‘AI is creating magic in everything we are delivering today’

In a panel discussion, at the e4mIndia PR and Corporate Communication Conference 2024, industry experts shared their opinions on the good ways of using AI as PR professions, how AI should be used to become more effective and productive and the ominous side of AI.

The discussion was chaired by Rishi Seth, Founder and CEO, Evoc while the panelists were Pranav Kumar, Managing Director, Allison; Shivaram Lakshminarayan, Chief Operations Officer, Ruder Finn; Seema Siddiqui, Director Communications, Microsoft India and Mahesh Devrani, Senior Director, SPAG FINN Partners.

On being asked how PR professionals should make AI work for them, Kumar said, “The way AI is helping us at the moment is across four areas. These are expedient content, research analysis, brainstorming and ideation for campaigns and it's also for helping us create content.”

Lakshminarayan agreed with Kumar and added, “It is also helping us measure what we are delivering to our clients while also helping us speed the entire process. All of us in the room are using some format of AI, knowingly and unknowingly. Our devices are actually AI-enabled and there are a lot of conversations that’s already been tracked and helping you make those decisions. Speed, measurement, and analytics, which all of us are thriving on today, AI is definitely helping us make those informed decisions in our workspaces. AI is creating magic in everything we are delivering today.”

Taking the session forward, Seth asked Devrani, “AI or Gen-I is making a lot of current skills redundant in some way, be it writing, graphic design, measurement or research. These were valued skills for PR professionals. If AI is going to do this job for us, what are the new skills that people in this room need to develop?”

Devrani answered, “Whatever was a routine job, whatever was a job which was getting repeated, all these jobs are going to get automated by AI. This is where the human element comes in. The human skills of strategic thinking, the human skills of emotional intelligence, or the human skills of being very resolute in your analytical skills are skills which the new age is demanding. So we need to focus on including those skills in the workforce.”

Kumar also iterated that the basic skills of empathy, insight, transparency and connection does not come from AI in any way.

“We are professionals to add value. We were always known for the value-driven services we provide to our clients. We now have a tool which helps us increase or make ourselves more relevant. The more and more we get trained on these tools, the more and more we understand the technology.” highlighted Lakshminarayan.

The panelists conversed about the flip side of using AI by PR professionals.

“AI gives us access not just to productivity but actually expertise which is a powerful thing in itself. Also, the rate at which it is diffusing, we know it's a powerful democratizing force as well. The natural language interface allows access to a whole lot of people to engage with technology in an easier way. It's a very powerful, disruptive force, something which we can't turn our backs to,” Siddiqui opined, “If it is all that powerful, there has to be a flip side. There are issues around misinformation, the data itself being manipulated, data which informs AI.”

Siddiqui shared the importance of the responsible use of AI and the risks related to the same. “Security is critical. Safety is critical. Privacy is very critical. This is data which is drawn, of course, from people like us. So, respect for privacy and also just human rights at some level are like guardrails that need to guide our world. We need to work with AI. And this is how we need to be able to use it responsibly. The kind of regulations that we see around the world, in the US, in the European Union, and in India also, these are some of the basic values that are informing the regulatory landscape around AI.”

Devrani differed with Siddiqui’s opinion on the regulations around AI and suggested that AI shouldn’t be put under any guardrails for now.

“It's a very early stage for AI. AI is taking different dimensions,” he shared, “ India is going to be the best use case model for AI in the world. It has the population dividend. So, there are more and more people who are going to use it. The more people use it, the better trained the LLM model is going to be. The more the guardrails are going to get put automatically around.”

“So we need to use these models in a way that suits us pretty well. Right now, every sector is going to come up with GPT models which are very specific for that sector, or very specific for that industry. Once that starts rolling in, there would be more avenues for us to see where the guardrails should be, what is ethical, and what is not ethical,” Devrani added.

The session moved on to the discussion of the promotion and encouragement of the use of AI tools internally within companies. Kumar shared, “We've been using a lot of these tools and somewhere we've come up with a figure that says that we've come to about 18% better in operations and efficiencies because we're using AI tools within the organization. We are also experimenting with a private chat GPT in-house model and we're seeing a lot of efficiencies in information flow that you would have to use other messaging platforms for, but now it's available literally within a few seconds at the tip of your fingers.”

Lakshminarayan said, “We are at the end of the climb when a lot of confidential information is with us. So, being more conscious about it and taking ownership of it, it's on us. We are not against the usage of the tool, but we definitely want to promote the correct way of using the tool.”

Discussing if AI would take away the jobs of PR professionals, Devrani highlighted, “We are enabling ourselves to use these tools better. At the end of the day, a human is as valuable as the tool he is using to get the output. We can enable tools, but humans need to be enabled at the end of the day. How they can use Meltwater better,how they can use media monitoring better using the tools, how they can build these models up is important.

Siddiqui concluded, “Iit becomes important to let your clients know that you respect copyright, that the language that you're using in the content that you're creating should not look like an AI generated piece. You have to get creative, et cetera, all of that there. That bit of creativity, you need to exercise when you share content using AI.”