Arming PR professionals with the tools to successfully navigate the AI age

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been dominating conversations and strategy pivots in recent times. This year commenced with a huge buzz on new platforms such as ChatGPT, Bard and the many that followed. This new era of AI is shaping business plans, making redundant several jobs and also creating new streams of employment. Thus, it has become imperative for everyone to be geared for working alongside AI.

The third edition of IMAGEXX Summit and Awards 2023, held yesterday (June 09, 2023) started off with a very interesting and timely opening keynote address by K Yatish Rajawat, CEO of Center for Innovation in Public Policy (CIPP), who had a plethora of data, insights and advice for PR professionals in ‘Preparing for an AI Age’.

At the outset, Rajawat introduced himself by saying that he had had a long stint in journalism, before moving on to his current work in public policy.

Addressing the huge gathering of PR and corporate communications professionals at IMAGEXX 2023, Rajawat said that he wanted to address something that is disrupting the PR industry, as well as the lives of PR professionals. He went onto state, “I will focus on how we can prepare for this disruption and the skills we need to inculcate right now so that you don’t become outdated and extinct. It is because the change that is coming is exponential in nature.”

Speaking about AI, Rajawat pointed out that there are two aspects of AI. While everyone has been hearing about AI repeatedly in the last couple of months, Rajawat clarified that AI is not new; it is possibly 60-odd years old. “It has gained hype because it now touches your life on a daily basis – more importantly, because of Generative AI, which is basically machine learning or a computer that is able to generate text, image, video and 3D modelling. So, while AI has always been in your life – whenever you went on Facebook and Facebook popped up something that was engaging with you, so you interacted with AI. Or whenever you used Google Search, you interacted with AI. But it didn’t really affect your life. Now, with generative AI, it affects every PR professional’s life, because you are in the business of communicating forms which are text, video and image, and all those three forms can be generated by AI. And it can be generated in a better manner – it can write better than you, it can create better presentation. So, effectively it is taking away what is called as the base of your skill, which is writing a compelling press release, crafting a persuasive pitch, and creating an engaging presentation.”

During his address, Rajawat also showcased a few Generative AI tools available in the market and said that most are open source, which means that they are free to use Business-to-Consumer tools such as Google Search.

However, they are just the tip of the iceberg. Continuing further, he said, “What is actually going to affect you is not these tools, but the business tools that companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Google are going to offer to your clients. These enterprise level tools are far more superior to any of the open source tools.”

Speaking about the much talked about OpenAI, Rajawat noted that its limitation was that it is 2021. He went on to talk about Codey, a product launched by Google in the last two months, which is generative AI that can even generate code for users. “Codey is so advanced that in four prompts you can train it to learn any computing language. This means that if you write four sentences of English, it can convert those four sentences of English into any computing language – Python, C-Sharp, Java, SQL – whatever you want, in a matter of seconds. That’s the level of advancements that these enterprise level tools are having.”

“If you think that OpenAI or Bard does a great job of producing an essay, then you should look at what text-to-speech or speech-to-text model – called Chirp, which is a Google product – is capable of,” Rajawat added.

These are edited excerpts. For the complete keynote address, watch below: