
How do you ensure that AI technologies complement your workforce’s existing skills and expertise rather than replacing or displacing human workers?
For example, the current generation of LLMs dovetail well with a PR pro’s core skills and expertise, regardless of seniority.
For example, when hiring new employees, we look for candidates with high emotional intelligence, an uncanny nose for knowing what makes a newsworthy story (and what doesn’t) and the ability to build relationships with journalists and clients. What we don’t directly look for is someone who can write solid press releases or compile a nice report for a client. These are skills we expect as a basic standard.
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So, when considering the role of AI in our workplace, we’re thinking more about how we can free up time to craft newsworthy content and build relationships. These are human traits the current generation of LLMs are not so useful in augmenting.
How do you envision the future collaboration between humans and AI? What role do you see AI playing in augmenting human capabilities?
I will keep this answer in the field of communications and PR. For our team, the collaboration has already made us more time-efficient, where we automate certain routine daily tasks (in line with our framework) and, in the process, have more headspace to chew on meatier communication challenges.
And in the future? Right now, we’re at a level where LLMs can give some sound (but very generalised) advice on potential ways to tackle those aforementioned meatier communications challenges. Going forward, we expect to see the sophistication of this counsel increase, but not at the replacement of a PR professional who makes decisions based on a multitude of (predominantly human) factors playing out in real time.
What advice would you give to other company founders looking to leverage AI in their workforce?
I think no matter if you’re a product or service-based organisation, weigh up carefully the benefit of AI tools alongside the needs and wants of your end customer.
Also, your team’s development and upskilling needs should be front and centre. Create opportunities for your team to learn new skills and allow them to grow into new roles that may not exist just yet.
As a PR agency, we might have a need – in a year or two – for an AI prompt engineer to augment our team’s skills. But right now, we’re all learning as a team and continuing to evolve the AI framework we’ve publicly committed to.
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The post Balance AI tool benefits with end-customer needs: Jon Howard of Bud appeared first on e27.
