Tips for staying on top of the latest comm tech

As a communicator, it’s as important to know the tools you’re working with as much as it is to understand the messages you’re sharing. Ensuring your team is up to speed emerging comm tech will clear pathways to all of your audience — even ones that might sometimes be unintentionally overlooked.

Education is the biggest key to comm tech integration

Adeta Gayah, senior director of social media and content at Visit Orlando told Ragan that for her team, staying on top of new developments in comm tech is a major part of the job. In particular, she’s worked with her team to get educated on AI in comms.

“I have encouraged my team to test out new AI tools and do their own experimenting to see how certain tools can help comms and content workflows,” she said. “Many of our existing social management tools, including Sprout Social and Crowdriff, have integrated AI into their operating systems.”

Reading about and tinkering with tools is undoubtedly a great way to learn about communications technologies. But Gayah and her team are taking things a step further — they’re working directly with some comms platforms to help guide their AI tools in the right direction. The hope is that their experimentation and feedback can make using them easier for all communicators in the future.

“Currently, we are still working with Crowdriff as part of their beta testing on some operational adjustments and AI training to better understand the travel and DMO space,” Gayah said.

Empower experimentation and keep an open mind

Gayah recommends setting aside time for employees to play around with comm tech tools to figure out how they factor into audience reach and messaging format.

“For several of our existing tools, we were part of the beta test groups when AI integration into the tools first began,” she said. “We were able to test it out and provide direct feedback to the vendors for enhancements.

“It’s also important to talk about these tools when you’re testing them,” Gayah said. “Share feedback with vendors and colleagues. Find others that are also experimenting with new tech or are well versed in it and discuss your thoughts and learnings with them.”

Gayah shared that her team has been experimenting with Copilot to keep better keep track of meeting notes and compile messages that need to go out to the team and the larger company. She added that the team now uses Copilot to help determine the best method and channel for a message in addition to messaging. Additionally, team employs AI to help tag and sort content along with using automation for help in creating descriptions for the audience about given pieces of content.

“It’s important to empower our teams to experiment with new technologies,” she said.

But as that experimentation takes place, comms teams need to ensure that there are guidelines as to how technologies can and cannot be used. These guardrails will help create standards that can extend across the company.

“Determine what comfort level your company has in leveraging these tools internally and externally,” she said. “Create policies around this so team members know the guardrails to stay within when experimenting. Especially concerning AI, there should be human oversight built into the process to avoid hallucinations or incorrect information.”

Gayah shared that the key parts of Visit Orlando’s AI policy include considerations for data privacy and AI ethics as well as transparency and accountability. She also said that the organization chooses to be transparent in blogs and social media posts.

“We created guidelines for the use of AI-generated text and visuals to ensure that we’re never misleading our audience,” she said. “We also have an established rule that AI should assist, not replace human decision making and should always be reviewed by an employee.”

One way to avoid these hallucinations is through careful prompt engineering. Gayah also suggested comms pros use the RACE method to ensure success when using an AI program in their work. The acronym stands for:

• Role. Ensure that you’re clear in what part a given AI is playing in your workflow. Determine how you’re interacting with it and how it might ease some process and free up time for others. When used correctly, AI can enable your team to devote once lost time to necessary tasks.
• Action. Be decisive in what you need an AI to do. The more specific you are about the job, the more likely you are to have positive results.
• Context. Do your research and provide the AI with the necessary background data that it needs to know to complete the task accurately and completely.
• Expectation. Have a good idea of what you want out of the AI and roadmap how you can get there through the previous steps.

Gayah added that her team has plans to continue rolling out AI in new ways later in 2025.

“I’m very excited about the progress we’ve made with AI,” Gayah said. “That comes from empowering your employees to use it correctly.”

Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications. In his spare time he enjoys Philly sports and hosting trivia.