How Anthony Colucci of IBM embedded AI into his comms workflows

Still skeptical about AI? You’re not alone. But with the right attitude, that skepticism can be transformed into practical progress.

In the latest edition of our “How AI Helped Me” series, we spoke with Anthony Colucci, AI for business employee communications lead at IBM, about his reluctant first experiences with AI on the job, how he’s implementing automation into his workflows and what he sees on the horizon for AI.

Sean Devlin: Could you tell us a little about how you first started interacting with AI in your role, and how it’s evolved?

Anthony Colucci: I used to proudly believe I didn’t need AI to help me write and would let that be a self-fulfilling prophecy. I’d write a half-hearted prompt to draft a blog or email, get a generic output and tell myself that I could’ve done the task so much better. Things started to change when I reluctantly began consulting with our internal AI tools to write brief descriptions, reword clunky phrasing and come up with stronger analogies. That helped build my trust and develop the muscle of incorporating new tools into my workflow, first with writing and now with other tasks, like research, brainstorming and analysis.

What’s something about AI that you think communicators need to be talking about but aren’t discussing enough?

AC: Would you ever write a blog without giving any thought to your audience? What do you want them to do and how are you going to get them to do it? That’s how we need to think about AI and the prompts we write. You need to be able to communicate your desired output with an effective prompt. If you aren’t specifying the role you want the model to play, the outcome you want to achieve, the tone you want to use and who you want to engage, you aren’t even scratching the surface of what AI can do for you. Since most of us got into communications because we’re writers at heart, that’s a strength we should be playing to.

When you first started using AI, how did you educate yourself on how to use it?

AC: IBM has hosted a lot of great enablement sessions covering the basics of topics like prompt writing and some role-specific use cases. That training is a good first step, but the real progress is made when you take what you learned in a course or workshop and start experimenting. You become a believer when you try the tools out and figure out how to make the best use of them.

How exactly does AI factor into your role?

AC: My job is to ensure IBMers understand our AI strategy and help them apply AI to their work. Both of those feed off each other. The more you know about the technology, the more useful it’ll be in your work. The more you use it, the better you’ll understand it. And the best way to do both is to let people see for themselves. We always try to incorporate hands-on elements into our events and content, because allowing employees to experience the technology brings it to life and builds understanding and belief.

Have you seen any changes to your workflow or customer/stakeholder satisfaction since you’ve begun using AI and automation?

AC: It started with one-off requests whenever I’d hit a wall, but I now use AI as a writing companion daily. It’s particularly effective when the tools are embedded in your word processor, so you can seamlessly access them and bounce ideas around like you’re in a room of comedy writers. That’s given a new dimension to my writing and helped me save time in content creation.

I have another example of how far we’ve come. In early 2022, I was working on a report analyzing hundreds of comments on a blog. As I tallied each comment’s sentiment and theme by hand, I remember thinking how such tedious steps were keeping me from the meaningful part of the project. There had to be technology that could help me do this.

That wasn’t that long ago. Now, we have tools that automate a lot of that prep work, while also creating formatted drafts that are tailored to a given situation and what an executive needs to see.

Do you have a big prediction for AI usage in the next few years?

AC: A whole generation of people who have grown up and gone through school using AI is about to enter the workforce. It’s part of the way they think and function, just like smartphones and social media were for my generation. We’ve seen very junior employees take prominent social media roles simply because they get how those platforms work, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see something similar with AI. A lot of groundbreaking ideas are going to come from the bottom up in companies, and the voices shaping the conversation in the not-too-distant future will be ones we haven’t even heard yet. I can’t wait to see what this new wave of people who naturally think AI-first come up with.

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Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications.