You Ask, I Answer: Generative AI and Public Relations, Part 5 of 5

In today's episode, this is the last part, part five of five of an interview I did with Stephanie Moore of Kent State University about generative AI in public relations. Okay. So in terms of encouraging that discovery and innovation, what strategies can educators and practitioners use to foster an environment of discovery and innovation. Talk to your stakeholders first, the people who are in charge. Show them here's how this will save time, save money, or make money.

And if those are important to your stakeholders, they'll go, we want that. How much is it going to cost me? How soon can you get started? Right. If you can get two out of three people are on board, and then there is leadership mandate.

This is what we're gonna do. We have to do this or we're gonna get left behind. Um, for individuals, again, how what you know the the way I tell people here's how you identify an AI use case in an organization. What of the things that you do make you go, I don't want to do that. That's your AI use case.

If you can figure out how to get AI to make you not have to do that as much every week, you will find AI an incredible companion because you'll be like, hey, you handle this product. I don't like doing my expense reports, I don't like doing this client report. I don't want to write that meeting summary. Great, get a machine to do it. That's great.

Good advice. Um, any any I examples of successful partnerships or collaborative projects? And again, I'm thinking in terms of academia and the industry. I don't know if anything Yeah, I mean, we do things like workshops and trainings uh frequently. I do half and full day workshops where we show people uh, and then there's hands-on labs, like by the time you leave here, you will have this.

So I was doing a recent uh thing at an architecture conference, and uh, by the time people left, they had their own go no go programmatic AI application that would let them decide you know, should I even bid on this proposal or not? They drop the proposal in and it comes up with the score and says yes or no, you know, bid on this or don't bid on this is you know, it's a good fit, it's gonna be a waste of your time. The fact that people can get to that point in a six hour workshop is amazing to them because they're like, I'm gonna save so much time. I'm gonna stop sending out proposals to half the companies that are no longer good fit. My boss is gonna love it, stuff like that.

So that kind of uh you know, collaborative teaching is so important. People have got to get hands on time. And there's a whole linear progression of you know, starting with basic prompts, prompt structure, the 22 different styles of prompting and stuff, and you just teach them all these things until and then you work, you work, walk them through use cases. Okay, tell me what you're working on, and let me show you how we can infuse AI into part of that, if not the whole thing. Excellent.

A lot of use with podcast editing in my classes, so we'll be playing with that. Oh, yeah, it's phenomenal for podcast editing and even excerpts. You give it a uh you give it a closed captions, the C this SRT file, and you say, identify the most impactful 30 seconds in this in this episode, tell me the timestamps, and then you know to how to edit right there. Perfect. All right, so how do you stay current?

And or how would you recommend or advice you'd give for someone to stay current on on an industry that is moving this fast? It depends on your purposes and goals, right? So I my job, my job to stay current involves reading like hundreds and hundreds of articles and social posts and academic papers. And of course, I use AI to summarize a lot of them so that I can get through them quickly. But that is because I need to know how the tools work under the hood.

Most people don't need that. So staying current is more about joining communities of like-minded folks and sharing practices, sharing what's working, trading stuff to the extent that you're permitted to. Excellent. Okay. We're breezing right through this.

And then now we have to pull out our crystal ball, which you know this is always coming. This is a question that we always ask. But what trends, what future trends do you foresee in the intersection of AI and PR? Uh either the public relations industry adopts AI well and thoroughly, or it goes out of business because it is so good. These tools are so proficient that you look at what an agency does, for example, you know, what the work output you're getting from an agency, and you look at what AI can do, and you're like, why am I paying 20,000, 30,000 a month for something that a skilled employee with Google Gemini or Chat GPT can do for 100 bucks a month?

But there still needs to be the human element, right? I mean, you always need the human to prompt it. Yeah, there is, yes. But you could do that. You I foresee a lot of bringing things in-house and a lot of agencies very much struggling to earn clients because the work that they do, a company will say, well, I can get AI to do that, and it's gonna be 70% of the quality.

I'm okay with that because it's not it's 5% of the cost. So how do we as educators and in in academia, how do we adapt to these trends to better prepare our students for future challenges and opportunities in this area? They'd better know how to use AI. Okay. They better be very, very skilled at it.

I have seen some really boneheaded things by some schools, uh, you know, banning the use of prohibiting the use of it. Like that is so stupid. It's like banning the use of calculators. Good luck getting, you know, your graduates hired. Um, it is a necessary skill.

And that same work trend index report, uh, 60 60, I think 66% of senior leaders said they would not make a hire of someone if they did not have AI skills. And 71%, they would prefer a more junior person with AI skills over a more experienced person without. That's excellent. I was gonna ask that question if you've if you've observed a shift in the type of work that PR or graduates are getting as a result of AI, and that answers that. Here's the biggest challenge graduates are gonna face, and I need to uh to wrap up very quickly soon.

Um, all the tasks that entry-level workers do, uh, machines do better. And so one of the biggest challenges that that PR is going to face, every industry is gonna face, is how do you better prepare the entry-level workers to have jobs if there are jobs? And how are you going to deal with the staffing crisis you're gonna have in 10 years when there's no bench for managers, directors, and VPs because those people aren't employed by you and they never grew up in your organization. When you trim away 80% of your entry-level staff, by definition, you're trimming away 80% of the people who will eventually become executives. Okay, well, in the interest of time, I have one final question.

Anything else that you would like to add that we haven't covered? The big uncomfortable message for, and this is something I was having a chat with the CEO of a PR agency literally yesterday, is PR has a reputation for not being as technologically current as maybe its advertising compatriots. That has to change, or the industry as a whole diminishes to a point where there's not a lot of opportunity. And so if the industry wants to thrive, it needs to get on board quickly because it is a language-based industry, and language models and language uh-based tools are exceptionally capable and are getting better by the day. Um, previously, two years ago, what ChatGPT came out with was kind of dumb, right?

It was not the world's smartest application. People looked at it going, ha ha, AI is never gonna replace us. Today, it is better than your average employee by a substantial margin. It's not better than the best people, but there are very few best people. It is better than the average person, and there's a lot of average people by definition.

Um, and that is only getting better and better and better with every iteration. These models upgrade every four months. Are you improving your skills by leaps and bounds every four months? If you're not, machines are going to consume more and more of the tasks that you do. If you enjoyed this video, please hit the like button.

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