The 5 Biggest AI-Driven Shifts in Media Relations and Issues Management
There’s a lot of buzz around AI revolutionizing just about everything, including the communications industry. As Bob Dylan once crowed, “The times they are a-changin’…” but not necessarily how I think some AI enthusiasts (and their marketing teams) are predicting!
I’ve been working in media and comms for the past 15 years and have been responsible for media relations and issues-management strategy at a number of large organizations—most recently at the University of British Columbia. More importantly, I’ve had the opportunity as the founder of a startup called Broadsight—the first-of-its-kind communications management platform for media and issues communicators—to consider how AI might one day significantly impact how we do our business.
Here are five shifts AI will bring about in our industry, and how we can all keep ahead of the game:
1. The wild west of hacked together systems is ending
If you find having 15 tabs open at once across spreadsheets, project management, shared folders and email leaves you frazzled, good news—because modern AI applications see through your fragmented data and simplify it into simple recommendations. I see this being possible in comms when an enterprise tool captures all media and stakeholder data in one place so it’s not siloed in the minds of team members or hidden in a maze of drives and folders. This will unfold similar to how sales teams came to see the power of Salesforce in the 2000s.
My team and I have been building toward this for three years. All hail the end of disorganization!
2. Relationships will increasingly be the focus of our work
In addition to helping ideate, edit and scale content production, AI will remove a ton of admin tasks. For example, our platform automatically converts inbound emails from journalists and stakeholders into tasks for your team—complete with key messaging for statements. This frees up time to forge better relationships with the team and leadership. Relationships are essential because no bot is calling your VP at 8:30 a.m. to talk them through a bad story blowing up online!
Even as mainstream media shrinks and evolves, issues management for big organizations continues to be a “growth industry.” To do it well, you need to spend your time with people and leave the admin tasks to AI.
3. Knowledge workers across the board will double their output
If you have tried asking ChatGPT a question that you usually googled in the past, you may have been blown away by how much faster you get the answer you want, without skimming multiple web pages. Having all your organization’s past messaging and media responses logged in one place similarly increases your work speed drastically.
To be honest, I’m of two minds here. It feels good to be more productive but technology has a way of increasing output pressures as it accelerates. Still, you don’t hear people saying we should ban AI to operate at a more traditional pace. Reacting quickly is simply a big part of what we do.
4. AI agents will be your friends
Contrary to every dystopian AI movie (ie. every AI movie!) AI agents will not be taking over. We’ve just hired a CEO from the AI industry, Steve Lowry, who reminds me often that “AI will not take jobs, people who know how to use AI will.”
Imagine how satisfying it will be to task a bot with securing those nightmare internal approvals you need before publishing a story or sending out your statement. AI will serve as a single source of truth for drafts, track edits against approved guidelines, and streamline approvals with alerts and summaries, ensuring consistent, up-to-date messaging.
We’re about 70 per cent of the way there with Broadsight, and charging forward to really target the annoying stuff so we can leave the creative storytelling to our team of experts.
5. Metrics will produce insights that lead to new metrics
When spreadsheet software was introduced in the ‘80s, I’m told that people thought it was the end of bookkeeping as a discipline. Instead, bookkeepers continue to be employed but instead of focussing on financial statement tabulation, most people in finance focus on financial insights.
Communication professionals are now seeing the importance of insights. At Broadsight we began thinking about what it would be like if you could literally speak to an AI agent within Broadsight before a big meeting with the higher-ups, and ask for “a graph representing how positive media stories about our organization’s work compared to the average for our sector in September.” Stay tuned on that!
These are my top predictions. Which ring most true to you?
If you’re interested in the future of media relations, my team and I are bringing together a growing group of media pros to share tips and perspectives on our work. Watch this space for more details soon!
