✅ Navigating AI: Opportunities, risks, and barriers for professional communicators
Your week ahead in management, media and public relations
We published a management paper - The Use of AI in Corporate Communications and Public Relations: The Story So Far - at a conference in Helsinki last week.
It describes the opportunities, risks and barriers to adopting artificial intelligence (AI) in corporate communications and public relations.
There are three insights from the work:
Practitioners must adopt a relationship perspective of organisations rather than a media perspective. Otherwise, this could be an extinction event within five to ten years. The CIPR paper Humans Needed More Than Ever shows the impact on public relations roles.
There is still no clear path to adopting AI at scale in an organisation beyond solution-based tools. Google Gemini and Microsoft CoPilot are the most likely way forward, or, alternatively, private GPTs.
The tension arising from the AI vendor market related to the rights of media used to train LLMs needs to be resolved. In the interim, organisations must implement clear governance and training for practitioners.
We're not publishing the paper openly because we're using it as an exercise to try and understand the nature of the market beyond the noise and hype. You can download a copy by registering via our website.
Please hit reply if we can help you with any of the issues we raise. Have an excellent week.
UK election
💷 DIGITAL AD BLITZ: Analysis by the Financial Times found Labour candidates far outspent Conservatives on Facebook and Instagram ads early in the UK general election campaign. Labour took advantage of a 9-day window with looser local spending limits, spending £900,000 on candidate ads compared to the Tories' £176,000, as part of a coordinated digital strategy. Source: Financial Times.
🗳️ TAX PLEDGES: Sunak and Starmer have ruled out raising income tax, NICs, VAT and corporation tax. While politically appealing, the Institute for Government says these pledges undermine the credibility of their promises to fix public services, as they limit funding options and the flexibility to address the challenges these services face. Source: Institute for Government.
📱 TIKTOK TACTICS: In the UK's "first TikTok election," Labour and the Conservatives are battling on social media, with Labour outspending the Tories on targeted Facebook and YouTube ads. While TikTok matters for younger voters, experts say the key is mobilising supporters through emails, texts, and real-world engagement such as door-knocking. Source: The Guardian.
Management
🌍 UK FOREIGN POLICY: The next UK government should pursue "realistic ambition" in foreign policy, focusing on navigating US-China tensions, improving EU relations post-Brexit, and strengthening its global governance role, according to Chatham House. Despite limited resources, the UK must remain actively engaged, leveraging its expertise in diplomacy, defence, development and technology to advance its interests. Source: Chatham House.
🎬 CREATIVITY GAP: New research reports that only eight per cent of UK film and TV workers are from working-class backgrounds, the lowest in a decade, with most based in London. Despite talk of diversity and "levelling up", the creative industries remain dominated by the middle and upper classes, leaving working-class talent feeling underrepresented and unsupported. Source: Channel 4.
Media
🗞️ NEW LAUNCH: Mill Media, a UK news start-up, plans to launch a London operation following the Evening Standard's decision to scale back its daily newspaper to a weekly edition. The group aims to provide in-depth regional journalism and expand its operations to Glasgow, arguing there is a gap in the market due to the decline of local newspapers in recent years. Source: Financial Times.
📰 FACEBOOK LOCAL FAIL: Small UK publishers are frustrated as Facebook incorrectly flags and removes local news posts as spam. Heavily reliant on the platform for distribution and traffic, publishers struggle to reach Meta for support. This highlights the power imbalance and need to diversify audience engagement strategies, especially before the general election. Source: Press Gazette.
Industry
🚫 FAKE PROFILES: LinkedIn removed at least eleven fake profiles claiming to be PR recruitment firm Phifer & Co employees. The profiles used stock photos and names of deceased individuals, touted impressive credentials to post high-paying jobs, but violated LinkedIn's policies prohibiting fraudulent activity on the platform. Source: PRovoke Media.
Social media and platforms
🎥 YOUTUBE AI EXPERIMENTS: YouTube is testing AI features to enhance creator tools and viewer engagement. Dream Screen generates imaginative background visuals for Shorts. At the same time, an AI-powered comment organiser sorts English Shorts’ discussions into digestible topics, allowing creators to engage with their community and find fresh content inspiration easily. Source: YouTube.
📊 X ANALYTICS UPGRADE: X (formerly Twitter) is testing advanced analytics features that will provide more insights into audience data and content performance. However, as the platform seeks to increase subscription revenue, the new tools will likely be available only to paid X Premium subscribers. Source: Social Media Today.
Artificial intelligence
🤖 AI ADOPTION LAG: A Reuters Institute and Oxford University study of 12,000 people in six countries found only two per cent of Brits use AI like ChatGPT daily, with adoption highest among ages 18-24. Most expect a major societal impact from generative AI within five years, but they are split on whether it will be positive or negative. Source: Reuters Institute.
🤝 AI DEALS DEBATE: Guardian and The Sun executives agreed that regulatory action is needed on AI and copyright at the London Deloitte and Enders Media and Telecoms conference last week. While open to AI partnerships, the Guardian's CEO emphasised the importance of fair terms, and news leaders expressed optimism that existing IP rules in other industries could apply to journalism. Source: Press Gazette.
📜 ADOBE CONTROVERSY: Adobe has clarified recent changes to its Terms of Use, emphasising they were made to improve content moderation and protect against abusive content. Users feared their creative work might be used to train AI models without consent or compensation. Source: Adobe.
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Thank you to all of the members of our community for sharing and debating the stories in the newsletter this week: Julian Christopher, James Crawford, Andy Green, Michael Greer, Mags Halliday, Milla Karaivanova, Craig McGill, Amy Losak, Alan Morrison, Andy Oliver, Andrew Bruce Smith and Sarah Waddington CBE.