By Headland Intern Mia Wu
Entering the world of work alongside the rise of AI is both exciting and unsettling. Over the course of my eight-week internship at Headland, I’ve been having conversations with my colleagues about how AI is going to impact the job market, both within communications and across different sectors. The exciting prospect is that some laborious parts of the job may soon be automated. The more unsettling side is the whispers around redundancies, threats to human creativity, and the possibility that AI’s biases and blind spots may affect the quality of our work.
I don’t believe this is a conversation that we should shy away from having, either with clients or within companies. It is only through speculative thinking that we can begin to hone in on the practicalities of how AI is changing the way we work. Whether as an intern or as senior management, an active consideration of how best to adapt to the possibilities and pitfalls of AI is necessary.
With that in mind, I’ve spent the past eight weeks thinking about what it means in practice to be adapting to AI. Here is how I have used it while at Headland – and why I have emerged optimistic about its use in the workplace.
As an onboarding tool
One of the challenges for a growing company in a fast-paced industry like PR is that it spends a disproportionate amount of its time onboarding team members to new industries, accounts, and disciplines. AI can help speed up this process.
Since joining Headland, I’ve primarily used AI as an instantaneous feedback loop to address more basic – but important – questions which have arisen during my internship. If I’m constructing a media list, for example, AI gives me pointers on the publications and platforms I should consider to help reach our target audiences. It can do this because it is, at its core, a pattern detector – the writer Ted Chiang argues, in a Lunch with the FT, that the term ‘artificial intelligence’ is misleading and we’d be better off calling the algorithms ‘applied statistics’. Perhaps if we think of AI as a particularly advanced statistical tool, rather than a replacement for our coworkers, we’ll be more amenable to the new functionalities it can offer us.
The ability of AI to clarify industry jargon and teething issues without costing the time of anyone else in the company has made me significantly more efficient. This means when I have a one-on-one with my manager, we spend it having broader conversations about the value of the internship programme or how I might shape my own future career in PR. AI frees up that onboarding time, and, in doing so, facilitates more meaningful discussions.
As a way of looking at the bigger picture
AI has also helped me think bigger. Headland covers a lot of disciplines, with teams working across corporate comms, financial PR, sustainability, public affairs, and so on. AI’s summarising and pattern-detecting capabilities are useful when sorting through all of that information and differing audiences.
For example, when thinking about a client problem which brings together, say, taxes, toilet paper, and TikTok – three seemingly distinct entities which make up Headland’s Who Gives a Crap campaign – AI proposes ways in which they might be linked together.
Ask a chatbot ‘What is the connection between taxes, toilet paper, and TikTok?’, and it will tell you: ‘During the pandemic, TikTok amplified the toilet paper panic by rapidly spreading videos that showed people hoarding supplies, which further fueled the buying frenzy. Similarly, TikTok has been used to discuss and criticise tax policies, making these issues more visible and creating viral moments around topics that traditionally might have stayed in more formal economic discussions.’
The above information alone won’t create a meaningful campaign, but it can promote the kinds of divergent thinking which shift a previous idea in a new direction. If you’re new to comms, learning about these connections is invaluable, but I imagine that the same principle applies even if you’ve been working in this industry your whole life. New patterns can emerge, challenging expertise bias and pushing past routine assumptions. Recent events can be built into old client relationships. In this way, AI doesn’t replace human creativity but rather invites it to work harder.
A flattening force
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the strategic adoption of AI can flatten out a company’s hierarchies. When less time is spent onboarding, more is spent actively engaging with the work of the company, which can lead to varied ideas and opportunities. Someone at Headland told me that many people here have a ‘side hustle’ – another project that they work on outside of their regular client portfolio – and I think AI will go on a long way towards allowing people to invest more strategic thinking into these types of projects. AI facilitates employees in creating their own opportunities by helping them look up from the everyday practices of their work towards the bigger picture of the whole company or sector.
From my perspective, this most clearly benefits younger generations coming into the workforce, as well as experienced workers who want to have greater mobility within their careers. The modern world of work is no longer one which thrives in the factory-style management hierarchies of the Industrial Revolution – rather, we value flat structures that allow us to contribute our ideas and skills in impactful ways. As AI contributes to faster information flow, traditional hierarchical models shift. In the future, I see this giving senior leaders a meaningful way of incorporating their employees’ ideas into their holistic thinking.
As always, challenges remain. The question of how to protect sensitive client and company information when interacting with AI models will become increasingly important. Training processes will certainly change. Employees will need to adapt to greater autonomy, while leaders will have to account for a more collaborative style of management.
Yet I truly believe that AI, if adopted intentionally and carefully, will help solve these challenges from the bottom up. Employees will be given a chance to reflect upon what their work means to others and to themselves. At least, that’s what I’ve spent my eight-week internship doing – in fact, it is AI which has helped free up the time and creative energy that I needed to write this article.
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