The fact that AI is going to change the way we work is no secret. But what is the influence of AI on the field of internal communication? What will it bring to our profession, but perhaps also decrease? We did research on the influence of AI on the work and the profession of internal communication. At the practice Congress internal communication 2024 , Peter was allowed to tell what his vision is on the impact of AI on internal communication. Read his story here.
Assessing technological impact
Over the past 12.5 years, we at Evolve have done a lot of research into all kinds of things that have to do with employees and new technology. What we know is that as humans we are apparently able to see what the direct effects are of a new (technological) development, but overall we are surprisingly poor at estimating the longer-term effects. And that also makes it difficult for me to say anything about the impact that AI will have in the longer term.
Everyone could foresee that the emergence of social media, for example, would democratize the process of publishing content. Knowledge and news can be spread worldwide super fast through social media and people can connect to each other by topic(groups / communnities), regardless of position, time and place. But the flip side of it, that this very democratization of content, under the influence of algorithms, has led to segregation and polarization, was not foreseen. Under the influence of these same algorithms, these platforms want to be fed with new content, such as shorts, over and over again. And those so-called shorts ensure that children have a tension arc of nothing, because of the continuous dopamine shots they get from it. That was not foreseen. We are sucked into our phone, and view the world through a screen. As a result, entire generations now find it exciting to speak to each other too directly. The fact that we prefer to have a screen between them today, because that feels safer, was not foreseen.
Social media fundamentally changes our brain, our way of interacting and our society. We didn’t foresee that. It feels like AI is going to have an even bigger impact. On society, on our profession and on us. But it is almost impossible to see what the actual impact of AI will be.
Generative AI in a nutshell
When we talk about AI, we are talking about computer systems that mimic the functioning of the human brain – the name ‘artificial intelligence’ already says it. In our work as a communication professional, we mainly talk about generative AI. This is a collective name, which refers to all technologies and models that are capable of generating new content, based on the content in their training data. This content can vary in form: from text, images and music to videos and even computer code. The generative aspect of this AI lies in the ability to take input (a prompt) and create something completely new based on it.
Working efficiently and effectively thanks to AI
In our study the influence of AI on internal communication (2023), internal communication professionals indicate they think that AI is going to allow us to carry out our work more efficiently and effectively. We can create larger amounts of content easier and faster.
We have unlimited working capacity to actually create tailored, relevant content for our audiences. We will soon be able to personalize content based on roles, functions, locations and language, so that content better matches target groups and content consumption. This makes the transfer of information many times more effective.
Deploy AI now
We are already seeing that AI’s influence on content creation is increasing. Our benchmark survey this year shows that 10% of participating organizations already have between 30% and 40% of their content created using AI. We don’t know if the content is actually created by AI, or if AI is just providing inspiration. But it is obvious that it is being used more and more.
AI at the receiver
You can imagine that we will soon use AI to filter, merge and unlock all the content that is present within the organization. We are talking about personalizing and audience-oriented communication. But the future is of course that AI itself adapts the content based on the recipient.
The use of AI will soon not only lie with the sender, but precisely with the recipient. Content no longer needs to be created for specific target groups. From a container of content, AI then creates messages, individually personalized for the recipient .
We’re far from that. Apart from the GDPR problems that this may entail, the internal data is still far from being good enough and, above all, not well structured. This is also indicated by almost 30% of respondents to the benchmark survey. This is a serious problem, but it is ultimately a matter of time. Various organizations are already applying the open-source language model of Meta to their own intranet, to make information easier to access via an internal ChatGPT.
AI for everyone
Where social media was about democratizing the publishing of content, AI is democratizing the creation of the content itself.
We don’t need any specific skills or equipment to be able to create relatively good (but at least large amounts) content using AI. But that same AI is also available to all non-communication colleagues in the organization. They too only need the right prompts to communicate well and a lot.
That is, of course, wonderful in the basics. The managers who occupy higher management positions based on content and not because of their communication skills can then communicate with their people in a good way. There is no need for internal communication professionals anymore. You can leave all that coaching, all that writing and editing to AI. And why stop at text? Based on texts written by AI, videos created by AI can be created. Then AI sticks the CEO’s head on it and you have a CEO who will soon address groups of colleagues online without you or them needing to do so.
And why stop at video. The CEO of Zoom recently indicated that in his vision, AI’s will soon conduct the Zoom meetings on the uninteresting topics so that we can conduct the really interesting conversations. Preferably via Zoom, of course.
We do not know to what extent we should take all this seriously, but these kinds of statements and thoughts do raise all kinds of questions regarding the profession, our work and even regarding the structure of organizations.
Guidance
How do you give direction and direction as an organization if we may soon find ourselves in a situation where we can create internally unlimited content in combination with the unlimited internal publishing possibilities of internal social, coupled with a situation in which AI determines who reads what, how. How do you keep control of the message?
And what does it mean to us? Our research showed that work is expected to become more effective and efficient, leaving more time for what is really important: making human connections, knowing what is going on, etc.
Every technological innovation is called to reduce our work, but in the end, every technological development leads to more work. In addition, organizations are generally focused on maximizing productivity. So the expectation is rather that we have to do it with fewer people and that those who remain just keep it just as busy, but then maybe with Writing prompts.
Critical thinking versus convenience
AI is based on algorithms and datasets. It can’t think out-of-the-box for the time being. The role of people, that is, of us as internal communication consultants, is to control the logical and create the illogical. In other words: we need to check the results of content and analysis generated by AI and find our added value in what AI cannot: thinking out of the box.
But in order to properly check whether something is right, or something makes sense, we need critical thinking skills. We need to look critically at what AI generates or that is logical and correct. But how do you do that? How to learn to look critically, how to learn to think critically? You do this by reading in, by consulting multiple sources, by discussing with others and hearing why you don’t see it well, by asking yourself ‘what is it actually saying here?’and by really living through content. In other words: critical thinking arises from making an effort. And let that stand in stark contrast to the essence of what AI is going to offer us: convenience. How are we going to learn to think critically and create out of the box when it’s all about efficiency and convenience.
Ways to express ourselves
If AI takes over our internal communication via means to make us communicate better within organizations, who will teach us to communicate in the real world, if there is nothing Digital in between? The only way to solve or prevent problems, to generate new ideas, is to be able to express ourselves well, to be able to put our thoughts and feelings into words so that others can understand us. That’s what makes us human. That’s what brought us civilization. Organizations can function if people work well together, understand each other. But if we may not have to learn that so well later, how can we still function well as an organization?
We don’t know what the impact of AI will be. But what we do know is that we often overestimate the impact of technology in the short term and underestimate it in the long term.
Learn prompts, clean up data, and create policies
Little word of advice: it doesn’t hurt to learn to prompt. And it is smart to structure and clean your data, so that when IT turns the button on you, something of relevant data will actually come out of your intranet gpt.
Because make no mistake, it’s coming. And who then conducts the conversation what it means? Technology has almost always been leading, without always thinking carefully about consequences. Because it can, we are going to do it and use it. Because MS365 is here, we turn on MS teams. AI is already there, but soon it will still be there and we will turn it on.
At the moment, about half of the organizations do not yet have a policy on the use of AI*. We understand that it is difficult to make policy on something that we do not fully understand, that we do not know where it is going and how it affects us. But you what you can do is think about: how do we want to interact in our organization? What are the principles of internal communication? All internal communication plans state which goals are to be achieved. Alignment, engagement, knowledge sharing. The guiding principles of internal communication within the organization are often lacking. It’s time to think about that before it is conceived for you. Maybe the work will soon be different or less, but the task will only get bigger.
