Greg Matusky is the founder and CEO of Gregory FCA, one of the nation's 40th largest PR firms.
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By now, just about every communications professional has seen the magic of AI. Enter a few thoughts into ChatGPT, and a machine writes a news release, blog or social post. Effortlessly.
But it’s all just a party trick. That’s because the value of AI in communications rests only partially on content creation. The real value hinges upon AI’s ability to fundamentally change the workflow of communications and communicators, offering a more structured process that ultimately delivers faster and higher-quality outcomes for the organizations we serve.
I came to that conclusion after spending the past two years immersed in generative AI as part of my PR firm’s technology lab. Over that time, it became obvious that AI communications tools will usher in a new class of technologically enabled communicators—those who work alongside machines not simply to gnaw through content but also to direct workflows in ways unimaginable as recently as six months ago.
There’s currently much debate in our industry around the quality of content that an AI can generate. Some marketers are dismissing it, claiming our craft is less science and more art, and that technology won’t ever be able to replace the human mind.
In reality, platforms like ChatGPT already have the capability to produce edit-ready copy. In fact, in my own business, we have already developed our own internal tools that do just that, and we expect others will do the same. So, no. Content is not the issue. The quality will improve quickly. What’s more important is that communications professionals inside corporations and public relations firms come to understand the real value of AI: its potential to reinvent our entire communications workflow.
Here’s how we see the big vision playing out. Imagine a world where communicators are still charged with communicating. Only their primary audience is a machine. In corporate communications, the task will be educating the machine on all things corporate—from the hobbies of the CEO to the crises that could most likely cripple an organization.
Enter AI, which will provide a communicator with the means to scrape information from a range of internal and external sources so that the machine holds all facts and details, along with the nuances of the corporate ecosystem. It knows, for instance, that the CEO communicates in expansive, poetic language of a John F. Kennedy, while the CMO is more of a Steven Pinker kind of communicator who uses precise and unique action verbs to advance ideas.
And now, suppose the machine understands all of the corporation’s many and varied audiences—from shareholders to employees to the homeowners who front the western side of a problematic factory in Ohio.
It balances and maintains such information and adds to it as more of it is published. A new earnings release. An annual report. A particularly flattering Wall Street Journal article and an emotionally charged speech given by a retiring founder that articulates the originating values of the corporation. All of this information resides within a customized AI engine, easily available and accessible.
The communicator within this organization then works alongside the machine, using natural language as if talking to a colleague. For instance, the machine might ask, “What are you writing today?” The communicator replies, “I’m writing a blog post from our CEO about the new product.” The machine follows up: “Great, I have a lot of info on the CEO, know his voice, and have written several pieces for him in the past. But I’m not sure I know much about this new product. Could you tell me about it or share a link where I could learn more?”
The machine then moderates the messages, customizing them for precise stakeholders, allowing for an unimaginable level of individualization down to an audience of one.
So an employee with 30 years of service will be reminded of the values of the original founder and the emotional speech delivered at retirement. And the mother who lives next to that factory in Ohio will understand the extraordinary lengths the company has taken to limit risks for her five children. I believe it’s going to be that exacting. That precise. Vectoring in on the informational needs of each individual who resides in the corporate universe.
As the center of this constellation, the communicator will be even more in demand than they are today—to tame and train the machine and to operate at a level of customization on par with how Amazon now serves you the exact product you recently searched for on Google.
That’s where the revolution will be waged—not as a party trick to write blog posts at the quality of the average human being or outsourced SEO firm. Rather, the real gain will be achieved once we accept AI as the missing link in the long-overdue tech enablement of the entire communications workflow.
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