By Nicola Koronka, Co-founder and Chief Client Officer
It may have only been a matter of months since we created our AI Charter, but the world has continued to move fast since.
The UK's inaugural AI Summit was hailed a ‘diplomatic coup’ after producing an international declaration on safety; tech giants unified to form the AI Alliance for Responsible Innovation; and – bizarrely - the world’s first AI-powered CEO was hired.
Our goal is to not just keep up with the ongoing AI revolution, however, but to responsibly shape its use in PR. One in five agencies report having an AI policy in place, and so we are pleased with our progress, but we are not complacent about the task at hand.
Our AI Charter aims to ensure that we’re using AI ethically, responsibly and to the benefit of all.
A cornerstone of the AI Charter is to review it on a regular basis, particularly given the pace of change. Our AI Taskforce meets regularly to discuss shifts in technology, regulations and societal acceptance, as well as to gather feedback from the team and clients.
So, what has changed since we published our AI Charter last year?
Expanding the AI Taskforce
As an independent tech comms consultancy we’ve harnessed AI for a variety of uses, beginning our early explorations with content and ideation tasks. You can see this in action in Erin Lovett’s chapter published in #PRstack: AI tools for marketing, media, and public relations, the latest #FuturePRoof publication, where she evaluated the strengths of Copy.ai. And as the capabilities of AI have improved and evolved, so too have our use cases. AI has since augmented our strategy and planning functions, helping us to tap into valuable white space in conversations, as well as boosted our social and digital offerings with strengthened social listening and content management. The back-office team has also used generative AI to assist with day-to-day tasks.
As confidence in AI grows, the Taskforce has also grown beyond supporting internal adoption and governance of AI tools: we are now advising clients on the ethical and reputational considerations of AI implementation.
Recent headlines have shown the public scrutiny companies can face over improper or controversial uses of AI. Even tech titans are stumbling; Google has faced scrutiny over an edited video demo, while Meta is facing legal action after using copyrighted books to train its AI.
These lessons show that care is needed as we explore new frontiers with AI in business, and the PR and Comms team is a valuable AI partner, providing advisory on the business’ reputation risks, and the expectations of customers when it comes to AI experimentation.
To this end, we advise clients with proactive planning and oversight. For instance, a health tech client on the ethical use of anonymised patient data to uncover population health insights while protecting individual privacy.
Our expertise spans best practices around AI accuracy, bias mitigation and transparency. The Taskforce strives to ensure clients use these powerful technologies responsibly. We know that with the right framework, AI can unlock immense value. But neglecting ethics and reputation is an unnecessary compromise we would never recommend. By expanding our Taskforce to draw expertise from around the business, including our DE&I Consultancy, we are equipped to guide clients down the former path.
AI is an assistant – never yet the end product
We continued to use AI as an assistant. Creativity and judgment remain unique human strengths that will never be replaced.
It’s imperative that AI should unlock potential, not unravel company culture. Healthy scepticism from the team means that we only use AI to augment human capabilities, rather than dilute award-winning ideas that stand our consultancy apart. We love this article from Aneesh Raman and Maria Flynn at LinkedIn that makes this point beautifully.
We continue to nurture prompt engineering and critical thinking as invaluable skills. We strongly encourage all staff – and clients – to always question the output of AI, helping to mitigate the risk of hallucinations and inaccuracies. We have found in unscientific tests that perplexity.ai supports our needs for data finding and summaries whereas ChatGPT is better for more creative challenges such as generating a catchy name for a new report. Ultimately, the goal is collaborative human-AI partnerships, with humans firmly in charge.
With empathy and transparency, the agency can introduce new technologies that the team and our clients understand and support. By fine-tuning this approach over time, we aim to amplify our consultancy to leading fintech, telecoms and enterprise innovation businesses.
Read more about our AI Charter here. And if you’d like our help navigating the ethical and reputational considerations of implementing AI, get in contact today.
