AI in the Era of Digital Economy

Artificial Intelligence in the Era of Digital Economy as explained by Jean Valin at the International PR Summit – November 2018, Bali.

AI has been described as the fourth major revolution, industrial revolution, they say it’s the fourth revolution of our economy so our society is going to transform. And public relations whether we like it or not it’s going to be transformed by AI. Now how much and what areas what jobs will be replaced that’s what my talk is going to be about this year. So I did some research with the help of other people and we’ll be talking about where the trends are going to be, how is AI today changing jobs, what tools are there to save you money from repetitive tasks, that today you could buy software to replace all this and automate. A lot of people don’t know this, a lot of people think “Ohh it’s not going to affect me” or they’re at the other extreme “Oh my God it’s going to kill my job or kill every job in PR.” The answer is somewhere in between. In my session we’ll talk about how AI is transforming society, so that you understand what I’m talking about but also very specifically what kinds of tasks and jobs in PR will be replaced by AI or assisted by AI and conversely which areas of our practice will never be affected by AI or should never be allowed to be affected by AI.

There are many types of work than can be done by robots. I’ll give you one example where I think it’s going to explode. Content writing or content generation will be done by machines, it’s happening today some people know how to use, it it’s happening today it’s going to increase I predict three times by in the next 5 years going to grow three times bigger. Another one is analytical capability of big data and double label you to predict certain things identify your stakeholders much better with a machine and then target them with communication messages and you can automate the rollout of a campaign through artificial intelligence. Those are some few examples where it’s going to be, forecasting, analytics writing and basic things, like workflow automation can be done like your event planning for a conference that could be greatly assisted by AI tools today and in the future.

So in my research, we find that there is about 40% of the skill sets of a professional that will never be replaced by AI or should never be replaced by AI. Those are areas like ethical decision making. You could be finding tools that will assist you with coming to a good ethical decision, but the final decision must remain with humans. That’s one area. Why? Because AI and robots they cannot understand empathy or emotional intelligence. They’re not be able to do that the same thing with building trust. This is something humans do, human understand context and contextual awareness. Machines are not there yet. They may get there, but they should never replace the human final decision.  Same thing with law, understanding law, there’s shades in law and interpretation of law that machines will have difficulty getting the right answer for you and you can’t trust their answer. So you have to be able to challenge these areas, so law ethics judgment, relationship building, don’t expect the machine to do that for you, that is the domain of humans

Where automation will be very helpful? These things like media collection and media analysis that is done instantly in real time now. There are tools available there you don’t need to count your present things and do all this in the old ways. Machines do it much better now. So if you were working in that job, I’m sorry that job will be gone. If you’re working as a junior writer there’s a chance the machine can do as good a job as you but you then will need to learn to be a good editor because the AI script will need to be edited by humans so the job will be this place somewhere else 

This is a brand new field so we’ve only started to look at this area of AI and PR. When I did my research for the institute in the United Kingdom, they said I was the first one to break the ice and look at PR but I invite others to help me build the case for this because I don’t profess to be the expert, but I’m very passionate about this area and I want to know if a chatbot can replace me, how good will the chatbot be because I need to be better than that chatbot because I want to keep my place.