How AI impacts PR agencies and solos (featuring Karen Swim and Michelle Kane)

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Chip Griffin: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Chats with Chip. I am your host, Chip Griffin, and I am delighted to have with me two guests in part one of a special crossover episode of this podcast with the That Solo Life Podcast featuring Karen Swim and Michelle Kane. Karen, Michelle, welcome to the show.

Karen Swim: Chip, thank you so much for having us, Chip. Yes.

Chip Griffin: It is great to have you and I’m looking forward to, to part two where we do sort of the law and order style crossover between shows and there, there will be, you know, no murders or crimes committed here in the next 20 minutes though. As far as I know.

Karen Swim: Watch out Dick Wolf, coming for your empire.

Michelle Kane: That’s right. Oh man. Right. We’ll, we’ll see if Ice-T might be able to show up by the time we do part two.

Chip Griffin: And, if only we could generate the same kind of revenue that those shows do, but

Michelle Kane: seriously. Right?

Chip Griffin: Alas.

Michelle Kane: Well.

Chip Griffin: So we’re gonna talk about two things that are related. In the first part here on my show, we’re gonna talk about the impact of AI on agencies, solos, the communications industry. And then we’ll talk in part two on your show about the overall business climate that we’re in, economic world affairs, all those kinds of things and how we function as business owners, in that universe as well.

So I think it should be productive and lots of interesting conversation. It’s always good talking with the two of you. And, so let’s dive right in and start talking about AI because it seems to be on everybody’s minds these days. It’s almost impossible to just go about your normal daily life, let alone things in the world of PR and communications without hearing about it, without having some people be super excited about it and some people just terrified of it.

So let’s just start with that big picture question of how do you see AI in the worlds in which we operate professionally?

Karen Swim: I think it’s an essential, honestly. I think we’re way past the point of being resistant to this technological change, and we should all be pretty deep in utilizing it. Refining our, not only our workflows, but how we think about the job and really becoming more innovative. Because I do believe that it’s important to be at the forefront and not trailing behind. That’s how you get lost, you know, in the shuffle when you’re trying to catch up. So, you know, I know that there are probably practitioners that still have not, you know, fully embraced AI and I think this is your wake up call to get in the game.

Michelle Kane: I agree. I mean, at this point, it’s a tool that we really need to harness and use, you know, not just to service our clients, but to grow our business and to at least, at the very least, be able to speak the language and understand what’s involved with its use. I mean, you know, in the back of my mind, of course, is data centers and resources, which, you know mmmm.

But that’s not going to stop it. So we still have to be smart about it and, you know, know what we’re doing in that realm because, you know we say AI and I know when we say it, we probably think through a certain lens. Of course, it’s, you know, it’s a massive concept. And I think probably people in different industries have different notions about it.

I know my friends in academia are still hating it for decent reasons, of course. But as far as being a communicator, it’s absolutely necessary.

Chip Griffin: I mean, academia is kind of known for resisting many new technologies beyond when the rest of the world has adopted it. So that’s, that’s not particularly surprising.

But unfortunately, I think in PR there’s also oftentimes a lot of resistance to technology and change. And so I’m curious, in your conversations with other solos, small agency owners, that sort of thing, are people generally adopting this same mindset that you have or is there, is there more trepidation and resistance there than, than you think there ought to be?

Michelle Kane: I have seen it’s mixed. I have seen, you know, my colleagues, they realize it’s a good tool, but at the same time, I don’t know if you have noticed this, we’re all sort of hating on the cookie cutter social media graphics that all look like they were made by the same Americana agency with the dark wood back.

You know, we’re cognizant of spotting it where people might be overrelying on it. But at the same time realizing that even though AI will certainly change the landscape of what we do and how we do it, the human touch, the human mind is still going to be necessary, which is good.

Karen Swim: Yeah. I think you know, I love Chip by the way, that you have an AI survey and I took the survey and thought the questions were really thoughtful.

So I’m really interested to see, because what I see is what Michelle sees. There’s a mix. But what I see the majority of PR practitioners doing is scratching the surface with AI. So they’re still kind of locked into the content and you know how my media database uses it and they haven’t gone levels deeper.

Here’s the thing. I just read this article that talked about, because, AI, for example, is training. They’re, they’re doing like deeper work. So they’re, you have this group of attorneys that are teaching AI to replace their jobs. They’re scientists. If you’re training it to do scientific discovery, you actually need human beings that are doing scientific discovery.

So what that means is, in that sense, AI is creating a demand for highly skilled positions that are not directly AI related because you need human beings that have those, those specialties and have that type of expertise. And I think as a PR practitioner, if I’m somebody who really has gone deeper into AI and I understand how to utilize these models to improve the way that I do work, to reignite the way that I think, to take the time because it takes away a lot of the busy work. And to now take the time to think deeper about what are the other ways that I can change this job going forward? How can I get better at analyzing markets on behalf of my clients? How can I make this, make me think deeper as a business person, as a CEO? The more skilled I am, the more that I’m protecting my own job, but it’s not me against AI, it’s me using AI to reinvigorate my skillset. And, I don’t think everyone’s there, unfortunately.

Chip Griffin: I think far too few are there. In fact, I mean, most people look at AI in my view, as sort of a, well, this can, it can replace this task for me or it can do, you know?

And, and usually it’s in our world, usually it’s around content creation, whether that’s an image, an article, a social post, something like that. But it, it has so much greater power available to it. I hear plenty of people say, well, you know, you still need us for strategy. So, you know, AI can’t do that.

Baloney. AI is actually pretty good at strategy today. And, if you tested AI 18 months ago and haven’t gone back, yeah, I mean, it, it wasn’t great then. But the models that are out there today and readily available. They actually, you know, do a passable job at strategy and ideation and even creativity.

And so, you know, we need to be much more ready to, as you say, I think, partner with it and treat it more like a team member as opposed to just, you know, a functional tool. And, I do worry that, that as an industry, we are not doing that. We’re too worried about, well, what does this mean for our pricing models?

And you know, I see, I see plenty of complaints about that. Well, you know, it’s, it’s driving down, it’s commoditizing. No. You, because you’ve gotta find new ways to create value. It’s like when we started, you know, having fax machines and email.

Michelle Kane: Exactly, yes,

Chip Griffin: It saved time from other things that we were doing back then.

And so we didn’t say, well, we gotta change our pricing model because we’re becoming more efficient. We’re not standing at the copy machine for half the day copying things. We found other ways to utilize that time and create new value. We need to do the same thing with AI if we’re gonna be successful. And not spend all this time complaining

Michelle Kane: So true, so true. The press release. Put it in an envelope.

Chip Griffin: So my other pet peeve is,

Michelle Kane: No, go ahead. Sorry. I was on delay.

Chip Griffin: Sorry that there was a little technological hiccup there.

Michelle Kane: Sorry.

Chip Griffin: So, my other pet peeve, and I wanna talk to you both about this. Obviously we do create a lot of content and we were referring earlier to the cookie cutter nature of some of this.

And, so I do see lots of complaints. I’m just filled with AI slop and all of that, so, you know, how do we think about that? And I see people saying, well, you know, you need to write your own stuff. And, honestly, this reminds me of the early days of social media where we had these inane debates about whether CEOs needed to sit down and write their own Twitter posts and blog posts and that sort of stuff, which was dumb.

They didn’t do it before with op-eds and that kind of stuff. And why should they do it with that? And, to me, I think we’re missing the boat if we are focused on who wrote this. It’s a question of is it good quality? And if it is, I don’t really care how we got there. But, but are you seeing, you know, more resistance to this or more embracing of the technology getting you to where you need to go?

Karen Swim: Resistance all the way. Yeah. Yeah. Because you know, as you said, and you know, some people are like, oh, you mean like chat GPT? Well, if you still use chat GPT, but there’s like tons of other models and I’m sure you have experimented with lots of them. I am always adding, like I used to, you know, in the early days I learned on chat GPT, but then I started playing around with Perplexity and wove that in.

And, you know, I love Claude today, but I, I use everything. I use Jasper and no tool is perfect, but I think you’re right around the strategy piece. I think people miss it. How really good your strategy can get with AI as a partner and how good your content can get with AI as a partner. They don’t realize that you can give it your voice.

You can teach your AI to write like you. You can feed it different ideas. You can take raw notes and upload it and have it do something that would’ve taken you a long time. And it just takes that work out. It doesn’t take away the high quality, it doesn’t take away the creativity. It just makes it easier for you and saves time.

And so I think it is a mistake again to think of AI or no. That’s just, it’s not going to work, and you’re going to find yourself sitting over on the side line, like a 90-year-old saying, get off my lawn, yelling at AI and resisting the change and saying, this is what people can do. And no one’s gonna hire you because your rate structure is old, your processes are old, and you’re gonna have 22 year olds running circles around you doing 10 times the job that you can do while you’re over here saying, this isn’t gonna work. Robots can’t replace people.

Michelle Kane: I could not agree more. I especially as, as you both brought up, it is a partner. And if it helps you serve your clients better, because at the end of the day, we are still the people giving it the green light.

What it gives us, we will either synthesize into our thoughts or, there are times, oh yeah, I didn’t think of that. That’s an excellent point. It’s, it is just a tool that we really, as you say, Karen, we really need to start adopting. And you know, Chip, you put it so perfectly, or else we are going to get left behind.

We can’t be reluctant. And, you know, as far as pricing structure, no one says, oh, you had an employee do that, so I need to pay you less. What? And, again, it’s not gonna replace, but you know, I, I am print out the press release, put it in the envelope and mail it years old and well, that took a ton of time.

Chip Griffin: Yep absolutely.

Michelle Kane: Yeah, like you say, no one batted an eye when we switched to fax and email and FedEx so.

Chip Griffin: Although I do remember debates back in the day with some folks that I was working with who were like, no, no, we need to mail these press releases. I’m like, but we’ve got a fax machine.

Why? Why don’t we send them by fax and they’ll get them faster? They’re like, no, no, we’ve always mailed them. I’m like, yeah, but it’s like 1992. We don’t need to do that anymore.

Michelle Kane: We’re so modern now.

Chip Griffin: We’re so modern. Right. And then of course, we’ve had a lot of developments since then. But I wanna pick up on something that, that you mentioned there, Karen, because I think that we all need to be thinking about how we train these tools and, you know, I think one of the reasons why we end up with so much AI slop is because people just go in and say, write me a blog post on x. And so it will dutifully salute and do that. But you would never think of having an employee or a contractor that you go to and just say, give me a blog post on X. You’ll give them guidance. You’ll say, and here are some recent pieces I’ve done that you might wanna look at for my style. And my voice.

And, and so you need to be thinking about how you’re training it if you want to get the most out of it.

Karen Swim: Yeah.

Chip Griffin: And so in the conversations that you’re having. Do people understand this is there, you know, what do we need to do to help educate people about this? Because in my view, AI is like an employee and you have to think about how you would manage and train an employee when you’re thinking about how you manage and train the AI agents.

Karen Swim: I agree. I mean, from the beginning I talked about keeping your own personal prompt library, but I think it also goes to exactly what you said. With an employee you’re gonna have an onboarding document, you’re going to have, you know, brand guidelines. You’re gonna have that style guide. So I think that you have to really think about it in that same way.

What would you give a human being that was starting with you? How do you talk about the company? What’s the tone of voice? Who’s the audience? What’s the objective of this piece? What are the goals? I don’t divorce my PR background, you know, my professional skillset for AI, because it’s easy. And I even have trained my models to ask me deeper questions.

Mm-hmm. Which honestly has made me like my job a lot more because I’m free from doing mundane tasks. I’ve been able to automate some really complex things that make it fun for me to look at this data and to dig into things. And it makes it fun for me to develop these strategies and frameworks because I’ve got this assistant saying, When you ask me to do this, what are you thinking? And like, what’s the end goal of this? Or what, you know, I noticed this thing, what about that? Or pointing something out like, Hey, when I pulled this, I saw this trend. Is that something that you wanna dig deeper into internally? I 100% agree, agree. No, it’s not a human, but you should absolutely be treating it like an employee.

Michelle Kane: Agree. Yeah.

Chip Griffin: As, as we think about trying to, to treat it more like an employee, how, how do we get more people to come along with this view in the communities that we serve? I mean, as I think about the solos that, that you all serve with your show and the work that you are doing through Solo PR Pro, et cetera, there’s a lot of potential here for AI tools to make you bigger than you are as far as capability. You don’t necessarily have to become, you know, larger in terms of clients that you, but your capabilities can expand substantially. So, and I think that’s more important than ever today because, you know, the single specialty hire, even on a contractor basis, just, it’s not quite as appealing to organizations where they want a little bit more of the one shot solution.

Is that, how do we get more people to come along with this view that it’s clear the three of us have, but it’s also clear that our, the industries we serve in terms of agencies and solos, just that there’s too much resistance. Is it scaring them or is it motivating them, or you know, what is it?

Michelle Kane: I think there’s certainly the fear.

The fear of the new, the fear of the replacement. But honestly, anything that can help me be a better communicator, to do my job better, to serve my clients at a wider breadth and depth is good. Why would I not want that? And, I think that’s the mindset that we need to come around to. Don’t be afraid of it.

Like Karen said, dig deep. I mean, I have a friend who’s a photographer and she has used it to help work her brand and she is the coolest sassiest person that I know. And she’s like, oh, I talk back to it. I say, I don’t talk like that. This is how I say it. And I thought, you’ve got it. Like you have grasped it and you know, keep going.

So that’s really, you really do have to interact with it. Now, I understand for, for some people that may just be way too creepy for them. And I get it, but it, I don’t think it’s gonna take over your toaster in your house today, you know? Or burn your house down. So I think it’s okay.

Karen Swim: Yeah. I mean, I think that we’re gonna lose some people.

Yeah. I’m just gonna be realistic. There are some people that are like, this is my exit ramp. I want no parts of that. But I think that this, what we’re doing today is a step. Educating people, talking about use cases, making it a little less scary, making sure that people understand where to go to get educated, you know how to get trained.

Some people function really well with taking a course and learning how to do it. They’re not comfortable jumping in. Encouraging people, you know, giving them those beginning steps. If you’re not familiar, here’s where you can start. And putting out things that kind of guide people and making it a little less scary, but also teaching them, you know, this is not without its problems.

So it’s communicators. We have to be aware of ethics. So we don’t wanna, you know, we wanna make sure that we’re not putting sensitive information into public models. We want to learn how to make sure that we double check that we are not, you know, breaking copyright laws, that we’re not stealing other people’s content.

We wanna learn how to look for the things that are popping up now where AI is pulling true things, like from client stories and putting it into something else that’s not true. So you’ve gotta start to train yourself. And then understanding risk, like what do I give my AI models access to? So you still wanna make sure that you’re protecting, you know, ethics, copyright, and privacy.

So there are things that I don’t do. I mean, funny enough, like when everybody jumped on the Alexa bandwagon, I did not because I had concerns about privacy. That is, you know, and people think that’s funny, ’cause you know, I’m a tech girl, but that was just the one thing and I was like, eh, no thank you. I don’t want anything listening to me in my house that has that kind of access.

I lock down certain things on my phone. I do. I do things where I see a risk. I will not give my models access to write all of my files. Or access to my drive. Because I need to protect my sensitive information. So be smart about the use, but you won’t be able to be smart if you’re not using it and you just shy away from it.

I mean, and at the end of the day, learn how to be sensible. You know, reality is our stuff is out there anyway. I mean who are we kidding? Like stuff is out there. There are so many things getting hacked on a daily basis. If you use a reputation service, it will make your head spin the amount of times that your data has been compromised.

So I think that we do the best that we can to protect ourselves, but we don’t allow that to stop us from moving forward and progressing in how we do our jobs.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, I think that makes total sense. I mean, to me, at the end of the day, the scariness of, of AI or the, you know, the bad things that can happen from it is more than outweighed by the fear that we ought to have of what happens if we don’t embrace it.

And, you know, I tell people, if you do not adapt, AI is absolutely coming for your job. So I’m never gonna sit here and say that, oh, you’re, you’re fine. AI’s never gonna take your job. It absolutely is. It will take the job that you have today. So it’s your job, whether you’re in an organization, or you’re a business owner, to create the job of the future with the help of AI.

So I, I really, I, I think we need to drive this point home repeatedly because I think there’s just far too much resistance to these new tools and technologies. And if you haven’t touched them recently, go in and use them again, because you’re gonna find that it’s a lot different than when you kicked the tires a year or two ago, and it’s only gonna get better from here.

People always like to say, this is the worst it’s ever going to be. It’s true. It is accelerating at a rate that most of us just can’t even fully appreciate, even if we are deeply steeped in it, which I think all three of us are.

Karen Swim: Right. Yeah, for sure.

Chip Griffin: So with that, that will draw to a conclusion part one of this crossover series episode. I don’t know exactly what to call it. But stay tuned for part two on the That Solo Life Podcast. For now, we will wrap up this episode of Chats with Chip. I’m Chip Griffin. Thank you for joining me, Karen and Michelle. It has been a great conversation. I look forward to part two on your show shortly.