AI Dominated Davos and CES. What Does it Mean for Communicators?
Insights from Jeremy Page, Executive Vice President, Global Director of Creative
TL;DR: After shaping Davos and CES this year, it’s safe to say that AI is more than another fad. At KWT Global, we’ve discovered several core strategies that can successfully usher AI into the workplace, from starting with understanding where AI can improve work processes and enhance client service, to having clear policies and guidelines around AI usage and beginning to test and identify specific tools for workflows.
As hot a topic as AI was in 2023, its prominence on the agendas of both Davos and CES made it clear that the trend will continue this year. This is unsurprising given AI’s seemingly endless use cases and implications — topped off with the trepidation that comes with change.
Much of the chatter at Davos was around regulation and safe, ethical and fair use of AI. The main takeaway was the need for global cooperation in regulation, reminding us that AI has enormous potential for good but is equally capable of harm; therefore, regulation and training are crucial.
AI taking over a tech-centric conference like CES was a given, but this year's announcements exemplified how quickly AI has entered the mainstream. To name a few standouts, Mastercard debuted a tool that provides personalized help with starting a small business (everything from applying for grants to naming the business), L’Oréal showcased its AI-powered Beauty Genius that recommends products for particular needs and BMW and Amazon announced that BMW owners can now ask an Alexa-powered chatbot anything about their car (goodbye to the manual you can never find answers in).
Looking at the communications industry, generative AI, in particular, has true staying power if used purposefully to solve real problems. Although the speed at which generative AI is evolving is exceeding expectations, many communicators remain uncertain of how to appropriately tap into this powerful tech for their business objectives.
As a communications agency, we see AI as a huge opportunity for our clients. AI can essentially work as a calculator for comms pros, generating efficiencies that will enable us to focus on services that require more refined skillsets and industry experience. Where we once used manual techniques for administrative tasks, strategic planning, creative development and tactical innovation, we can now arrive at the same destination in half the time, leaving human intelligence freer to focus on testing and refinement, relationships and immersion.
Identifying Where Value Lies
First, it’s important to identify where the tech can quickly improve efficiency, from client workflows to business operations. Consider some of the below questions to identify opportunities:
Where can AI enable a team to move faster?
Tapping AI to streamline manual work like data entry allows more time for strategic and creative work.
Where can AI improve a client experience?
This may be assisting in collaboration or communication, or even using AI to focus in on the client’s target consumer to help provide more personalized ideas.
Can AI automate real-time monitoring or identify potential issues?
By identifying potential issues early, they can be fixed before getting out of hand.
What other tasks can be automated?
While humans still need the final say for many decisions, there are places AI can streamline upfront processes providing insights to make the journey to decision faster, such as document creation and early approvals.
At KWT Global, our “reflect, refine and resonate” model is key. By engineering prompts providing the correct context for the AI, we can direct it to augment our assertions, suggesting alternate routes and predicting outcomes and impact. AI can even emulate the mindset of a consumer, which presents a huge opportunity for simulating everything from a new product launch to a potential crisis.
Laying the Foundation
Given the power of AI, it’s critical to establish guidance around proper use and guardrails to prevent pitfalls. Understandably, clients want assurance that their data and information are protected. As AI leans into our natural curiosity and has the potential to transform our work, we encourage exploration within our contractual responsibilities to client privacy.
To start on the path to AI safety, you can create a formal document (generative AI can even help you draft this) to clearly state policies and guidance on using AI tools for client work or internal processes. Although AI can help suggest a framework for its own regulation, its education using machine learning means that it carries inherent bias; if there remains one task for human intelligence to handle without augmentation, it should be the regulation of AI applications.
With our guidelines, we have parameters on AI usage but still encourage employees to test various platforms. Our agency has also established an AI task force with volunteers across disciplines and levels to help encourage and facilitate the day-to-day use and experimentation of AI. Starting a formal group is smart, as organizations can end up with an inconsistent narrative and approach across teams without guidance.
Embracing AI Solutions
The communications industry is currently facing a reckoning to demonstrate its value, and AI can assist with measurement.
When it comes to media coverage, PR pros will need to go beyond UVPM. Tools like Relative Insight can compare language usage to understand what audiences are saying and identify trends and patterns. Understanding common language tied to a brand can help it understand where it needs to shift in strategy.
Meanwhile, when it comes to measuring success on social, tools like Koalifyed can help go beyond basic metrics and assess what value an influencer really brings to a campaign.
Measurement will be especially important for marketing directors; with strong economic headwinds coming in 2024, there will be a temptation to reduce budgets in communications and augment actions with AI replacements — a huge tripwire that has the potential to ruin market share positioning for brands.
The opposite approach — investment — is the smart strategy. Sure, there’s a future in which certain functions of the communications workstream can be redirected, but we aren’t there yet. Unless you’ve spent the past year developing bespoke AI offerings, upskilling teams and preparing for a transition to a more augmented approach, then there’s still plenty of work ahead. Agencies should act as sherpas in this space, helping clients to scale the full peak of potential.
A bonus to comms practitioners will be a larger selection of efficiency-boosting tools. With the manual work associated with our jobs (gathering and organizing information, transcribing meeting notes, building coverage reports and creating media lists), bespoke tools will increasingly take over these low-value tasks so we can focus our efforts on what AI can’t.
While AI excels in areas related to strategy and calculation, it lacks the ability to empathize and possess emotional intelligence. It cannot fully comprehend the importance of certain moments, the uncertainty of existence and the potential for a limited future. These are the foundations of human consciousness, which cannot be replicated by AI. While AI may be able to emulate human behavior, it will never truly possess emotional intelligence in the same way that humans do.
AI is great for initial brainstorming, but it can’t provide tailored, thoughtful insights to create true ideation and strategy for a brand. It can help cull data and research to inform strategic planning, but as for understanding the nuances of human behavior — which is the core of a communication strategy — it comes up short in comparison to humans (at least for now). However, you can tap back into AI for prompts for refinement, stress testing and outcome modelling.
Navigating the Next Steps
Love or hate AI, we can no longer ignore it. While it’s not perfect, it’s already helping organizations move at unprecedented speed. We’ve seen firsthand the benefits it brings for providing optimizations for real-time strategy adjustment.
We’re all charting a course through the unknown, and no matter how far behind you think you might be with adopting AI, the truth is that we’re all a short distance from the starting line. There are clear, simple and tangible steps you can take to make rapid progress.
To learn more about how our comms experts help brands navigate the unknown, check out our services here.