PR in the Age of AI

The following episode summary was originally created by AI and edited by the CIPR’s podcast editorial board:

A year on from the launch of ChatGPT, host and chair of the AI in PR panel, Andrew Bruce Smith, marks the natural language processing tool’s first birthday by reflecting on the technological advancements we’ve seen in AI over the past year and its impact on the future of PR and comms teams.

Featuring Swati Virmani (senior lecturer at De Montfort University) and Antony Cousins (executive director for strategy at Cision), in this episode, panellists discuss the ethical considerations and challenges while weighing up the benefits of adopting AI by practitioners and teams.

Timestamps and resources mentioned:

03:03 - Reflections on technological milestones over the past year

• Humans Needed More Than Ever research
• The impact of AI on UK jobs and training report from the UK government’s department for education

09:00 - What’s the use case for AI in PR and comms?

• Ethan Mollick’s blog ‘everyone is above average’

15:12 - What skills if any, should PR and comms practitioners develop in line with the evolution of AI?

23:00 - What AI tools should teams and practitioners be adopting now?

• Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools and the impact on public relations (PR) practice 
• ai for meeting minutes and summaries
• DALL-E 3 integrated into ChatGPT to generate images
• Claude for AI assistance
• Perplexity for assisted research
• Cision for media monitoring and social listening
• Fiver and Upwork for freelance support

27:59 - What are the ethical and legal implications of using AI?

36:50 - Tips for adopting AI and thoughts on what’s next for AI.

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