✅ Status report: artificial intelligence in public relations

A week in management, media and public relations

It’s almost 12 months since the launch of ChatGPT by OpenAI.

I’ve written a status report on the public relations industry this week examining its adoption of artificial intelligence (AI).

✅ The approach of communication and public relations to AI is mainly characterised as tinkering and experimentation. Enterprise solutions, robust data management policies and a shake-out of the tools market are urgently needed.

✅ Generative AI can produce a first draft, but quality is often poor, and machines make stuff up. As AI models improve, computer-generated copy is getting better.

✅ Entry-level roles are at risk as productivity gains come from automating routine writing tasks such as information gathering, blogs, press releases and social media skills. Adaptability and entrepreneurial skills will be key.

✅ AI's reductive potential is significant, particularly in senior roles. Spotting patterns in data and summarising reports offers new insights for planning, decision-making and measurement.

✅ Public relations skills will become critical for relationship-building, emotional intelligence and ethics that fall outside the capability of algorithms - whether we call this public relations in the future is another issue entirely.

You can read the full report on our website. Please let me know if we can help you with anything. In the past week, we’ve supported agencies and organisations with 2024 planning, AI horizon scanning and training.

Have an excellent week.

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Media

📰 REACH RESHAPES: Reach, the publisher of the Mirror, Express, and Star newspapers, is cutting 550 jobs, including 320 editorial roles, as part of a restructuring to reduce costs and focus more on digital platforms and social media influencers over print. Source: Press Gazette.

🏛 PRESS REGULATION: The Press Recognition Panel has launched a public call for views on press regulation in the UK 10 years after the creation of the Royal Charter governing press self-regulation. It is seeking input on issues such as the government's proposals to repeal access to justice legislation and the Online Safety Act. Source: Press Regulation Panel.

Artificial intelligence

⌨️ OPENAI ENHANCEMENT: The ChatGPT developer has announced products including GPT-4 Turbo with a 128K context window, Assistants API for building customised AI apps and multimodal capabilities like GPT-4 Turbo with vision and DALL-E 3. It has also committed to reduced pricing, higher rate limits, and copyright protection for developers. Source: OpenAI.

Platforms and tools

📱 SECURING WHATSAPP: Silence Unknown Callers and Protect IP Address in Calls enhance the security and privacy of WhatsApp calls by blocking unwanted calls and hiding users' IP addresses during calls. The features protect users from cyber attacks, spyware, and unwanted location tracking. Source: Meta.

Research

❓ MANAGEMENT INTELLIGENCE: Wadds Inc. has partnered with NewsWhip to explore how corporate communications and public relations can support management with data and insights, including during issues and crises. We’d welcome your perspective via this short survey. All of the findings and results from the survey will be anonymised. Source: Wadds Inc.

🌍 ESG SKILLS SHORTAGE: A report from The Open University found that 77% of UK businesses agree ESG factors impact brand and reputation, but only 8% have a fully realised ESG strategy. Lack of skills, resources, and complexity holding back implementation in areas such as waste reduction and carbon accounting. Source: Open University.

🤹 EVOLVING SKILLS: The European Communication Monitor offers insights into public relations practice over 15 years, highlighting the importance of trust, alignment with management, digitalisation, empathic leadership and inclusive teams. The findings provide practitioners with a sign-post to developing skills to lead change. Source: Wadds Inc.

Management

👩 NED TO GET AHEAD: As part of our work, we help creative agencies set company direction and provide support with strategic growth plans. We’ve set out four areas for business to focus on as part of 2023 planning: company purpose, conducting futures and foresight work, improving risk management and reviewing financing costs. Source: Wadds Inc.

⏰️ AGENCY MODEL: Caroline Johnson, co-founder of consulting firm The Business Model Company, says the billable hour is a flawed agency business model as it incentivises inefficiency. Agencies should embrace commerciality as a creative skill and move to fixed-price products and programs to increase margins from 13% to over 30%. Source: Contagious.

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Thank you to the following members of the House of Marketing & PR community of practice for sharing and debating stories covered in the newsletter over the last week: Alan Morrison, Andrew Bruce Smith and Sarah Waddington CBE.