How communicators can become Ai champs in 2024

1️⃣ Be an Ai champion; it's too early to consider oneself an expert. This means curiosity - research, reading, watching, listening, talking, and using (see my link to BI's AI Resources page below). Develop your own personal responsible usage principles, research the best tools for your needs, get to know them well and use them regularly for certain types of work. E.g. subscribe to the paid version of ChatGPT for your writing, analytics and visual all-in-one tool. There are so many out there (user cases include writing, coding, images, videos, audio, translation, meeting management, etc), so look into the pros and cons for each. I sometimes use the best writing tools to compare output quality against one another, e.g. ChatGPT (OpenAI), Gemini (Google), Claude (Anthropic), and Microsoft Co-Pilot (which uses OpenAI). I subscribe to ChatGPT as my preferred tool. - I use it for research - helping me get off a blank page - sorting and categorising large lists - pulling together initial copy I can take offline - translation - critiquing my copy or if I've missed anything - and accessibility checking. I find it helps me to be efficient. I'm hyper-aware of making sure that I use these tools only with general, non-specific, identifiable data. The info used by many of the tools is used to train their models. I use Adobe Photoshop and its Generative AI image capabilities for editing and ChatGPT's Dall-e2. I've stayed away from audio replication,at the moment.

2️⃣ Be storytellers; have conversations with your leaders on the role of Ai for them and the company. Find out where they're landing. Read around the subject yourself to understand what others say about Ai and their worlds. Start to map out the overall picture and how theirs supports the direction of travel - explaining and bringing to life their plans. We have the opportunity to show employees how your company's use of Ai could make their lives easier by answering the what, why and how to build out your narrative, themes and topics for the year.

3️⃣ Cover the What's in it for me perspective; there are going to be mixed feelings about Ai in your populations: those using it, those curious about it and dipping in, those who are overwhelmed by it, and those worried about it. It's an opportunity to paint an optimistic future. Most people will want to know how to use it responsibly - so there's a fantastic user case there to highlight which tools, how to use them correctly, and how not to use them. Telling the upskilling story for 2024 should be big. An opportunity to collaborate with your Training/HR teams.