Train your AI assistant to write like your company does

AI can help a communicator tweak their written messaging in just a few seconds. But the process that requires more time to pin down is the expertise comms pros need to help refine an AI’s output.

During Ragan’s Communications Boot Camp Virtual Conference, Lisa Peyton, senior AI marketing strategist and AI for strategic communications professor at The University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communications, said that communicators need to be able to feed AI the right information to get the best use of out, and that comes from a deep knowledge of exactly what they need.

“The more specific our objective can be, the better the AI is going to nail it for us,” Peyton told the audience. “The more we understand what we need and can communicate that, the better our final product is. We don’t want, ‘Help me with social media marketing.’ We want something with a lot of detail.”

For comms pros, the objective might be to rewrite leadership messages in the company’s voice or to adapt the same announcement for different employee groups. Once the task is clear, Peyton said the AI assistant needs enough context to understand how the organization sounds when it communicates.