‘We bring the human in’

“Alex Sévigny is an optimist about how AI will change the world of work — specifically, the world of communications and public relations, an industry he’s worked in as an academic and a practitioner for more than two decades. He lists the irreplaceable strengths communicators bring in relationships that are increasingly steered by machines: the ability to strategize, protect reputation, manage risk, provide empathy and taste, use judgment and bring the human element into relationships increasingly steered by machines. He should know; one of the first professors in McMaster’s Master of Communications Management program in 2006 and its director from 2011 to 2019, Sévigny’s own academic background is rooted in communication analysis and natural language understanding, with the topic of his PhD thesis, incremental discourse analysis, sharing some of the principles guiding the models that power today’s large language models (LLMs). And, in addition to being the first professor hired for McMaster’s fledgling communication studies program in 2001, Sévigny has also maintained a strategic communications consultancy, initially working largely in political communications and more recently shifting wholeheartedly to speaking, writing, and consulting on the role AI will play in communications work in the future. He’s also spent a lot of time helping to develop the professional practice of communications and public relations, working with the Canadian Public Relations Society (CPRS) for many years, serving for five years as their chief national examiner and now the presiding officer of their national accreditation council. In fact, earlier this year, the CPRS named Sévigny to their College of Fellows — the profession’s top recognition reserved for senior leaders with at least 20 years’ experience who have made outstanding contributions to the field. Here, he shares a little about how he sees the evolution of communications work – and how today’s communicators can adapt to tomorrow’s technology. You went from linguistics to political communications to AI. What was that path like? Well, when I started at Mac, I changed my focus from linguistics and cognitive studies to communications, but I kept up to date on things like the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of languages, ontologies, and lexical representation, all aimed at applied communication research. That meant I was keeping track of developments in AI and natural language processing, and I was aware of how AI was progressing. Then, when Dr. Geoff Hinton’s team won a major computer vision competition with AlexNet, followed by the famous Google paper introducing the transformer and GPT , I had a sense that AI was going to hit sooner rather than later. Since ChatGPT launched publicly in late 2022, my work has been almost exclusively focused on the impact of AI on communications strategy. We’ve started to get a clearer idea of how AI is radically reshaping our profession – but we had a sneak preview when social media was introduced. Do you see parallels between the advent of social media and the introduction of AI? One hundred per cent. I argue that public relations and communications management missed the boat on social media, because we sat back and let someone else – usually marketing – define the playing field. That diminished most PR practitioners’ ability to participate in social media, because it was driven by sales, marketing, and lead generation; the idea of building relationships, reputation, and so forth through social media remained underdeveloped. I don’t want that to happen with AI, because this is a relational technology. It’s a storytelling technology. And if it just becomes another vehicle for lead gen or one-way customer service, then as a profession, we’re going to get cut out again – and not only that, replaced. And that brings us to the real fear – that communications work will just get replaced by machines. Most of what we do at a tactical level, AI can do, and if it can’t do it today, it will be able to do it next year, or the next. It’s a crucial moment for our profession – AI is quickly becoming commonplace. It’s going to replace what we currently define as our entry-level jobs – unlike most technology, which privileges youth, AI privileges people with experience. Can you elaborate on that? Well, those of us with years of experience as practitioners know what our end goal is – we bring our experience, empathy, memory, life history, judgment, taste, and knowledge to our work with AI, and we get it to automate the functional, tedious things that we don’t like to do – but those are the exact things that young people in entry-level jobs do. I feel very deeply for young people who have no work experience and whose entry-level tasks are being automated. That’s why it is important for the communications sector to rethink the types of work juniors do. Perhaps a first step is to retrieve the idea of the old role of compiling news clippings in a new role of data cleaning, helping the team build a unique-source-of-truth database to drive brand voice. So what will the world of communications work look like in the not-so-distant future? Well, hiring will look different. It will require a new skill set, with greater AI, data, and business literacy. It will likely be more of an apprenticeship model, where you must learn directly from those who have more experience than you do, and learn the business through observation, rather than an increasingly more challenging set of well-defined tasks. What you’re really learning is how to build relationships, judgment, empathy, taste, strategy – all those deeply human things. Then you are using those qualities to deploy and manage AI. That’s the value-add – and that’s what all of us in the industry need to figure out: how to make ourselves valuable. And that’s in strategy and governance, knowledge translation, reputation management, investor relations, and internal communications. The cohort of communicators may be smaller because less tactical, functional work will be needed – but the value attached to the remaining, more strategic work will be higher. I think this is an opportunity for our profession, but I also think leaders in this space have a responsibility to provide guidance for practitioners – thought leadership, education and training, that encourages them to understand this new technology and to reposition their careers away from the highly tactical and towards the more strategic, higher-value thinking. Communicators should lead by serving as the voice for responsible, ethical AI use in their organizations. We think about relationships, we try to exercise empathy to understand how key publics and individuals feel – and that has a huge impact on whether a company has the social license to operate. The potential relational impact of AI creates organization-level risk, elevating it to a board-level risk. That’s an opportunity for communicators to elevate their practice as a strategic function. Given our unique perspectives and whole-organization understanding of AI’s impacts, we should be spearheading AI task forces, governance, and accountability, or at least playing a fundamental role in those forums. And all of this must be framed in a way that the CFO, the CEO and the COO understand exactly what the value is. That’s why programs like our Master of Communications Management , in which I teach, are so valuable – we are training the next generation of communications and organizational senior leaders. We are providing them with literacy in AI, data, ethics, governance, management and leadership. Those will be invaluable, fundamental skills for communications managers going forward in the Age of AI. So there’s hope. More than hope – serious opportunity! It’s been my life’s mission to enhance the skills and knowledge of practitioners so that they can confidently step into leadership roles and bring that relationship-building, empathy, ethics, taste, judgment, and understanding into senior leader tables and boardrooms, where they may be thinking in very utilitarian ways. We bring the human in. The post ‘We bring the human in’ appeared first on McMaster News .

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