And we are live. Hi everybody, and welcome to Circle of Fellows. Uh, I am Shel Holtz. I am an IABC fellow. I am here with, uh, three of my IABC fellow colleagues, and we are going to talk about, uh, the leadership moment in artificial intelligence for the communication community. This is the first of two episodes where we will focus on this topic. This is based on the results of a survey that was conducted by the Global Alliance. Uh, both Bonnie and Adrian are heavily involved with the Global Alliance, and I’ll let them tell you how, uh, as we go around the horn and do introductions. Uh, before we get into that, though, I do wanna let everyone know that we hope that you will participate in this conversation by sharing your questions, your observations, your thoughts in the YouTube chat. I can see them right here in this sidebar panel, and we’ll share them on the screen, and we can bring you into the conversation that way. Uh, so let’s do introductions. We’ll go around, uh, clockwise in the order I see you. Uh, and that means we’re starting with you, Adrian. Thanks for that, Shel. It’s always good to be on the Circle of Fellows. Um, I’m Adrian Cropley. I am the co-founder of the Center for Strategic Communication based in Melbourne, Australia, past IABC chair, and now, uh, director on the board of the Global Alliance, and fortunately, um, a partner in the research. Bonnie has- Bonnie and I have done this now for the last couple of years with the, the Global Alliance, so it’s great to be on here sharing a little bit around that, uh, what it’s telling us about that leadership moment. Terrific. Glad to have you with us, Adrian. Bonnie, you’re up. Hi, I’m Bonnie Caver, and I am in Austin, Texas, and I run a company called Reputation Lighthouse, and that’s my day job. Um, of course, I’ve been involved with IABC a long time, and am the past chair of the Global Communication Certification Council and sat on the board of the Global Alliance where, for the last, uh, three years, I’ve been focused on responsible AI and the way our global profession looks at responsible AI. So anytime we have an opportunity to talk about that, uh, it’s very helpful to me as we’re moving forward to Abuja and the World PR Forum, and we’ll be updating the responsible AI guidelines for our profession. Excellent. Looking forward to seeing the outcome of that initiative. And Mike? Hello there. I’m Mike Klein, and I am an IABC fellow. I am also editor-in-chief of Strategic Magazine, which publishes daily content for communication leaders worldwide. And also, I have my own consultancy focused on internal communication and organizational strategy. And my AI bent is less about responsible use of AI and more about strategic use of AI and our strategic positioning within the AI ecosystem, um, with an, with a particular focus on the second-order effects of AI use in organization worldwide Great. And some of you watching this may have seen the promotional materials that went out announcing that this was going to be happening and saw that Thea-Mari Karamalis was also going to be on the panel. Uh, we miss her. Uh, we were looking forward to seeing her here as well, but she let us know the day before yesterday that she has come down with laryngitis. So I, I suppose she could still be here, she just couldn’t say anything. Uh, so she’s opted to take it easy, and we hope that she recovers well and look forward to having her on a future, uh, installment of Circle of Fellows. So let’s jump into this. We have talked about artificial intelligence on Circle of Fellows a couple of times. It’s hard to avoid the topic. If you spend any time on LinkedIn at all, I swear half of the posts there have something to do with AI. I have started following somebody who is talking just about AI in the construction industry on, uh, on LinkedIn. Uh, she posts some really good stuff. She’s not selling anything other than her own consulting services, so, uh, she’s talking about what different companies are doing, and it’s, it’s, it’s really fascinating out there. Um, I personally subscribe to, I think, 12, uh, different AI newsletters, uh, that come by email. And I use AI to summarize all of those because I can’t possibly read 12 daily email newsletters. Uh, but we wanna sort of look at this from more of a, a 40,000 foot, uh, perspective as opposed to the nitty-gritty applications of AI in communication. What does this mean for communication leadership within organizations, uh, and within the communication profession? So, uh, the survey that was conducted by the Global Alliance, uh, I believe, if I remember correctly, I don’t have it in, up in front of me, but I think it was 600 responses or so. Um, so it was a, a, a pretty good representation, a global representation of, of how this is being used. The report, uh, does slice and dice the data so you can see how it all shakes out regionally, for example. But there were some interesting results. Let me just share a couple of, uh, the data points, uh, here. Um, 95.9% of organizations now permit their employees to use AI. That’s up from 91% last year, so incremental growth. Most organizations are letting everybody use it, but only 8.6 of organizations have communication professionals leading formal AI governance. And one in four organizations, uh, specifically 25.4%, um, discloses AI use to no one. There is no disclosure at all. Uh, disclosure is one of my favorite topics because I don’t think it’s an either/or question. But, uh, that’s Interesting data that’s out there. I’ve seen other data from other surveys. We just did one where I work, uh, so I’ve, I’ve, I’ve got that perspective floating around in my head since I joined this call on the heels of a call with my company’s AI committee. So what does that data tell us? Let’s, let’s look at this from, from a governance perspective. What’s missing, uh, when only 8%, 8.6% of us are, are, are leading governance? Uh I, I mean, I presume that somebody’s leading governance in, in these organizations. So what do companies lose when, when communication isn’t engaged? It’s, you know, it’s a really interesting one. I, I might jump in and, and talk about this one first, ’cause when we looked at the, the survey, it, it, it was kind of a worrying statistic because this, this year’s survey, it’s now the second year that this particular survey has been running. So Bonnie and I have, have kind of led that with the Global Alliance. It means now we’ve got that comparative data. Governance really hasn’t shifted in the, the last two years. We can ask a question around what involvement should communication professionals have in governance, should we be leading it, is probably the, the key question there. But if we’re not leading it, are we, are we part of that? Um, so for instance, one of the, the statistics in the, the survey was 57.3% of us are involved in shaping responsible AI guidelines. Um, but only 13.9 are actually leading in that work as well. So it- it’s part of that government s- governance frame, but it’s quite low in the numbers. Now, I guess there’s, there really is that debate around where we should be positioned as communication professionals and there’s, there’s lots of people that say we really shouldn’t be leading it, it should be dedicated AI, um, executives, um, that have a department that looks at, at AI, and I’m, I’m all for that. I think that’s great. But at the absolute minimum, we have a big role in being part of that conversation, and certainly leading it in areas that support communication within the organization. Um, and I might come back to this later, but the, the latest changes within Claude, for instance, is a reaction to… And, and, and what those changes are is, is digital watermarks saying how much of, uh, AI is, is being used, and it automatically discloses for, for us. We’ll talk about disclosure a little bit later, but it’s worrying that decisions are being made without the understanding of the context of communication and, and our input because it’s not black and white, we used AI or we didn’t, it’s to what degree and how much is the human in the loop. And, and, and, and I’m sure Bonnie will talk a lot more about, um, about the, uh, uh, responsible AI and, and the importance of, of that role. But I think we’re in, we’re in a, a place where we actually need to be starting to be part of that conversation, if not leading in that con- that, that area of governance, ’cause it’s a really good role to be given AI is used in content development right across organizations. I was just gonna add in here that, that really and truly where this governance is coming and where it, it impacts us is in that connection to reputation. And because of the way that we are working as organizations, how we’re governing, uh, it, it increases our risk, uh, exposure. Every time we are hiding something is, or it appears that we’re hiding something because we’re not transparent, we’re not dis- dis- disclosing, uh, when people have questions about how we’re using AI, when there’s any sort of doubt, uh, around, of course, we’ve got all of the AI slop. When we don’t have governance, um, it goes to the patterns that are looked at, um, for our organization and how w- it’s, it’s impacting our reputation. And if you look across the board, um, you know, I, I’ve been in the reputation business for a long time. My, my company is, is, uh, 20-plus years old, and we’ve been talking about reputation for a long time. But it’s interesting to me how many comms departments and how many jobs now say reputation is important, how many, um, organizations are talking about it, how many agencies are talking about it. It’s like reputation is the new buzzword, and part of it is because of this lack of AI governance and the ethical challenges and how we’re not communicating that, and we’re not communicating appropriately, uh, and transparently to our stakeholders, and it’s causing, um, reputational risk Mike, any thoughts? I think the, I think the challenge of, of looking at, uh, uh, I think the challenge of looking at AI, you know, uh, this from a reputational lens is that reputation is hugely important. A huge chunk of a company’s value is based, you know, particularly most of a, a company’s intangible value is based on its reputation. But reputation is a fundamentally defensive discipline, and governance is a fundamentally defensive discipline. And the opportunity that communication leaders have isn’t just simply about leading the defense, it’s also about guiding the offense. It’s about finding the opportunities and seeing beyond the, the, the, the current set of risks. Um, AI isn’t just simply making it easier for people to produce on s- you know, produce content without supervision. AI is also transforming the way people work in organizations, and what organizations fundamentally do and how they do that. And as important as AI rep- you know, as AI governance is, it’s also very intense. It’s very time-consuming, and we could very easily find ourselves sidetracked from even these even bigger opportunities on, you know, on the other side of the organization. Mike, I’d like to just talk about that. I th- I love that you say that reputation is defensive, because I’ve just written a whole book about the fact that it’s not. And everything here is about how- Okay. We’re gonna have some flak Here’s some opportunity r- right, to move it from being defensive to how you do things right and take advantage of the opportunities to differentiate yourself and to differentiate yourself from a reputational perspective, how you create reputational currency. And this is an incredible opportunity to do that. While we’re looking at the risk, um, certainly I 100% agree with you. Let’s switch it and let’s look at where the opportunities are for our leadership and, and really reputation should be embedded in those things that we do, um, in, uh, as a daily basis. And so how do we begin to look at it from that perspective and take advantage? I totally agree with you. Um, it’s time to look at the positive and how we lead on a positive level versus being in this total defense mode. And I think there’s, there’s- It’s interesting- If we look at the role of communication professionals o- over years, we, we love a good defense. We love to get involved when the crisis has happened. We love to get involved when, when issues need to be managed within the organization. So do we automatically put ourselves in the defensive role? Is it time now to start looking at being the proactive role and, and, and the attack role, as, as you said, Mike, which I, I totally agree with, is we need to look at our time. So are we saying that things like governance reputation is time-consuming, and it will become even more time-consuming the more we fall off these cliffs because there is not governance and there’s not order in place when it comes to AI, or it’s being defined for us around how we use AI within the organization. So I think there’s… I think it’s actually about turning it into, as Bonnie was saying, the positive of here is the opportunity now for us to step up. Because if we stay in content creation mode and tool mode and, and learning those tools without stepping into a much more leadership role, then I think we’re missing a huge opportunity. One of the things that Bonnie mentioned that I wanted to come back to was the idea that reputation should be embedded in what people are doing and what organizations are doing. I agree that it should be embedded rather than being, you know, a parallel measurement. One of the big problems that we have in the realm of communication, it’s not just around reputation, it’s also particularly strong around employee engagement, putting my own book on as it happens. And we often look at measurement of reputation and measurement of- employee engagement as parallel metrics to organizational performance. And Bonnie is dead right about saying these are embedded, these are part of the picture. Um, we need to think about reputation, but reputation isn’t an end of, an end in itself. When, when I think about governance, uh, I, I come at it from two levels. Uh, one is the role that, uh, communications and particularly internal communications should play, uh, in any governance, whether it’s AI or anything else in the organization, and that is how are employees gonna react to this? Uh, this is, I think, why we wanna be proactive and, and be in the room and have a, a voice in shaping all of this because we know, uh, intrinsically, uh, how employee audiences are going to react to, to certain things, whether they’re gonna be cynical or upset or, uh, skeptical or if they’re gonna like it. Uh, because if this is built in a vacuum and we’re not involved, uh, they’re gonna send it to us and say, “Communicate this,” and, and we’re gonna look at it and go, “This isn’t gonna fly. Uh, this isn’t gonna work.” I mean, I, I’ll give you a great example out, out of my company is, uh, we, in the communication of the survey results, said, uh, one of the things we’re gonna do is revisit the governance policy. And the guy who’s leading this effort for the company said, “We don’t have to do that. I just checked with our general counsel, and he says it’s still good.” And I said, “Well, you know, this is two years old, and agents weren’t even i-in, uh, in the conversation two years ago.” Uh, I had been reading about companies that are worried about having thousands and thousands of agents that have not been cataloged or inventoried. Nobody knows what they’re doing. Employees create them and leave, and they’re still out there looping and burning tokens. Uh, this has to be addressed with governance. Uh, so at one level, we need to have a say, uh, o-o-on any governance, but at the other level, we need to be able to say, “Hey, what about agents? Shouldn’t that be in here?” And for that, the communicator needs to be pretty well informed on all of this. And I don’t believe that all, uh, I, I wouldn’t even hazard that most are completely up to speed, uh, on the issues that would affect AI governance. Uh, so, uh, you know, should they be leading that effort? Probably not. They should just be looking at the impact it’ll have when it’s introduced into the organization. I, I think one of the really important points that you’re talking about is the difference between AI as tool Uh, even when we talk about Claude or ChatGPT or let’s implement, uh, Copilot, you know, we’re looking at it as a tool. But when we start to talk about it, uh, we start to talk about agents, we’re talking about it beginning to be part of our infrastructure, and we ha- we are already behind because we didn’t put in the governance for tools. Now we’re going to look at it, um, as it, it’s embedded into our infrastructure, it’s embedded into our workflows, it’s, uh, you know, part of the way we do business. We’re moving away from it being a trusted, you know, just a, an, um, a, you know, I’m using these tools, this is my, uh, you know, we used to talk about our stack. Well, now we have an AI stack. We’re moving completely away from that, where AI will be embedded in our organization at such a level, um, that we won’t know where it’s looking at data. We might not know when we’re using third-party tools where it is. So if we’ve started out without the right infrastructure, we’ve started out without the right governance, now when it w- when it moves from being an operating system, from being guardrails to an operating system, how far behind are we going to be? The challenge is the, where it’s going in our organizations is moving so much faster than our governance, uh, that we’re gonna have a day of reckoning, exactly as you said, Shel, when somebody creates an agent and, and it’s just out there running, um, and we don’t even know about it. You don’t even know it’s there. The, uh, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll make a little parable between- You know what? You know what this- … history and, uh, and where we’re at now. And I know when I started in, in internal communications 25, 30 odd years ago, um, and you’ll remember this Michelle, is there was no understanding of what internal comms was, what was involved, how to manage channels, what was good communication. So we were stepping into organizations where we actually had to say, “We need to take stock of this, put some frameworks around it, put some governance, put some structure.” And then as we’ve evolved, we’ve been able to let go of that because people were trained within the framework of, of how they work. And we’re seeing in the report the confidence levels of, of communication professionals around issues like ethics and understanding ethics. Now we’ve got the knowledge of it, but how are we applying that? ‘Cause that’s only one component of responsible AI. But I think in, in any evolution we’ve got, uh, we’ve got an area where we, we have this, this chaos. Sometimes we have to put some very tight guardrails and governance around it, bring everybody into the understanding then of how to use and what’s good practice and, and those things. It’s an educational process, and then we’re able to let it go. The conversations we seem to be having, certainly from a center point of view with, uh, with our clients at, at the moment, is that they’re, they’re dealing with that exact issue of people generating content within their organizations, sending it to them and going, um, “Can you send this out?” Um, exactly what you were saying before. And it’s because there is no understanding of what good communication is in the AI space. We’ve got this great opportunity not just to govern it, but also to educate people of what that looks like when we’re using AI Sorry, Mike, I think you were going to say something to that Well, I just think the, the b- yeah, I had a, I had a couple of things. I mean, I think the educational role of, of the communication person around things like AI ethics and responsible AI is important, but at the same time, we need to be cautious about the extent to which this is seen as a primary role of ours. Because, you know, there are very few of us in organizations. You know, our, our resources are stretched, our remit is stretched. You know, we’re often in, as you say, defensive mode rather than proactive mode. And certainly AI governance is a largely defensive or proactively defensive approach. But this conversation also reminds me of the intranet conversation that we’re having 5, 10, you know, certainly conversation we were having 25 years ago, where there’s lots of stale content out there, and there’s this idea that comms people should be the ones who colle- who do all the tagging and collect all the metadata and screen all of this stuff out. There aren’t enough of us to chase rogue agents. Um, there aren’t enough of us to chase, um, you know, stuff that was created that’s no longer relevant, that’s consuming resources. You know, maybe we can work with AI so that AI can find its own, you know, its own rogue, um… But, you know, there’s only so much we can do without marginalizing ourselves in that process See, interesting. And, and I, and I absolutely get it. It’s, it’s, to me it’s a little bit around the how much role do you play in, um, facilitating the governance role. I think what we need is a really important in defining the governance role from our point of view. Um, but I don’t think we should be the arms and legs of saying we’re going to be the, the organization police around it. What we do need to be is the facilitator of the knowledge around proper use and responsible use of AI, given that the majority of the work that we’re doing in organizations now is about content, and it is about getting that stuff out there. Disclosure, without kind of flipping us onto another topic, has been the hot topic right now, and there’s tons of conversations being happening around what we disclose, how we disclose and, and so on. And that seems to be the hot button now. And we should, in a way, been ahead of that curve in helping our organizations understand what does this mean for the content that we’re producing and putting out there in terms of disclosure. Yeah, and we’ll talk about disclosure in just a second. I know we need to move on to that. But I, I did want to raise one other issue. I, I really liked what you said, Adrian, about the difference between, uh, influencing what the governance is and actually facilitating it. I think that’s an important distinction. Uh, and yeah, I think it’s important that we be engaged in the definition of the, the governance, uh, because ultimately this is gonna have an impact on communication, and I can, I can think of a couple of levels where this is happening. Uh, one is, uh, work slop, where people are using a, uh, an iffy prompt. They’re getting what looks like a polished document. It sure reads well. Uh, and they’re attaching that to an email or, or copying and pasting it into an email and sending it, and they go, “Wow, I just saved two hours. I didn’t have to do the research and the writing on this.” But that saved time on the part of the person who created that has really just been offloaded onto the person who received it, because they have to read this now and go, “Okay, this, this sure reads well, but I’m not getting any substance out of this. Uh, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with it.” Uh, it’s, it’s not a good document for people to work with, so that affects communication. And then I was just hearing, in fact, I’m on a popular panel coming up next week, uh, with Jenny Field Uh, that is talking about the fact that there are people who are getting internal comms content, uh, for review and approval, and they’re rewriting it using AI because they think with AI they’re now all internal comms experts. Uh, and the communicators are getting this stuff back and they’re going, “This isn’t what I wrote. This isn’t getting, uh, the intent across.” Uh, and yet they think that this is now perfect because they ran it through Claude or ChatGPT. So, uh, one other interesting bit of data that I’m aware of, and that is that people are less frequently getting in touch with their organization’s subject matter experts because they can just go to ChatGPT and get the answer from the engineering team or the marketing team or the sales team. Uh, I don’t need to actually talk to one of our SMEs, I can just ask Claude. Uh, so we’re communicating less with the people in the organization. The second, the second-order effects of all of this are absolutely brutal. It’s not just simply that the, that the receiver of the message is getting a diluted and perhaps worse message. You know, when multiple people are getting that memo, when multiple people are having meetings to discuss that watered-down memo, then the cascading effects of all of this aren’t just simply, you know, content. These are actual second wor- second-order impacts happening in the organization. And when you talked about the offloading of expertise conversations onto Claude, that is wreaking havoc on the organizational social networks of every organization in the world. It’s wreaking havoc on, um, new employee onboarding. It’s wreaking havoc on, you know, really the ability to do coherent internal communication more broadly. And organizations are not willing to do the, the basic organizational network analysis right now to figure out what their current networks look like, so that when the networks get degraded by this use, you know, they’re not gonna be able to take the right corrective action before things deteriorate further. Now let’s move on to, uh, disclosure. Uh, again, looking at the data from the Global Alliance survey, 60.3% see AI as a reputational opportunity, 56.1% see it as increased reputational risk. And I’m not a mathematician, but to me that means there are people who answered yes to both of those questions. Uh, and one in four organizations disclose to absolutely nobody. I, I mentioned that at the outset. Uh, what, what’s being risked? Uh, w- what are the– what, what’s the fallout from this kind of an approach to AI and disclosure? So w- and if I look at this from a general observation, I, I, I’ve been talking to quite a number of communication departments, particularly in internal comms. Um, and A lot of what’s coming back is they’re just not sure about how to disclose. And, and I know that sounds like a really basic issue, but it, it’s do I just say sweepingly AI was used in the, in the development of this content? And does that then impact the reputation because people believe it’s not you, it’s not your intellect. Um, and what we’re really starting to get our head around as, as, as a world le- uh, working in AI is that at what parts is AI playing the role? And I think this is the big thing around disclosure now is the fear of disclosure if it’s gonna have a, a, a negative impact, um, versus what is it we should be disclosing on. Because you go from a spectrum where you go, “Look-” AI really is, is doing to the world what calculators did to the world in mathematics years ago. Um, should we be disclosing every time we use AI to get an idea or a, a prompt or, or should we be having levels of disclosure? And I think that’s where we’re coming into effect where we need to understand what the landscape of disclosure… So for instance, image, if it’s completely, completely, uh, uh, created in, in AI, we should have a disclosure saying, “This image has been created, um, use, with the use of AI.” But when it comes to content and intellect, it is how much of your intellect versus what AI has done. So if it’s just been used to spell-check and edit, then do we just pop that in, in terms of this is what it’s being used for? And I think there’s a drifting towards that what is it being used for. So I think what we’ve had is, and then why the statistics low, is we’ve had this paralysis in understanding the actual landscape of disclosure. I think something really interesting there is, is to, to add in this conversation to transparency. And all of us know that, that, um, people have a different idea of what transparency is. Um, you know, you want your leaders to tell you absolutely everything they are doing, and we’re going to go through a merger and you’re going to lose your job, or you’re going to get promoted or whatever. We want to know everything in this day and age, and reality is it’s, it’s a need to know transparency. Mm-hmm. Um, and I think when we go to disclosure, it gets at that level as well. We have to think about how does this impact the stakeholders, and when is the right time to tell them, and what does that look like, what that level of disclosure. But we also have to look at it as to how as organizations we’re being judged, and AI has now become part of that judgment process. It’s now how, you know, I’m judging you how you’re using AI. I’m judging you based on the products that are coming out. If I’m looking at a consultancy that I’m going to pay millions of dollars, and they have thrown out some AI slop that doesn’t, wasn’t properly researched, that’s hurting their reputation, so now I’m judging them on how they used AI. I’m judging you on organizations, whether you’re governing AI. I’m judging you on how you’re communicating your use of AI. And then I’m also trying to make some decisions as to whether I’m going to, uh, do business with you because I don’t know how you’re going to use my data and whether, uh, I can trust you. And we can even look at governments and it, govern- publics are now re- wanting to know how are, is my government using AI? And when it gets so embedded in our organizations and we don’t even know how AI is being used, we don’t even know what it’s doing, that becomes an issue. So that’s where I see this disclosure and transparency. Um, we’re really looking at it as being visible corporate behavior, and just as you would talk about anything else in your organization, uh, you need to be talking about your use of AI. And I just want to add to that one too, just to bring in the point that Shel made before. When you’re working in the world of agents now, particularly as we’re looking at autonomous agents where AI is in the loop of checking AI, and then we’re putting stuff out there, disclos- disclosure becomes even more important when there really isn’t the human in the loop apart from kind of the, the, the, the deciding the, the, the process in the first place. So it, it, it is becomes a really tricky landscape, and organizations won’t want to put it out there for the fear of diminished reputation. And, and so the rewards versus benefit is a big conversation here and, and this is why I think there needs to be a lot more guidance to help support organizations’ use of AI. It’s, it’s having conversations with your stakeholders. Mm, absolutely. T- cert- there’s a certain brutality level around all of this. I mean, I’m a small business owner, been working in Europe for the last 20 years, and the recent AI regulations from the EU, which, you know, essentially, you know… And, and it’s not the regulations themselves, which, you know, really focus on public awareness and public, um, information about certain specific topics. But the proactive overcompliance, like what we saw with Claude and their digital watermarks, is absolutely crucifying small business here. You know, I have a, you know, I have my own newslet- you know, I, I, I have my own news magazine, basically, Strategic. You know, there’s two of us working on it, um, you know, on a day-to-day basis. I use AI to generate headline images for the articles that we use. I use Ideogram. It’s excellent. I pay 20 bucks a month for it. If I had to say AI content all over that, you know, that would diminish the credibility of what I’m doing. Which, you know, is, you know, i- it’s an unacceptably high cost just because we need to align ourselves with corporate standards for, um, for disclosure. I mean, you g- you gotta wonder about the whole disclosure thing to begin with. If you’ve got a human who’s accountable for a piece of information that goes out, then why do you need to have disclosure regulations, so long as there’s an identifiable human who’s got some finger on that? I mean, if you’ve got AI feeding directly into information systems, then it’s a different ballgame. But it’s like, why should I have to label my, my headline images as AI generated? You know, I can’t afford to pay a graphic artist or Getty Image for, for every, um, for every article I post, and it would make my, the work that I do impossible if I had to do so. It’s a really good example, Mike, of it’s being done for us because we haven’t given the context to the people that are making these regulations. So are, are we actually talking with, you know, the EU to say, “Right, here, here is the, the, the regulation,” or, “Here is our take on what the regulation should be from a communication perspective.” Because you can’t blanket AI versus non-AI use because it is context. And if we look at, you know, IBC’s, um, global standard, context is one of the key principles here that we bring to the table of value to our, our organizations, but the wider world. So we might be getting our heads around it within organizations, but when we see government starting to regulate things, they go in quite heavily handed. And you’re quite right, it has that negative impact on, on the businesses because you’re now made or mandatory doing it. Same with Claude going, “Right, so we’re solving the problem because everybody’s telling us we need to disclose, so we’re now gonna put the digital watermark in place.” Um- Now thankfully there isn’t the, the, the trackers to just, to see whether that, that watermark is working ’cause they haven’t produced that yet. But the reality is we will see the companies going, “Oh, we now need to comply with a greater regulation that’s been put in or imposed by people that don’t actually understand the landscape of use of AI for content.” Uh, well, and that’s my take on it. Yeah. I think- There’s a, there’s a bigger issue with the Claude watermark, and that is that it will, uh, be a positive if it was processed through AI, not necessarily written. You could have written that whole thing bespoke and run it through AI as a grammar spellcheck, and it’s going to incorporate that watermark and will show as a positive when somebody runs the eventual, uh, check on it, uh, that, that Claude, uh, that Anthropic says they’re going to release. But I, I think, you know, disclosure ultimately has to be a question of individual judgment, and our role, um, in the governance part of this is giving people the context they need in order to make a good judgment. Uh, I know what I need to disclose. Uh, it’s, it’s a bit like that, uh, that US Supreme Court decision on pornography that is like, “I, I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.” Um- … it’s, you know, it’s, it’s kinda like that. I mean, I, I can absolutely see the need to disclose that an image was created with, with AI if I think people would feel deceived if they knew that. On the other hand, I just published an article on our intranet where there was n- there were no photos, uh, there was nothing to photograph. Uh, so I had AI create some conceptual commercial graphics. If I had gone out to an artist, you know, um, 20 years ago for this, I wouldn’t have said, “This art was created by commercial artist Don Weller.” Um, it just would’ve been there with the article. Uh, and I don’t see that I need to disclose that I used AI to create this commercial- you know, uh, graphic, uh, either. Uh, I don’t need to disclose, for example, that I used AI, uh, one of the note-taking tools to record an interview, shared the transcript with one of the large language models and said, “Please strip out anything that isn’t about this topic and then organize this in a nat- natural flow, and then use that to actually write the article based on that interview.” It was a tool that I used in the process, and I don’t feel compelled to disclose that. For me, the rule is if anybody would feel deceived if they knew I used AI, then I need to disclose that. But I have the context to make that decision. I’m not sure everyone in the organization does. I think that’s the, the, the big issue is, is really about organizations understanding around this one, and I think this is a really good role for us, not only to, to give the guidelines, but then help people understand how they might apply that because people are actually confused. Um, I run a number of writing courses for, for government here in, in Australia, and they’re not communication professionals. They’re people that just want to learn a, a skill, and they are completely confused around, uh, things like disclosure and when I can use it. But they’re also very confused on how to use the tool to get good content out of the, the writing that they’re, they’re doing. So it is really about the role you take and then what it is that we need to, to, to look at. And, and, and I’m a big advocate that we didn’t disclose when we started using calculators. And I’m, I’m, I’m of the generation when you went to a- an exam when you were younger, you were not allowed to take calculators in because that was cheating. Now it’s, it’s just a given. Um, and I think we’re, we’re there on some of the things where it’s absolutely a no-brainer. It’s just a tool to help you. And if it’s spell-checking or reformatting or putting it into another style, fantastic. But if it is a significant part of the process I think we need to say where we’ve been able to, to use that in our ability to deliver a better outcome, certainly for our clients. And we’re, we’re now looking at statements certainly within the, the center that’s saying, “So what’s our general policy on use of, of AI?” Uh, and their statement’s around the intellect, the input is from the, the, the professionals that understand this and the expertise. AI is helping us as a tool to help format or re- um, re-look at or do research or whatever those moments are, just so you’re… It’s just, it’s there, it’s transparent, and it’s assumed that’s what you would be doing. Yeah. And by the way, I, I get really frustrated when I hear people say that AI should never be used for writing at all. Uh, because I d- I don’t know if any of you have ever read a memo written by an engineer. Uh, but, uh, if, if AI can make their stuff readable, um, God bless it. Uh, I, I, I will take that. But this again gets to- And it’s if- … the need for having that kind of training where they know don’t just throw in a prompt and have it produce something. You have to give it the good information that you want it to polish into a readable document. But if, if AI does that, then we’re all gonna benefit from it. And as we begin to build, um, our infrastructures within our organization and we’re uploading, uh, our brand guidelines and we’re uploading our narrative and our messages and all of these things, people are gonna come in, uh, and, and use that information. So we’re not necessarily the people that are writing. We’re being the narrative. Uh, we’re, we’re creating the narrative. We’re creating the brand. We’re talking about the stories. We’re showcasing the, the proof points. All of those things that we’ve done forever, but we might not be doing the end product. We may just be setting up our Claude workflows. We may be setting up our agents so that the VP of sales can go do their own presentation, can go do their own sales sheet, but they’re not gonna break my rules. They’re doing it anyway today, right? Um, and then you see it a month later and you go, “Oh my gosh, that wording’s not right. That’s not what we talked about. Um, that’s not our brand.” Now you can put all that in place and in, within your work, work teams, uh, whether you’re in ChatGPT or you’re in, um, Claude or whatever tools you’re using, and then they can’t break the rules, and they have to use the storylines and the things that you say. And that is going to be the way our role’s changing because we might not be writing the end products. Um, we may be a little more on that strategy perspective, and other people are gonna take that and build their own content out of it. Yeah, and, and, and that was, I think, a very interesting development that basically perhaps our long-term role was really as part of the, you know, the guidance and programming team rather than the delivery team. Um- Mm-hmm … you know, making sure that there is internal consistency around narratives, internal consistency around brand guidelines. You know, you know, some of the tools that we’re seeing with, um, you know, AI monitoring, AI, um, media monitoring, those tools can do some of the things that can monitor the internal consistency and the internal prevalence of your messaging. Mm-hmm. So I mean, that’s, that’s, that’s an interesting take on where the profession’s headed. Um, but one thing that just struck me about the whole conversation about disclosure is that if everything is AI, nothing is AI. You know, if ev- you know, ultimately every single piece of that text, whether it’s an email that you’re sending from Gmail that suggests the right word at the end of the sentence to a 360-page book written based on 20 interviews that are fed into Claude, um, everything’s gonna be AI. And so, you know, a lot of this blanket disclosure stuff is gonna go out of the window within, you know, within two, three months because everything will be AI. One interesting, uh, observation that I keep hearing is how new this is. We’ve never encountered anything like this before. Uh, and one of the reasons for that is this is a tool that everybody uses differently based on their role, uh, based on their industry, uh, based on their department. Uh, this is not like Workday where everybody gets trained the same way. Uh, that’s actually kind of useless to train everybody exactly the same way. And, uh, for, for a tool that people are going to be using on their own and have an impact on, on the organization, we have been here before. Uh, and the specific tool that I’m thinking of is desktop publishing. Um, because with desktop publishing before that, uh– And, and we’re going way back, uh, with desktop publishing. The, the first one I used was called Ventura Publisher. I think this was around 1985, so absolutely predated, you know, the internet and, and, and the web and, and, uh, certainly social media and things like that. But before desktop publishing, everybody came to communication and say, “I need people to know about this.” Then out- outcomes Ventura Publisher and then of course PageMaker, uh, and every department was producing their own newsletter and sending them to the mail room for distribution to ev- And everybody was getting 30 newsletters in their inboxes. Uh, and yeah, I remember getting a call from leadership saying, “Make this stop.” Uh, you know, the company I was with at the time. This is– Nobody can consume this much content. There’s no gatekeeping going on, and communicators had to figure this out from a governance standpoint, from a technology standpoint. Uh, so we have been here before, haven’t we? We- we’ve been, we’ve been here actually many times. Um, uh, and those significant milestones, the, the one I, I really love and I, I absolutely relate to where you’re at, and in fact, I used to get my copies in a routing envelope. It all came in printed copies, and you had to sign off that you’ve actually read it. Um, so you had a ton of emails or ton of, ton of printed emails to read, um, through the organization. The one that, that I, I use as an example all the time is, is our journey into social media because the … I, I see some of the similarities in behavior. With, with social media, there, there, there was the few that jumped in, the early adopters. We’re, we’re seeing that certainly from a, a comms point of view, people jumping in there early. Um, I like to feel all of us on this call are, are people that are doing that. Um, but there were the people that resist getting into it, and I think social media, because we’d gone through that, that change, and it changed the landscape and we didn’t We kind of resisted that they were channels of communication. It was a fad. All of those, those types of things. But the reality is it became embedded as in part of what we do. We don’t even think about it now. It’s all part of the mix that we do. However, it, it got away from us when it came to, to any behaviors that we would use in social media. So we kind of went, “It’s a platform. Anybody can say anything, and we’ll put it out there.” And then governments started putting in some, some regulations and changes. And here in Australia, and I know the US are looking at this now, uh, about age limits to, to who can, you know- use certain social media platforms because we’ve now learnt the impacts of that. So I think when we, we look at some of those times in histories where we’ve gone through the change, it is, it’s the change journey. We should actually be stepping in, embracing it, and looking at how we can positively use it, understand when it becomes part of the norm, but learn some of those lessons from the past of the bad behaviors, and do we make sure that we’re being proactive to make sure we are educating people on the proper use of this stuff? I think that’s really one of our roles, um, and our opportunities, is to really help organizations, um, operationalize responsible behavior. Uh, that is something that we really miss the opportunity with social media, and we miss that training opportunity to say, “This is where you can gain trust. This is where you can lose trust. This is where you put in the reputational risks.” We lost all of that opportunity. We lost the opportunity for our narratives. Um, it became an influencer environment, which now is, is, is, you know, AI is now our influencers in many cases. We’re moving away from human influencers in many cases. So there’s a lot of opportunities, I think, for us to g- to guide that, um, responsibility of, of what behavior in AI, and then call it out, uh, this misinformation, this disinformation, um, you know, stand up for the things that are happening out there that aren’t, um, you know, aren’t helping organizations and also aren’t helping humans. But you kind of- It’s interesting that you- Oh, sorry, go on, Mike You know, it’s, it’s interesting that you talk about this being a follow-on from social media. I think there’s something f- that’s potentially fundamentally different between AI and social media. And social media was about the decentralization and disintermediation of knowledge sharing to large groups of people, whether inside the organization through social intranets or publicly through Facebook, Twitter, what have you. AI, particularly if organizations focus on having, you know, some degree of an internal AI platform, whether it’s, you know, and this could be where Copilot actually adds value, providing access to a- Uh, various models, but actually centralizing the data on a platform. AI may give us the chance to help recentralize the narratives, recentralize the, the processes, the principles, the practices, the guidelines for responsible use that were completely lost in the social media era. I think you’re right on the internal side, but on the external side, uh, we don’t have control of that. So how do we, uh, how do we look at it from, uh, both perspectives? I love the fact that we can now take back some of that control, um, on the internal side. But the external side is like the Wild West, and it’d be nice to see how we can, uh, take a little bit of control back for that, and I think we’re gonna have to stand for that from an internal perspective. We’re going to have to s- stand for our narratives, and we’re going to have to argue when, uh, our brand is attacked, uh, when people are, uh, you know, when there are AI influencers that are misrepresenting our organization. We’re gonna have to step out and, and, and change that narrative, and that’s where it will be the Wild West is externally When we look at th- those bigger impacts too, to, Bonnie, just build- building on that is the, the state of trust. And we, I think we have to overlay this with, you know, the Edelman Trust Barometer this year talked about, uh, you know, the new role of organizations being the trust broker. Um, because we’ve got this erosion over time in the landscape of communication in society as a whole. And so we’re dealing with this, this whole people disconnecting because they’ll only connect with the things that they engage with. So people will engage with like-minded people, and our algorithm- algorithms s- kind of help put that on steroids, that you’ll only engage with those people. So that polarization is now there, but how do we start rebuilding it? And I think, you know, AI, AI gives us that opportunity to really start looking at how organizations can now change that landscape of, of, uh, trust and engagement back into the organization from both the internal and the exper- external viewpoint. But it does play into that bigger narrative, and it’s one of the things that the, the, the global alliance that we’ve been looking at that we’ve got responsible AI is really, you know, and the work certainly you’ve been doing, Bonnie, with, with, um, with responsible AI and saying, this has to be a living document and what continually evolves as we evolve as a, a society. And now we’re looking at it from a, a, a total perspective of responsible communication because there’s all this stuff that’s happened in the past that we really now need to go, how do we retake some of that control of what we should and shouldn’t be responsible for as a communication professional? Um, and that’s, that’s the stuff we’re now starting to look at as we head towards the World PR Conference in, um, in, in Abuja, in, in Nigeria in November. And I think to your point, uh, that do, say, are is so important. Uh, what we do, uh, versus what we say versus what we are at the heart of our organization, that will be, that disconnect of that alignment will be so exposed, um, in today’s environment. The more AI becomes embedded in, in the way we live, the more w- will those lines of disconnect will be exposed. And, and, and not only will they be exposed, people will take advantage of that. Um, AI will take advantage of that. So it’s really important in organizations that we’re looking at how we do that alignment between what we say and what we do and what we are at the heart of our company, and that is our role. Well, I, I actually had a couple of questions left, but we’re down to less than three minutes, uh, so I’m not gonna ask those questions. But fortunately, we are, uh, pushing this over to next month, part two of this. I think we can just probably pick up where we left off. Um, that will take place, that will be episode 133 of Circle of Fellows on Thursday, September 24th, same bat time, same bat channel. Uh, be, uh, 6:00 PM Eastern, uh, that’s 3:00 PM for me, and Adrian, it’s tomorrow morning for you, uh, coming to us from the future. Uh, Adrian, you’ll be back for the panel next month. Yep. Uh, you and I will be joined next month by Mary Hills, uh, Cyrus Mavawala, who is one of our new fellows, uh, named this year, um, and Robin McCasland. Uh, so that should be a good panel. Um, in the meantime, uh, this will be available as both the YouTube video replay and the audio podcast. For those who are listening, uh, or watching this on YouTube, go to, uh, subscribe to this, and it’ll just show up in your podcast app, uh, every month just, just like magic. Uh, thanks everybody. I think this has been a great conversation. I really appreciate your, your time.
