Communicators can unlock innovation by encouraging AI experimentation. Learn how to empower your teams, foster creative use cases and drive success.
These tips are part of the session "Defining AI Readiness for Entry- Mid- and Senior-Level PR Pros," where our speakers, Anthony LaFauce, Managing Director of AI Innovation at Clyde, Katie Stratakis, Head of Corporate Communications at Samsung Electronics America and Kaylee Hultgren, Content Director for PRNEWS, help PR professionals discover strategies that inspire AI adoption and boost productivity through collaborative learning.
This session was part of the PRNEWS PRO Online Training Workshop: "The AI Shift: Practical Strategies for PR Leaders."
Watch the full session at this link.
Full transcript:
[ANTHONY LaFAUCE]
The other thing that I would really suggest if you're in that eight to 12-year period of your life, don't stop somebody from experimenting, right? Like, we, uh, I know from the agency side, we are so risk-averse when it comes to hours being used, like, every hour that we haven't billed is an hour we're not making money. But giving someone just a little bit of breathing room to try something, like, "Hey, I can run this through AI and maybe that's gonna create my media list for me, or maybe it's gonna create social content for me." Give them that room to experiment, and if they succeed, promote them. Like, not just, like, give them more money, but, like, really, like, tout what they're doing because that's gonna show other people how these tools can be used and, like, it's gonna really, like A rising tide raises all ships here. Like, when other people see it and they see their managers encouraging them, it creates an environment that, like, people are gonna do cool stuff, and that's, from an agency standpoint, that's what we're really looking for.
[KATIE STRATAKIS]
That is really good advice. Um, I agree. This, this mid-level, um, management, like, the roles have built sort of muscle memory around certain ways of doing work that, that predate AI. Of course they do. Um, and you need to break those chains, right? You have to sort of learn new behaviors, and, and behavior change is, as we know, as communicators, marketers, one of the hardest things to- elicit, right? Um, but what I'm finding within my teams, especially at this level, is exposure and learning sessions are going a really long way 'cause this idea of almost, like, not dictating how or what you are doing with AI but sort of exposing people to different platforms, to different use cases, practical use cases, sort of inspires them to consider how they might incorporate it into their, into their daily work.
Um, so we prioritize these quarterly AI learning sessions on, on my comms team and it's really created a forum for engagement and sharing and, uh, nine times out of 10, you know, everyone's coming out of that session with sort of their own light bulb or aha moment of like, "Wow, I have this problem in my day-to-day, and I'm really seeing very clearly how AI can help me solve that. Like, let's work on that together." So that's, um, that's been a really useful approach.
I think sometimes that top-down cascade, as Anthony was saying, like, isn't always it. Like, finding those solutions or discovering them for yourself can be even more empowering and more energizing to, um, to think about how you're gonna incorporate the technologies.
[KAYLEE HULTGREN]
That's great. I'm just curious, Katy, Do you, uh, introduce new tools in these meetings or, is this something where you are teaching, you know, is it something proprietary to your employees?
[KATIE STRATAKIS]
Varying degrees of. I mean, a lot of times it's outside in, too. Do we bring in an expert? Do we bring someone from a platform to come and give, like, a hands-on tutorial, a Q&A session?
Um, it's taken a few different forms, and to your point, we've also done sessions where we're just sort of, hands on, sort of interacting with our own proprietary LLMs and tools that we use internally at Samsung. So, any number of those things, I think, can work really well to, um, to inspire, um, different use cases.
[ANTHONY LaFAUCE]
I know here at CLYDE labs, or at CLYDE, we run a program called CLYDE labs where it's once a month, we sit down, and the whole point of the program is bring something somebody hasn't used.
Like, I don't care what it is, I don't care how simple you may think it is, bring it to the group and, like, let's just share it. We basically spend the afternoon playing with whatever's out there and, like, that inspiration is really cool to see. And then we had a small group get into that first and, like, they did some cool stuff and now we see other people in the company being like, "Well, can I participate in that? Can I be part of that program?" because they see the fun stuff that's coming out of it.