6 AI use cases to up your employee comms game

By Justin Joffe, editor-in-chief, Ragan Communications 

It’s been said at Ragan events (more than once) that AI won’t replace your job, but someone using AI will.

To wit, we’ve been covering several ways that AI will impact the way communicators write, ideate and work overall. Many use cases have focused primarily on PR.

During Ragan’s Employee Communications Conference last month in Chicago, Richard Harbridge, CTO at 2lead, reminded the audience that AI will be a transformative tech for communicators — and that transformative tech is nothing new for our field.

After all, the printing press led to the spread of societal literacy. Standardized document types led to the spread of systematic management. The spread of e-docs, meanwhile, led to the spread of information management. The rise of websites removed communication barriers. The rise of apps led to the removal of even more accessibility barriers.

Harbridge emphasized that success with AI for communicators will be all about collaboration. “For every one automation opportunity inside an organization there are 10+ more Al collaboration opportunities,” he said. “Collaboration with Al can be hard, but with the help of others it can be easier.”

He then went into some comms use cases for AI we may not have considered.

AI for employee comms

Employee communication is already benefiting from AI, Harbridge said. “Whether you use GPT or other industry tools, or whether you embrace copilot soon,” he said, “the reality is that these tools can have an immediate and notable impact and are in use by many.”

Specific use cases for employee comms include:

• Accelerating and optimizing communication. This can include testing and psychographic information about employees, connecting messaging and amplification opportunities, and more.
• AI chat tools like ChatGPT, Jasper and Microsoft Word’s Copilot can help us summarize better and more efficiently, helping us produce better and more concise work that becomes a new version of the “too long, didn’t read” summary (TL; DR). It can also provide us with news digests that summarize multiple articles and streamline our media intake to pull out what’s relevant to our business and role faster.
• Research assistant. AI can do significant data crunching and analysis, identifying relevant sources and helping us outline key points we want to hit in less time. Most suggestions or recommendations using AI will cite the sources it used to get there.
• Intelligent recaps. AI can pull highlights, soundbites and insights from videos and other multimedia. It can also generate transcripts of recordings (but you’ll want to listen back and check those proper nouns, nuances in speech like accents)
• Writing support. AI can provide tone suggestions and messaging styles (many already use the Grammarly plugin for this precise reason). This will give you a sense of how people feel and better allow you to tailor a message to a specific employee persona. It can also greatly aid your employee feedback process, as you can weigh its recommendations against actual employee sentiment and rewrite, refine accordingly.
• Writing suggestions. AI can recommend topics, starter content and best practices for adapting text or statements into your brand style.