The PR Net Digital Event Recap: ‘AI & The Future of Communications’

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the latest technology shaping the future of communications, and at this week's digital event, we heard from experts in the space Aaron Kwittken, founder of PRophet, and Antony Cousins, the CEO of Factmata. We learned how communications pros can tap AI to enhance their marketing and PR efforts, with tools that predict media interest, perform social media listening and more.

The takeaways: 

• The historical approach of ‘the bigger the media list, the better’ is being replaced with the smart practice of identifying media targets. Databases of just reporter names are being replaced with more informative datasets
• Adopting A.I. tools with features like natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) helps PR pros analyze past reporter behavior and predict future reporting potential
• Three current challenges that AI can help PR pros navigate:
  • An increase in ‘buying on belief’ by younger generations (Millenials and Gen Z expect brands/companies to act on events, or they will boycott)
  • Increasing expectations from all consumers of faster response on social/political issues
  • Increasing volume of content across more diverse and private platforms (i.e. social media)
• It’s important for marketers to be able to dissect the origin point of where misinformation, disinformation or any narrative thread begins so you can better understand how to amplify or counter the narrative
• Currently, AI and machine learning mostly looks at keywords, hashtags, topics, sentiment analysis
• The future of AI and machine learning platforms empower PRs with narrative insights (automatically identify and cluster similar opinions, instead of just identifying keywords)
  • I.e. instead of just keywords ‘Peloton’ ‘CEO’ ‘Resign’ you get a sentence made by machine summing up the narrative: ‘Peloton CEO should resign’
• Stance analysis identifies targeted sentiment - measures what people’s intent towards X company is; all sentiment might be situation because it was a bad situation, but stance narrows this narrative
  • Sentiment analysis really only measures positive, negative, neutral qualification of a word, nothing to do with intent 
• Cancel Culture will become ‘the norm,’ meaning fundamental changes to customer and market segmentation
• Trend-jacking will become an ever more dominant form of reputation enhancement, but it will be more time-sensitive and authenticity will become critical
• AI will help brands and agencies predict situations, or at least help them prepare for potential situations before they happen
• AI tools can also help brands and agencies act fast when events do arise, helping them speak on matters quickly (you never know how a brand could get tied into a current event or cultural phenomenon that teams were not watching for)

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Case Study: Kroger Chefbot Demonstrates AI's Consumer Power

Written by David Manning, EVP/CMO, A-list Communications

In step with this week’s webinar on communications pros embracing artificial intelligence (AI), I thought I’d share a recent case study of how AI can be used in award-winning campaign work.

My team at A-list Communications works closely alongside our digital division, Coffee Labs (both owned by parent company Lagardere Group) – a division that uses innovative technology to create impactful customer experiences and influence sales for their clients. One such example is their work alongside 360i agency for Kroger: Chefbot.

The award-winning Chefbot is a first-of-its-kind AI tool that helps people make the most of the ingredients they already have by finding recipes that use those ingredients. For users, it’s as easy as snapping a photo of their ingredients, tweeting the photo to @KrogerChefbot on Twitter, and cooking one of the recipes Chefbot replies with.

For Kroger, this meant teaching visual artificial intelligence to recognize over 2,000 ingredients from millions of photos and match them with the staggering 20,000 recipes Kroger’s in-house chefs have written over the years. All of this takes place within a single, e-commerce-integrated social platform.

As more people use Chefbot, its intelligence grows, creating not only a better product, but new opportunities to reach new customers at massive scale. The launch also included influencer partnerships with famous foodies and novice cooks, showing how easy Chefbot is to use and inspiring social media users to use Chefbot to reduce their food waste inspired by Kroger’s Zero Hunger | Zero Waste program.

I can say that the uniqueness of creating celebrity and influence partnerships for Chefbot was different than for a restaurant or product because the talent would be creating the recipes and cooking themselves vs. a chef and there was less of a challenge securing participants given the communal goodwill goal and messaging of curbing food insecurity and promoting zero food waste.

As a product, Chefbot:

• Knows 2000+ ingredients and learning

• Can pull from 20,000 recipe responses in seconds

• Is available to 330 million twitter users

• Can save the average american family $1500 and 250lbs of food per year.

• Is Kroger’s most successful social campaign ever

As a campaign, Chefbot generated the most conversation in Kroger’s 137-year history. Chefbot is still going strong, getting smarter and more helpful with every ingredient it sees.