AI is poised to have an impact on almost every industry, but what are the implications of AI in PR? In this episode, we hear from people who are pioneering the use of AI in the communications industry.
How is AI transforming the public relations industry, and what does it mean for PR professionals? We recently hosted a captivating discussion with a panel of AI pioneers, including Aaron Kwittken of PRophet, Ed Clarke of Cometrics, and Bobby Lincoln of PeakMetrics, to explore this fascinating topic. Our conversation delves into the need for communicators to become more data-savvy and how these tools can support our gut instincts with solid data.
In our conversation, we focus on the crucial issues of ethics and accuracy as we explore the initial reactions to AI-powered tools. We also delve into the necessary skills that communicators will need to incorporate AI effectively in the future. Our panelists provide valuable insights into how to address concerns and leverage opportunities that AI presents for brands to better understand their customers.
Looking ahead, we examine the potential impact of AI technology on jobs and industries, as well as the importance of ensuring accuracy in a world where AI is continuously evolving. We discuss the need for governing bodies to establish standards for AI, the question of content ownership in AI-generated work, and the responsible use of this technology. Tune in to this episode of #PRFuture to learn more, and download the 2023 Global Communication Report at www.annenberg.usc.edu/gcr.
Moderator:
Doug Dawson, Director, Global Communications, Microsoft and USC Annenberg faculty
Featuring:
Aaron Kwittken, CEO & Founder, PRophet, Comms Tech Cloud CEO, Stagwell Global
Ed Clarke, CEO and Founder, Cometrics
Bobby Lincoln, COO and Co-Founder, PeakMetrics
Host:
Fred Cook (@fredcook), Chairman Emeritus of Golin, a global PR firm. Author of “Improvise - Unorthodox Career Advice from an Unlikely CEO” and Director of the USC Center for Public Relations
Follow us: @Center4PR (Twitter, Facebook and Instagram)
Newsletter: News from the USC Center for Public Relations
Visit our website: https://annenberg.usc.edu/research/center-public-relations
0:00:03 - Fred Cook
AI is now a reality and what you're going to see will prove that and it's going to be a big part of the future of our work and our profession. Chat, gpt is only the beginning. From small things like translation to big things like having your car drive itself, ai is going to become an ever important part of our daily lives, and the public relations industry will be one of the most impacted by this new technology. In fact, new tools are being introduced every day that are going to change the way we work. Recently, we hosted an event at USC called How AI is Transforming the Future of PR, and we talked to three of the people creating new tools that they think are going to change the way we work every day. The panel was hosted by Doug Dawson, the Global Communications Director of Microsoft and a board member of the Center, and the three panelists included Aaron Kwittken, who's the CEO and founder of PRophet, Ed Clarke, the CEO and founder of Cometrics, and Bobby Lincoln, who's the COO and co-founder of PeakMetrics. Each panelist has helped create new tools that they think will revolutionize the way we work. Let's hear what they have to say. Thank you for coming to USC. We welcome you all here for this event. I'm as excited as you are to see what we're talking about tonight and see some demonstrations of some really cool products that are going to change the way we work and think and act, and this is just a preview of a lot of cool things to come.
I'm just going to introduce this topic with a couple of slides based on some we do every year of global communications study. This is our PR Tech report, and I have a couple of slides from it that I thought I would share with you to give you an idea where we were just a few years ago. So if we can go to the first slide, ron, we ask people how do you rate your company's current ability to use the latest technology? Only a small number said excellent. So at this time, the PR industry was a little behind in its use of technology. According, to this.
We ask another question How knowledgeable are you about the future of applications of AI? And, as you can see, 3% of the PR people and this is the thousand PR people around the world said that they were very familiar with AI. 11% said, moderately, the reason I'm not moderating these panels. I fall somewhere in that area. Maybe I'm somewhat, i could be somewhat, but these guys are very, extremely. But this is the way it was just a few years ago And you're going to see tonight how much it's changed since then.
0:02:53 - Fred Cook
Let's show one more slide.
0:02:56 - Fred Cook
Artificial intelligence will be very important in the future of PR. Pr professionals 18% agree. We ask people what will be most important in the next five years Machines or people? You can see that PR professionals thought human capital would be more important And students thought machines would be. We'll see what you guys think in just a minute. But that's where we were a few years ago. But AI is now a reality And what you're going to see tonight is we'll prove that And it's going to be a big part of the future of our work and our profession, and we have a great panel here to talk about it. Now I'd like to turn the mic over to Doug Dawson, who's a member of our board at the Center for PR and the head of global communications for Microsoft. Take it away, doug.
0:03:48 - Doug Dawson
I did use Bing to ask some questions. The first question it spit out actually was for you. Aaron Said it said in your materials for profit. You refer to the comms engineer. So how is that different from a comms professional today? And what skills do you think communicators need tomorrow that they don't have today? Pretty good question.
0:04:10 - Aaron Kwittken
I feel like I've heard that question before. I don't know. Well, let me just take a step back. So Our business, historically in PR, has been very focused on gut instinct and sometimes charm, but we've not had the data that our marketing siblings have had to support an idea and To be really real in this, most clients or higher-ups, if you're at a brand, think they're way more interesting than they really are.
So, and and when you're in a crisis, a general counsel is giving you comms advice when you're asking them to give you just legal advice. So we don't have the tools or the data to support whether or not a story is going to catch wind or whether or not You know you can negate it with a type of a statement. So the reason why I think we need to become engineers is because we need to be more data savvy, use tools like Ed and Bobby And his partner Nick have built and, of course, profit to backstop gut instinct with data. That's why, and in terms of understanding, you don't have to build the tools I'm not a technologist, i'm just PR guy to understand it.
But it is good to get familiar with things like you know What's the difference between Boolean search and semantic folding. You know which is one is linear, the others you know, contextual. But our business is non-linear, communications is non-linear, so you shouldn't have a linear Technology like Boolean decide who's going to be interested in your story. But I can go on and on, but I'm just going to stop it.
0:05:33 - Doug Dawson
Okay, look, we want you to engage. What about your body? Is there any skills that you think communications, communication students need Today that they may not have had yesterday?
0:05:45 - Bobby Lincoln
I Think, frankly, a lot of the students today are probably ahead of many of us.
You know we're we're learning how to use all of these AI tools today And, in many ways, we're unlearning how to use the tools that we were previously using in their in their stead.
For those of you that are students, you don't have that debt that you're dealing with. You know you're already Using those many of you probably in your classes, using those for fun. You know you're generating things on a Friday night, and so, i think, being able to continue to both stay up to date with that technology like, like Aaron said, but also, you know, taking forward that knowledge that you already have, in the same way that 10 years ago, people that knew how to use social Media were, you know, revolutionary because all of us didn't understand how to leverage those, and so I think that the the future, you know I'm very optimistic for those of you that are already in school, and I think we've all kind of echoed the same sentiments that these tools Aren't replacing people, and so the better you're able to leverage them and take advantage of them. They're hyper enabling you, and so really it's, you know, adopting them and embracing them and moving forward with them.
0:06:44 - Doug Dawson
Thanks, and I'm going to come to you, the the. We're the Canadian side of the stage, so we need to represent, tell us about the initial reaction to co-metrics And what. What are, what are clients saying? How are they responding? But how are clients responding to the tool, but also to AI in general?
0:07:04 - Ed Clarke
I think it's well I mean generally is a positive response, because what we're doing, we're actually Allowing companies to sort of look outside of what they would consider you consider their traditional competitive group or peer groups So we're able to sort of show you know, with the help of AI at different points.
You know sort of connections between companies that didn't really exist, thematic connections, and I was going to show you earlier. We've got a really cool graphic where we show, you know, the ESG footprint, communications footprint for a master card, and we compare it against a Microsoft and we compare it against British American tobacco and Generally we're exposing that they're all generally talking about the same types of things. So you know, we're just really finding our way through this and uncovering really interesting things that you never really would be able To see unless you had a really nice data pool, data lake.
0:07:49 - Doug Dawson
I think finding your way through this is going to be a theme for discussion. Ai poses many benefits when it comes to speed and cost, but accuracy remains a work in progress, and so perhaps a question for Aaron or for Bobby How are you looking to address that part?
0:08:08 - Bobby Lincoln
So in our business, we actually don't care as much about accuracy. What we really look at is influence, and I think you know for what we're doing, whether it's AI generated or not. You know how is it able to matriculate out into the media ecosystem And you know how is it received. How is something like the Pope in a pufferjacket all of a sudden set off? you know an entire like trend and so You know. Accuracy, i think, is less important than you know what the impact is and think. Tools like errands are designed to help you provide that impact more easily.
0:08:37 - Aaron Kwittken
Thank you for that. I appreciate that. Yeah, i think it's like what you said earlier, doug We have agency, no pun intended. We have control over ideation, serendipity, values, judgment, and we need to maintain that control. I liken this in the same way that we use calculators and Excel. We still know math right, but we have to be guardians of Accuracy, because then that also helps us to become a guardian of brand safety and brand integrity. So it's again, it's not to displace, it's just like hyper enabled hyper enable.
0:09:06 - Doug Dawson
Okay, you, you mentioned agency, so I'm gonna. I'm gonna pull that thread a little bit. How do you see tools like profit impacting that agency brand relationship? Is this a new dawn of consulting?
0:09:23 - Aaron Kwittken
I meant agency in a different way, but I do like that question. I do So having run and had my own agency for so many years. The churn is real, as we all know, because this is a mixed cohort of both agency, corporate communicators and faculty and students, and it's because people are doing mundane, awful work. They quit for three reasons, right One, because of that. Two, because they hate their boss. Or three, because the culture is toxic, or all three. We can at least solve for the first one and we can free them up using tech to do higher value things and upscale them. I also think it's going to force a better, more accretive relationship between an agency and a brand, because we're going to do things faster. We're paid to do things slowly, hourly, but maybe it'll force a value-based billing discussion and we'll be paid for the value that we provide, because often it's behind the curtain, not in front of the curtain, versus the hours that we provide, and I think there's a huge difference there.
0:10:18 - Doug Dawson
Yep, no fair. Let's also. We're going to lean into some tough ones. Let's talk about ethics and AI And how can?
0:10:25 - Aaron Kwittken
That's for you, Ed.
0:10:26 - Doug Dawson
How can brands ensure that their use of AI is responsible, is ethical? It's a question for all of you, but we'll start with Ed.
0:10:35 - Ed Clarke
Thank you, give me the hard one. I think it's just a real math of opportunity. To be fair, it's almost like the advent of the Internet, which would open up many, many different possibilities. I think this is just the next logical step in it, and there's another chance for brands to come closer to their agency but also come closer to their consumers. So I think it's really positive.
0:10:56 - Bobby Lincoln
I think, frankly, it's a concern that we think a lot about given our business and looking at how do we track disinformation narratives and how do we protect brands against these concerns. I think, on the brand side, having ethics statements and value-based decision-making there is really important. But I think, from what we're seeing, how do we protect brands against this risk from things outside of their control, where some of these tactics can be weaponized and used for bad, and how do we use AI in those instances to actually combat that? And so a lot of what we're doing is leveraging tools like Peak Metrics to understand those trends and help folks be able to respond to them more quickly, to understand the context around those trends, that they can make decisions as to which ones to focus on, and so I think there is a risk there, but these tools also enable us to combat that risk. Aaron, is there anything like that?
0:11:49 - Aaron Kwittken
So we, up until a couple of weeks ago, purposely did not have a free version of our product because I was worried about that. And even to this day, you have to join a wait list, not because it's BS although it is helpful to have a wait list because everybody does that but because we have humans vetting and looking at the list of people that are signing up to make sure we don't have bad actors or ill-intended organizations trying to use our product to spread mis or disinformation. But companies and communications is all driven by the humans behind them, right? So bad humans are going to continue to do bad things, whether it's technology enabled or not.
My bigger worry or concern is synthetic media less about the text, but more about the Pope wearing the puffer jacket, people taking my voice, my image, my video from tonight and everything else that's across the web and putting together fake synthetic media of me saying things I never said or I might have actually, but probably not. That concerns me. I wish there was a fourth chair. Maybe we can have a Fred. We can have another conference on this or talk on this where somebody can address synthetic media, because I'm very worried about that.
0:12:54 - Doug Dawson
Okay, When speaking to each of your clients perspective clients the advent, the introduction of any new technology comes with that sense of awe and wonder and that sense of fear and uncertainty. How are you having those conversations when it comes to the uncertainties that AI does create? Is that I'll start?
0:13:14 - Aaron Kwittken
I'm going to start with you. Sure, well, like a year ago, i thought I was dead in the water, to be perfectly honest, because I'm talking about this and people are like, yeah, maybe I don't know, and thanks to OpenAI, which we sit on top of, and the novelty of ChatGVT, which is helping to drive awareness, i see it as this continuum of like first there's doubt and I was in the sea of doubt then fear, then there's curiosity and then there's courage and then there's adoption, and I think we're right now in our industry. The conversations I'm having is somewhere between kind of curiosity and adoption, and I feel really buoyed by it. I've never been busier the last three, four weeks, and I don't think this is.
I think this is a different hype cycle than, say, the metaverse or NFTs or blockchain, and I was, i had a little bit of envy a year ago and all that was like the rage, because I'm like that's not real. I'm sorry, it's just not as real. Right, this is very real. I think it's the most consequential thing to happen to our business. Since I don't know the Internet, the iPhone, email, i can't it is incredibly consequential for us, but I think, in a positive way.
0:14:20 - Doug Dawson
Bobby, what would you add to that?
0:14:22 - Bobby Lincoln
I think a lot of the folks that we talk with they've felt the impact of AI in a negative way Or the impact of negative media influence. Something like 46% of companies have felt some kind of social media attack, and so in many instances, they're struggling to figure out how to deal with this. The volume of content is too vast for them to use traditional methods to actually be able to sort through and identify these trends. By the time they do, they've already gone viral and their ability to combat them is extremely difficult, if possible at all, and so I think, for us, ai is just another tool in their toolbox. It still requires a person to go through and be able to understand how to use it and to implement it and to refine it. It's not replacing anyone in that instance, but as the landscape has evolved and a lot of that shift is due to AI, the tool set that you use to address it needs to evolve as well.
0:15:14 - Ed Clarke
Yeah, no, I think when we speak with clients and speak with potential partners, it's really more of a revelation. It's great you're able to see this information that you currently couldn't see because of this. So it's actually quite we're not getting a lot of sort of negative. Oh, you can do this, this is great. So generally it's been positive.
0:15:32 - Doug Dawson
You've all mentioned the introduction of chatGPT. With the rise of chatGPT, has that also impacted the volume of coverage that you're seeing relative to ESG?
0:15:43 - Ed Clarke
Absolutely, absolutely, and I think what we're seeing as well as does do. items like chatGPT allow a magnificent or sort exponential increase in the amount of content you have to sift through. Absolutely. There's even more stuff And in terms of what we do, we only extract things with ESG messages. It can really extract anything, but as an example, we only produce in our production database. only about 2% of the records we look at are actually themed and tagged. So it's interesting in that the more content that's out there, the more valuable. the less content is actually more valuable when you have that. That's what we're seeing.
0:16:20 - Doug Dawson
Now we're going to open it up to questions from the audience.
0:16:24 - Audience
First of all, I work in wellness And everyone asks us to define what that means. So could some of you define AI and then answer if you think it will mean a loss of jobs and communications?
0:16:38 - Aaron Kwittken
When I started in this, i defined AI as augmented intelligence, not artificial intelligence. To me and again, i'm not a technologist the artificial comes in when it can learn from itself and you create what's called a neural network. I haven't created a full neural network yet. On the predictive side, i'm still learning. So the more users I have, the more experiences I have, the more I can learn in an anonymized way. On the generative side, that is AI, because we've got templates and it's learning, but you still have to teach it. So that's how I describe it Again, a non-technologist, just everyday human in the PR business trying to describe it. I think it's going to create more jobs. I really believe that, and I think it's going to create higher value, higher paying jobs where people are happier and they stay longer. I really believe that. Not in all instances, but most instances. I do believe that.
0:17:26 - Bobby Lincoln
And I do think it will help people be more effective in those jobs, correct?
0:17:31 - Audience
Hello, thank you so much for the insightful conversation. I wanted to ask. A lot of companies are now forbidding their employees, schools are forbidding their students from using AI, so what are some tangible points you can provide to your company saying like this is why we need to adopt it right now. Even three weeks is too late. What are some things you can actually tell them to prove your point?
0:17:54 - Doug Dawson
You know, one of the reasons that companies are being thoughtful of it is right now. it is an open platform, so it might not be the most secure, which is what open AI has also said. But I'm curious, if you're seeing that, as you're introducing these tools, are clients or prospective customers also talking about that as well? Say, hey, we're uncomfortable with these tools?
0:18:18 - Aaron Kwittken
The two biggest questions that we get, and I immediately punt them to IT and legal, But the two biggest questions we get is one do we have to disclose that we're using AI to help us? And my instinct is no. You don't disclose and use Grammarly or Spellcheck And, by the way, it's PR people weak ghost right for people constantly, but that's never disclosed. So it's kind of it's not a silly question, but it's almost a moot question. In terms of the bigger question around values and standards, I do believe our governing bodies PRCIA, PRSA, PR Council and others need to develop standards. Just like we have ethics and standards for communication, we also need that for AI, And the unsolved question I think you're getting at, Doug, is who owns the content?
You know, as an agency person, when we build a press release, a press list or a violent, the client owns that content. I still believe they do. It is still being debated. I'm sure it will make its way to the Supreme Court at some point. There's copyright issues, So I can't remember who said we're still working it out, but we're still working it out. Still, though, because of the revelation, we still have brands and agencies wanting to use it to get an edge and to get ahead.
0:19:30 - Bobby Lincoln
I think there's also responsible ways to use it. And it's a tool. I think you know it's not perfect and the results aren't perfect, and the point at which you try to take those results and pass them on directly is the point at which you know it's no longer being used as a tool. It's being used as a replacement. It's not effective in that mechanism. You know, for us, we still, you know, we still tell our clients you need to be looking at the results, you need to be refining them, you need to be working to help it make you better, and I think that's you know that's a safer way to use it than to just put something in and not even look at what comes out.
0:20:05 - Doug Dawson
I'm really impressed with all of your products And I look at you all as futurists. You know, five years or 10 years from now, where is this headed?
0:20:16 - Ed Clarke
We're still figuring that out. No, really, it is an evolving thing. If you look three months ago, who knew we wouldn't even be here on this stage? So I really, I really have no idea. I'm excited to see them, Hey.
0:20:29 - Doug Dawson
Bobby.
0:20:30 - Bobby Lincoln
I think that even six months from now, a lot of the questions that we know we're currently wondering will have answers to and we'll have a whole new set of questions. I think tools like this are going to become more commonplace, You know, right now. You know it's a big topic and it's you know we're figuring out how do we use them within organizations. We're figuring out what's the regulation around them. I think once we get past that, you'll start to see these being introduced, you know, into more common areas, And it's not going to be this thing that we're up here talking about on the stage. It's going to be something that everyone's learning in school. People are figuring out how to, you know, engineer prompts so that they can make sure that they're optimizing for results, in the same way that you see people doing search engine optimization now, And that's just kind of a common practice.
0:21:09 - Doug Dawson
Five years in the future.
0:21:11 - Aaron Kwittken
I totally agree. I see a couple things. One is you will have as much importance focused on the tech stack inside of an agency or a brand as you do the human stack, if you will. So that's one thing. I do think that long form is going to get better. I don't think it's going to be quite as cringy or as inaccurate. We'll always require us, and I do. I'm very excited for voice skills. I think voice skills are something that hasn't necessarily been integrated yet into generative AI, and I'm incredibly excited about using generative AI and immediate training role to help restate things in other ways. that might be more positive for brands, especially in times of crisis. I mean, we could talk about my product roadmap, but it's long and I do think that it's bright and optimistic.
0:22:00 - Audience
Thank you so much for coming. I'm a second semester senior, so obviously going out into the world and This is all really fascinating. I think that we heard a lot about PR tonight, but AI is affecting a lot of the world. Where do you, are you kind of excited to see it like also advance? I feel like you definitely have connections and have seen certain Markets grow and I was just interested in like other than PR. Where do you think this is really gonna change the world?
0:22:30 - Doug Dawson
Okay, and you like to tackle that one. The world beyond PR.
0:22:33 - Aaron Kwittken
I mean. For me, it's all about health and wellness. I think that you know, the more stories I read about people's lives being saved or advancements using AI, being able to be Interventional and detect things before they become diseases, to me that is incredible and that's what I'm most excited about, and I wish I was actually in that business. I don't I love this business, but that's very exciting.
0:22:53 - Doug Dawson
That's next Profit for wellness.
0:22:57 - Ed Clarke
But Microsoft also does some really good work with disability and accessibility within software, so it's really enabling a lot of really cool things that just weren't possible Three months ago, ten months ago, years ago. So I think it's really. It's actually quite Especially the accessibility stuff. I think it's really cool. I.
0:23:14 - Bobby Lincoln
Think this common thread we've talked about of hyper enabling isn't exclusive to PR. You know engineering. You're seeing engineers now use tools. They're helping them code faster than they did you know before, and so I think Being able to see us focus on kind of higher level tasks because we're able to use AI to Help us streamline some of those more base base efforts that we're doing, we're gonna see benefits across industries because of that I'd also like to see AI force more conversations around equity and equality, and I think that one of the places where there's an intersectionality there is with creators and pay equity with creators, because white creators and influencers are paid a lot more than anybody else, and that has to end.
0:23:58 - Aaron Kwittken
But the only way to do that, or one of the ways to do that, is to find the data to help support a New structure, and I think AI can probably help there. Much bigger tasks, but something I've been thinking about.
0:24:09 - Doug Dawson
And Bobby Aaron, on behalf of USC. Thank you for your insights, for your demo.
0:24:14 - Fred Cook
We had this question I showed on the slide. in the next five years, how would you compare the importance of technology versus human capital in the communications industry?
0:24:24 - Doug Dawson
There we go. Plug for the which which report is that?
0:24:27 - Fred Cook
this is our, this one from a long time ago, but Which is gonna be most important in the future? the technology or the human capital?
0:24:35 - Doug Dawson
Why do you have to choose?
0:24:37 - Fred Cook
Well they are, will they be equally important?
0:24:40 - Aaron Kwittken
Human capital O is to be, but.
0:24:43 - Bobby Lincoln
I agree. I think without the human capital There's, technology doesn't have a place.
0:24:48 - Fred Cook
Thank you, thanks everybody for coming. Bye, bye. Time will tell how much impact this new technology is going to have on the PR industry, and There are certainly issues with AI in terms of privacy and ethical use. But my opinion, pr people should engage with AI technology, they should experiment with it, they should adapt it to their business and they should use it every day in their work. Ai is going to be the future of communications. Unless PR people are ahead of that curve, they're going to pay the consequences. Thanks for turning into PR future, a podcast created by PR professionals for PR professionals. You can also subscribe to our podcast on Apple podcast, spotify or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Today's episode was recorded and produced in Los Angeles by Loki Wu, matthew Kamma, grayson Wolfe, danny Rodriguez, martinez, spencer Klein and Ron Antoinette. Once again, i'm your host, fred Cook, and this is PR future.