What is AI?
AI stands for artificial intelligence, which is the development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.
Artificial intelligence is everywhere!
You interact with it when you call our utility provider, those “personalized emails” from your favourite personality, holiday emails from your favourite brands. There's a constant need to continuously give your audience information, AI is really an integral part of communication and is only becoming more prevalent in the upcoming years.
According to the 2023 Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends Report “By 2026, enterprises that have adopted AI engineering practices to build and manage adaptive AI systems will outperform their peers in the operationalizing AI models by at least 25%.”
So what are some ways you can incorporate AI into your communications strategy?
Email Marketing
Automating emails is a great way to keep on track and remain consistent. AI helps you tailor your emails to make sure each one is personalized by name, tone, and even which content each person would most likely want to see.
Another great way to use AI to communicate with your customers is to use automated emails to welcome newcomers to your site. These can include a welcome message, FAQs, and sign-up/sign-in procedure. This gives your audience instant access to information and will immediately start building rapport. As well as, lessening the amount of traffic messaging the office with questions for your staff.
Employee Management
AI saves hours per month in the HR department. Businesses can set up a program for employee management that will communicate with their employees, obtain information and relay it to the management teams. This covers hours worked, for accounting and payroll. These special documents need to be dispirited and policy and procedure updates.
For example, we had previously worked with a client who owned a small business with multiple employees working at multiple locations (changed daily). So they would have to call each team leader every evening to get the report. Communicate PR set up a system that allowed each employee to submit their information to the system, and then the business owner would be notified via report with each site summary in one document. It saved about 3 hours per night.
In 2023 expectations for businesses to integrate AI into their communication systems will grow, from consumers and employees, and all of your stakeholders alike.
According to Forrester’s 2022 Data And Analytics Survey, “AI has become mainstream, with 73% of data and analytics decision-makers building AI technologies and 74% seeing a positive impact in their organizations.”
Hiring & Talent Acquisition
Finding the talent and the perfect fit is hard. There is so much information and applications online you need AI to narrow down your choices. Job search engines make it easy to find the information you're looking for, from both an employer and employee perspective.
As an employer, you can (shortlist) narrow your search from thousands of applicants to 10s or 100s, with the specific skillset you’re looking for. Skillset is just the tip of the iceberg, you can customize your applicant pool by income preference, experience, hobbies, and interests.
As someone searching for opportunities from an employee's perspective, AI makes that search easier by being able to narrow down which positions you are interested in, the income levels offered and the skills required. Depending on your email/privacy settings you will also receive articles and opportunities weekly via email so you don't have to look for them. Advertisements for companies that are hiring will start to present themselves on your online journey.
Insights
AI can comb through tons of information and give statistics about your customers and their preferences, product/service development and communication channels. AI also helps with discovering patterns and relationships in data to help create predictions and helps to measure the success of a company’s online marketing efforts.
There is still a lot of work to do with narrowing down information. It seems like the more data we learn to manage, the more data we gain access to. Perks from learning in the information age no doubt. A learned piece of advice would be to religiously stick to your objectives and only measure data that relates to accomplishing those goals. It’s easy to get lost in the data you have lost sight of what you're looking to accomplish, it will save you time and money to learn which data matter to you, or to hire someone who does.
The McKinsey AI Survey - Published December 6 2022 found “52% of organizations reported that more than 5% of their digital budgets went to AI compared to 40% in 2018. 63% of respondents say they expect their organizations’ investments in AI to increase over the next three years.”
AI is making personalization easier no matter how big your company is. Personalization makes your audience feel valued and helps to build rapport. In 2023 People expect to have immediate access to the information they want. Integrating AI into your communication strategy will make sure you don't get left behind by the competition while getting ahead as artificial intelligence amps up in the next few years.
Conclusion & Personal Opinion
We have come so far with AI in the last 5 years, and we have not even begun to scratch the tip of the iceberg of what it will do to our business processes in the next decade. It's an exciting time to witness the AI revolution. Although is a long road of trial and error ahead, it will be an interesting one. We have basically laid the foundation of AI and now it's time to create benchmarks and move ahead, and we are doing this quickly. Here are some Do's and Don'ts to avoid getting left behind!
DO
Experiment with different AI platforms
Integrate small AI tactics into your communication strategy
Learn how to use AI so you won't get left behind (or find a great team)
Rely on AI to save time - don't be stubborn
DON'T
Put everything into 1 AI platform - changes are coming, keep your options open
Resist - start now, resisting will only leave you way behind the competition which will cost you.
Don't rely solely on AI. Yes, it saves you time but you still need a human touch. AIT is getting smart but consumers are getting smarter.
Thanks for reading!
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Sources for Article
Forrester Report - October 2022
Gartner Study December 2022
McKinsey AI Survey - Published December 6, 2022