Aseem Sood on how AI can empower communications professionals

During the recently held e4m India PR and Corporate Communication Conference, CEO of Impact Research and Measurement Aseem Sood spoke about how automation and artificial intelligence can empower communications professionals. He gave examples how their work, that is media monitoring and intelligence is specifically affected by it. 

Sood was the chairman of the International Association of Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC) until last month. He presented a study conducted by Maya Koleva, director of research and insight at European media analytics firm Commetric and a fellow board member of AMEC while delivering a keynote speech on the topic “GPT and beyond: what we’ve learned and what we still want”. 

Every professional conference these days has multiple sessions on the impact of AI on their industry, he said. Koleva’s research tried to answer six pertinent questions about this with regards to the media monitoring and measurement, a niche field within the PR industry. Citing a Muckrack study, he said that while in April 2023 28% of PR professionals were using AI, the number grew to 64% in November 2023. 

Talking about the new game changing tools, he spoke about how they conducted a Boolean search on the topic with keywords public relations, PR, media measurement, media monitoring, GPT, AI and machine learning. “We conducted research and came up with a word cloud to analyse the results. There were four distinct types of tools that were being targeted at our niche; we found sixty new product announcements or reviews on the topic,” said Sood. 

The types of tools included writing assistants, automated insights, chat interfaces and backend features. 

Sood elaborated how the automated insights helped companies like his pick up a lot of data on their clients including news coverage, social media mentions or engagement among others.Another tool, he added is the advent of chat interfaces like chat interfaces like chat GPT that enable us real-time connection with users. Backend features, meanwhile, involve pulling these large language models into your own workflows.  

“Some companies have started replacing Boolean queries with very simple, easy to understand questions. We, in the research field, take a lot of pride in saying we know how to create the right Boolean query so you get the right results,” stated Sood. 

Now, he added, some companies have started replacing these Boolean queries with AI-backed tools. While usually the trend data analysis from social media or search engines just looks at the peak data, automation could help pick up all the conversations around the topic to arrive at more in-depth insights. Despite all the benefits of automation and AI, many companies are not able to harness this technology due to high costs of implementation, said Sood. 

Addressing the job losses due to AI, he said that queries using LinkedIn and personal connect tools to members of AMEC revealed that it was more due to overall automation rather than AI.