Is Data the Future of Comms?

Speaker A: Good morning. Good morning. My name is Mike Klein from We Lead Comms. We're going to get started in about 90 seconds. This is Mike Klein from Wheatley Comms. Welcome to the debate. We'll get started in about a minute. If somebody would like to share their location, please drop your location into the chat.

Speaker B: Bye, guys, from Reykjavik.

Speaker A: Bye.

Speaker B: Hi, Emily Hayes from Boston, Massachusetts. I know who you are.

Speaker C: UK, Belgium.

Speaker B: Montreal, Canada.

Speaker A: All right, let's get started. Thank you very much to Contact Monkey. May I have the slides, please? By the way, thank you very much for partnering us, Contact Monkey, with the 8th installment of the We Lead Comms debate series. My name is Mike Klein of We Lead Comms, and today's debate is on the question, Is data the future of comms? We're sponsored by Contact Monkey and the Center for Strategic Communication Excellence. I like the question, is data the future of comms? Because it's a timeless question. We've been asking this question for a long time, but with the changes in the world, particularly in the technology world, there's some agreement that the quantity of data is ever increasing, but that there's lots of debate about what to do with it. We have a great set of participants today. From an in-house perspective, we have James Maiden of McCown Gordon Construction. We also have 2 distinct comms vendor perspectives. We have Kate Liston from our sponsor ContactMonkey, and we also have Kevin Haneline from Halo. And we also have as our expert moderator, one of the longstanding experts on internal comms and particularly internal comms platforms, Elizabeth Moll. Before I hand over to Elizabeth, I just would like to thank Contact Monkey again, and also the continuing co-sponsor of the debate series, the Center for Strategic Communication Excellence, the CSCE. Over to you, Elizabeth.

Speaker B: Thanks, Mike. Hello, everyone. Welcome, James, Katie, Kevin, to the call. Glad to See you and see everyone here. I want to give a quick shout out to all of my friends at The Nature Conservancy who might be joining. And let— and I am here in the Washington, D.C. area, and it's great to see so many people joining from, quite honestly, all over the world. So, as Mike said, we're going to talk about internal comms, and we're going to talk about data. And I must confess, I went into internal comms because I don't like numbers and I like letters. And but that doesn't mean that data isn't super important to how we frame our internal communications. And as we know, one of the biggest issues that we have with communications is just communications overload. In fact, I was reading a recent Gartner report that really talks about the rise of communication channels and really influenced by the shift to remote and hybrid work. And that has really led to more messages, greater complexity, making it harder to manage information. And, and so that's why it's so critical that we use data-driven insights to tailor communication strategies, identify areas for improvement, and to really understand employee engagement overall. And when we use these metrics like open rates, click-through rates, uh, and even employee feedback to refine our messages and deliver what resonates with employees, then we're really building that culture of trust and connection. So as Mike said, we've got James, Katie, and Kevin here. We're gonna dive into the importance of data and the growing popularity of AI tools and their potential implications on internal communications. And so, Kevin, I thought it might be fun to start the conversation off with you. And if you could just share some thoughts that you have on why data is so important for measuring the effectiveness of internal communications?

Speaker D: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Elizabeth. And hi, everyone. I think also I want to answer that question right away. Is data the future of comms? No, it's not. It's the absolute present. It should not be a future thought. It should be your absolute today task to get into data. And also, I would say that it's not an excuse, good enough excuse anymore to say I'm not into numbers because you have AI for that, right? So you don't have to be into numbers. You can I'm sure we're gonna talk about AI a lot later. But yeah, I think it's absolutely crucial because as you said, Elizabeth, without data, we're just guessing, right? You're just guessing which of your messages resonate, which of your channels work, and how your employees truly feel. So only with data, we can gain clarity on all of that, right? And track all the quantitative side of things. But also go beyond those vanity metrics like open rates. So I think it's super important that we go beyond those. It's a good starting point, but it's about tying that communication that we deliver to the outcomes, right? So always testing, are employees more informed? Are they acting on what they read? And then are we reducing confusion during change? All these kinds of things. So that's what we need qualitative data for, feedback channels, surveys, sentiment analysis, et cetera. So yeah, all in all, data gives us the power to move from from, from broadcasting messages to, to creating real dialogue is, is absolutely crucial.

Speaker B: Agreed. But I think for internal communicators, sometimes just getting the data is super difficult. And James, I know you lead internal communications at your organization. So as someone who does internal communications day in and day out and knows Like, yeah, it's really great in theory to get data. But what are your thoughts? Do you agree with Kevin's view on the importance of data? Or because of the level of difficulty, do you see it different in your daily work?

Speaker E: Yeah. First, hi, everybody. Happy to be on here and chatting with everybody. I do agree with Kevin. I think it's extremely important. I think— but to your other— the other side of your point, We have, as a user, as someone constantly implementing and strategizing, I have to find time to balance both. And I'm sure a lot of people on this call are also one-people internal comm teams. And so, you know, it's wonderful that there are tools out there that help us gather that data. AI has become, at least for me, AI has become a way to kind of sift through through a lot of that data. To Kevin's point, there's a lot of the vanity of open rates, right? Like we have super high open rates, but I also know that that's because people are like me and we open the email, determine how important it is in that second, and then we'll read it later. But on the other side of it, I use AI a lot to make my job easier. So the writing, the sorting out the importance of some of the messaging, different things like that. So less around the data and more around the implementation is where I am using a lot of my AI work. And I'm sure there's probably others on this call or tuning in that see it for that same purpose.

Speaker B: What do you mean by— can you go further on what you mean by implementation? And, and I ask this because I know you, you're internal comms, you're in the manufacturing arm of your organization, very disparate employees. We talked about how a lot of times your staff are very disconnected just by nature of what they do. So when you, you just mentioned implementation, can you dig deeper a little bit on that? And what is, what are you actually pulling in terms of data?

Speaker E: Yeah, so just clarification. So again, I work in the construction industry. We do work from across, we do work around the US and we do everything from major medical buildings to manufacturing to industrial to schools. And so, as you mentioned, we have folks who will never come into the office, right? There's no office nearby them. So we're trying to find a way to reach them. And I guess back onto the implementation portion of it, it's not just combing through to see, did someone open the email? It's Creating the email, making sure that it's something that— making sure that the message resonates with my team in Dallas, the team in South Carolina, the team in Kansas City, Missouri. It's the making sure that the managers also understand the message before I push it out to the whole company. So it's a lot of— it's not just the strategy. It's not just the, here's what we're trying to get across. It's how do I schedule this? Do I make sure it's at the right time? Whose time zone am I in? What am I trying to get across with this one email and what other platforms and messaging tools can I use? So it's, it is the nitty-gritty of it all. I guess if that answers your question.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, I think it totally does. You know, we, I was just curious too, just in terms of how you pull the data, like, what are the, some of the, what are, are you using any type of platform to aggregate it? Because I know with where in my organization, like, we are pulling from disparate sources and then pulling it all into, like, Power BI to create a dashboard view of it. What are you doing? Something similar?

Speaker E: Yes. So, I mean, we're fairly, we're a fairly small firm. We're in the grand scheme of things, we're about 600 associates. So we are also very bootstrap. pulling info from wherever we can get it. So as was mentioned earlier, we are a user of ContactMonkey, so we pull that data. We are a Microsoft house, so we use Yammer. We use any feedback we get from SharePoint. And we do utilize Power BI a little bit to try to build some of these dashboards. But we also have a single team that's dedicated to that. So they're also working on the parts of the business that put work into place. So it's one of those things, as I mentioned earlier.

Speaker C: Oh, nice.

Speaker B: They're doing all of the analytics for you?

Speaker E: They're— no, let me rephrase that. They are like, you are the one sending messages. These are the people actually making the work happen in the field, the construction.

Speaker B: Gotcha.

Speaker E: We're gonna, you know, they get priority. So it's a little bit of a scrappiness, right? I'm trying to pull from dozens of sources. On the AI side, I will utilize tools. Like I said, we're a smaller house, but we are a Microsoft house. So we use Copilot a lot to dump data and figure out what insights and trends it's seeing. And from there, I will usually go and try to figure out what do those trends actually look like.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker E: And then do they actually apply to our teams?

Speaker B: Great. I love how you said scrappy. I think that's fitting for you for manufacturing and construction. So Kevin and Katie, hi, Katie.

Speaker C: Hi, everyone.

Speaker B: To get your guys' thoughts on, as you're hearing, I've kind of alluded to it, but James also dug a little bit deeper. So as from an internal comms perspective, we all know and appreciate the value, I think, of data. But what are your guys's— what are your thoughts? What are your reactions when you hear your— because you guys are external providers. What are your thoughts when you hear from internal communicators like, yeah, we get it, but how do we actually— we have problems with actually doing it. And so, or either because of the momentum of our day or whatever we're doing. It's just not easy to get data. So what's your— what are your perspectives on that?

Speaker C: Yeah, and I think because we are a provider and kind of one of our key things is our email analytics, really kind of when I started at ContactMonkey over 7 years ago, like the first way to get in there or the first kind of buy-in from leadership is that email tracking. It's a lot easier to get buy-in. It's not like an app or an intranet that needs kind of a longer implementation time. And there's also no learning curve. You're already using Outlook. So I think for us, we come from that point of view when we're talking to our clients. That's how you get started. But also, there's not much in the internal comms space to back it up and to benchmark against. So that's kind of why, kind of a couple of years ago, we launched an internal email benchmark report. There's lots of stats out there for marketing and sales. You can get inundated with different metrics. But there wasn't anything on there for internal emails. So we're in our 5th edition of that and it's on our website if anyone wants it. And hopefully someone from ContactMonkey can drop it in the chat. When it comes to data, you have to have a benchmark if you're getting started, because if you're not, kind of like you don't really know what your goal should be and then always thinking about the why behind it. And then you can get more advanced, whether you want to use that benchmark report with your metrics if you are using a third-party tool. and put that into ChatGPT to identify different trends around sentiment, around how your subject lines are doing, around kind of how your open rates compare, and kind of just using those and then working towards kind of a better place to push those benchmarks. And then also we have a global survey which is in a 6th year coming out. It's just launched this week, so I'll get someone to drop it in the chat or we can have it in the email afterwards. But for the 5th year in a row, tracking and measuring is still a top channel challenge. 54% say it's a primary challenge. Although there's lots of tools like ContactMonkey, Helio out there, not everyone is using a tool yet. We're seeing 60% this year not using a third-party tool, which again, we know it's a lot of economic pressures at the minute. So budgets are getting cut as well. We saw in the survey. So there's a lot of conflicting things going on in the environment. But those who are using the tool, 68% said analytics kind of is the key feature they want. But on the other side, 70% still struggle with proving internal communications impact. So it's really that balancing act, I think, with kind of developing your strategy, setting your key benchmarks, and then kind of integrating that into your day-to-day as well.

Speaker B: Great insights. Thank you, Katie. Kevin, what do you think? Do you have anything else to add?

Speaker D: Yeah, I mean, I think it's very important to also kind of double down on the fact that not every organization has the funds and the budget to use modern technology. Not every organization can afford using ContactMonkey or can afford having a modern intranet platform like Halo, where obviously we also have lots of analytics and insights that go beyond quantitative data, also including sentiment analysis. So pretty cool stuff, but The reality of most of the clients that I speak to and potential clients that I speak to is that they just don't have enough budget for these kind of platforms. But I always like to tell them, well, that's okay. Obviously, I'd like you to be a client of ours, or Katie would like them to be a client of ContactMonkey, but it doesn't require the most fanciest and most expensive platforms in the world to start gathering data. I mean, you can get creative with other methods, right? And if you don't have the quantitative side of things, you can still go out there and at least have conversations and gather some qualitative data, right? So especially organizations that are the size of James' organization, right? So I'm sure he does that in some sort of way, but he could also go out to the plants and talk to the people that are frontline, right? And get some snippets and some insights from those employees that are hard to reach. Or even just use survey tools. There are good free open source tools that you can use to create surveys and send them out to your employees in a good frequency. So there's many ways. And another excuse that I don't let count anymore is I don't have data, I don't know how to get it, I don't have the platforms. There is ways to get data, a lot of ways.

Speaker B: I just saw Marissa posted a really good question in the chat. Is anyone willing to share an example from their industry of how they're able to correlate business outcomes to internal communications? And James, I'm gonna have you touch on this real quick, and then Katie and Kevin, if you can, just from an outsider perspective, have some insight. But I think that's a really, really good question because when we think about data, we think about the, the that overflow of communication. I know that as internal communicators, we are often asked, is this— what's the value of this? And how do we prove or demonstrate that value? And I just want to give another shout out to my team because I think one of the mechanisms that they— we've developed, which I think is outstanding, is We put all of our internal communication tactics into a platform called Asana. And in Asana, we actually correlate our initiatives that we have to our internal communication strategy. So everything that we do aligns to that overarching strategy. And then that, that internal communication strategy then aligns to our desired business outcomes. And if my team were on the— well, hopefully they're on the call, but if they were speaking, they would give you all kinds of insights about Asana. But James, I think that's a really good question for you too. And I saw you nodding your head and just— and I think you were touching on this before too about getting the data, but then making sure that there's the— you're demonstrating the value of the internal communications and the overall effectiveness. So what are your thoughts on that?

Speaker E: Yeah, I mean, kind of for anyone in the implementation or strategy side of internal comms, that's the big question, right? Is, hey, great, I'm glad you did this. What was the outcome? You know, we use a ton of different tools across our company. One of them includes the— we do a survey index. It's the Q12, Big 12 Q. I cannot remember the title of it. It's through some major national—

Speaker B: Gallup.

Speaker C: Yes.

Speaker B: Thank you.

Speaker E: You made a photo friend. Thank you. Yes, Gallup. We love Gallup so much. And so, you know, before I— we've been doing— we've been utilizing Gallup before I came on. And we were able to see an uptick once we had formalized it. So that was one way. So actually, Kevin brought up a great point. We do, we, I go do site visits pretty regularly to all of our different offices. And it doesn't hurt that our leadership team is bought in on communications and marketing. They understand the importance of it. That makes my job a little easier, but when it goes to proving the value of the work, Or, you know, when I do have to go submit that expense report or the renewal for ContactMonkey or any of the other tools, it's often followed by, here's the data, here's what we've seen. Now, depending on the level of individual, there are those easy ones where they're like, oh great, you had really great read-through, you had really great clicks. People are obviously using this information. But then there's, you know, I credit our COO a lot. He'll always ask me, well, what did people say? What did they get from this? And so a lot of times it's me taking him anecdotal feedback. We use some of the survey tools that Kevin had mentioned, and we can share that feedback with them. So it's not just my word. It's essentially not saying, here's my word, here's what people are saying. And it is hard. I do love the concept of utilizing Asana. We use similarly, we use ClickUp. And it allows us to plug in some of the reporting that's happened, which allows some of the higher levels to understand at a big picture, here's how these align.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker E: I also think for anyone that's, you know, regardless of level, depending on your role, a big way to make those connections for people that maybe don't understand is just sitting and having the conversation. I am consistently People ask me what I do in internal comms. I say I bug people at least 75% of the day. And that's because I'm in people's offices asking them what they wanna see, how they wanna see it. It's a lot of showing them results from their own teams.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker E: You know, I had a really, one of my very first hard conversations, I had a business unit leader say, I don't understand the point of the internet if all you're doing is posting stories about where we've donated, where we had, you know, that group lunch. And then maybe every now and then, here's a process change. I was able to show him reporting and say, well, 75% of your team clicked through these, opened these newsletters and are engaging with them. They're not just reading them, right? They're, I'm sorry, they're not just opening them. They're actually going through and engaging with it. And that very quickly shifted that leader's viewpoint and he's now an active member in my work. So it's beneficial to just sit down and have some of those conversations, as nervous as you may be to have them. Because that just— it's that one-on-one, even if you— sorry, even if you can't do it in person, Teams, virtual, Zoom, they all work as well.

Speaker B: Well, I think you raise a really good point, is one of the ways to demonstrate the value of communications is leveraging the relationships that you have, especially with your key partners. And showing them, hey, based off— you represent this division, this function. I just wanted to share with you some of the metrics that we're seeing from people within your own team. And then really correlating internal communications to that leader's own business strategies. I think that's another way that we could help demonstrate the value of internal communications with business outcomes. So Kevin and Katie, what are your guys' thoughts on this from just an external standpoint?

Speaker D: I was just thinking of the word business outcome, right? Because it's another buzzword there and it means something completely different for every organization. And when I speak to internal communicators, surprisingly often they don't know what the business outcome is or even what the most important metrics for the organization they work for are. So I always ask them, what are the metrics and the outcomes that your leadership is looking at? What are the metrics that they care about? Your CHRO, your CEO, your CIO. This is where you got to start because if you want to tie your value to what's important to them, you got to understand that first. So that's kind of step number 0 for me. And then once you got to gather an understanding of what that is, it might be hard to find that connection, right? Because they might look at things like revenue and productivity, right? And it's hard to tie communications to that. So you might have to get creative again. And I had a project with Mike over the past couple of years where we're trying to develop something like a value framework where you develop your own metrics that are kind of outcome-related, but not necessarily as hard as revenue or productivity. So just to give one example, I love the metric of trust in leadership. Many organizations might already measure something like that, but only on an annual survey kind of basis. But that is something that has worked pretty well with lots of Feilo clients that started creating that metric by gathering data around it and make that something that out of a sudden leadership was super interested in because of course they want that metric to rise and it's and what you're doing in your intranet and your emails, et cetera, to that metric, right? And another, just to get another example is also to start measuring the employee net promoter score. So it's a simpler version of the Gallup Q12 that James mentioned earlier. So for everyone that's not familiar with that, employee net promoter score is basically just asking your employees on a fairly regular basis, how likely are you to recommend on a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or family member? And that's also something that every leader will be naturally interested in to keep that ENPS score very high. So yeah, that's what I've seen working pretty well. And ultimately, yeah, tying things to business outcomes and things that your leaders understand, right? Because that's what ultimately should be your goal.

Speaker B: Gotcha. Katie?

Speaker C: Yeah, and from our side, We also link it to organizational efficiency because of sometimes there's small teams, maybe you're one communicator communicating to 6,000 employees, your time is precious. And if you're in like an external marketing tool, building your templates, exporting it, putting it into Outlook, then building your list, there's a lot of time that can be saved there. So we've done a couple of case studies where it was comparison versus an external marketing tool, but using Contact Monkey and it was 25 days per year that was saved. And then also similar to Kevin, EMPS is big for us. Similar to James, recurring surveys. I know, James, you talked about anecdotal feedback in person, but setting up recurring surveys and introducing them kind of efficiently, how you're gonna use the results, we've seen that help as well with our clients.

Speaker E: I would actually just add on to Katie's comment about those surveys. So This is not a plug for ContactMonkey though. You could consider it that. They recently upgraded their survey tools and I, we have a huge focus this year on empowering our managers. We have a lot of first-time managers in our company and a big, big focus is making sure they're informed first and they know how to speak to it. So we've actually been adding a very simple survey down at the very bottom. It's Was this informative and helpful? And we're getting great feedback. They've all been, you know, yes, we agree, this is great, we're very excited about it. What's cool is that we're also hearing feedback come in where they're saying, I would also have loved to know these other parts of it. I would also have loved to know maybe a couple more days in advance before my team, you know, we give them a timeline, but It's those in-the-moments that you catch people and they're more willing to give you feedback and you can adjust off of it. So I will give that to Katie and Kevin's point. Those in-the-moment surveys make a huge difference. And back to the business part, I'm able to take that to my leadership team and show, hey, our, our new managers, these young managers that are trying to understand how to do their job and lead people. They're gaining value from this, and we're seeing communication change. Priya made a wonderful comment in here about what's the risk if we don't say anything. That's been a lot of our conversation at my organization lately of not so much if we don't say it, but if we don't say it soon enough. And so we're able to prove, hey, this manager's first communication is working. People are taking the information and they're sharing it. just through those simple survey tools.

Speaker D: I also like the tie to risk because that might also something that resonates quickly with leadership. I think it was the Gallagher, the recent Gallagher report, it also defines internal comms as a part of risk management. And I think that's a pretty interesting angle to look at it.

Speaker B: Yeah. And so thanks for that. I think that that's a really good kind of a holistic perspective on the value of data with internal communications. And we've been receiving a lot of questions around then how do we help or how do we use AI to help address some of these gaps? Or, you know, how do we— or to even streamline our workflow and our processes? So that getting data is a little bit easier than it has been traditionally in the past. And so I was just reading an article in Forbes, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna pull up, bear with me one second. I'm gonna pull up the link to the article. It's a really good article. I'll share it with everyone in the chat. But it, it's really just around It touches on how many organizations are using artificial intelligence and automation to help with communications overload and even to developing actual content. And like I said, streamlining workflows. And, and it actually says, you know, in the article, it says that organizations or increasing number of organizations are using AI to help plan, present, you know, showing growing reliance on AI overall to improve workplace communications. And we got a question here in the chat, and I thought it was a really good one to help us transition over to this notion of the use of AI. And I think, Mike, is it Marissa that had posed the question? I'm trying to remember.

Speaker E: Yeah.

Speaker A: So it was Marissa.

Speaker D: Marissa's saying—

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: Thank you. Thank you, Marissa. So Marissa had put in a comment here saying that, and I think other people have put in the chat too on some of the AI tools that are being used. And Marissa has said that she's using ChatGPT and Microsoft Pilot, which is actually the 2 platforms that I use as well. Well, officially within my organization, we use Microsoft Pilot. And she says, I wouldn't say what I use it for is content creation. But mostly for helping writing and editing. And sometimes Anna— oh, wait, nope, sorry, I'm getting that one. She says, one of my biggest challenges is our list of 10,000K faculty and staff is not segmented aside from faculty on one list and staff on another list. And I work in higher education, specifically a school of medicine. So. What are your thoughts then, Katie, on how we can use AI to glean insights and help aid in distribution from something like a small distribution list?

Speaker C: With that one, like, we see this a lot. Like, internal communicators don't have control over their lists because IT likes to lock it down. So if you were using Contact Monkey, what you could do is we have list management built in that would link it with your HRIS. So you could just create your lists yourself. And then we have a feature. I don't want to make it all about Contact Monkey, but it would be my first point. We have a feature with dynamic content where you could kind of segment your email and it'll make it easier for you. You could use AI to create the comms, or with dynamic content, you can say this list is going to UK London. This one is going to New York office, so you can change your news, or it's an HR update. Sales team, here's where you are for your metrics for the month. HR team, here's how onboarding is going, HR policy signups, that sort of thing. So that helps in an efficiency point of view, because instead of creating 10 emails, you can create one and send it to so many different lists. But if you don't have a tool like Contact Monkey, Getting into the listing, I think it's gonna be difficult because I know a company won't like you uploading that into a Copilot or a ChatGPT. But what we do is we use AI more so on the content creation path. So I would think of it from that sense of view, whether it's kind of translations, if you're sending different emails out to different organizations. We use it on kind of validating points, summarizing points, that sort of thing. And then on the analytics side, from our own marketing team's perspective, we actually input a lot of our Google Analytics. So you could do this for your intranet as well when using AI. And we get trend analysis. We build a ChatGPT We just input our numbers weekly and it'll automatically do it for us. That saves us hours of previously Excel time that we would have spent wasting it. And the same is applicable across internal communications, whatever metrics you're tracking.

Speaker B: Great, thank you. Kevin, you have thoughts?

Speaker D: I kind of kept on thinking on that email list example, and it's definitely something we run into with so many organizations that their directories RMS, and in theory, you could personalize and do targeted communications with platforms that are out there. But if you just don't have the directories in an organized way and those lists and groups sorted out, then this is where the theory ends, right? And it's definitely something that we should not just accept, but team up with IT and give them a list of required groups that we need and then have them sorted out. I know it's not an easy ask, but it's definitely worth going through it and having that fight if it's a fight. Because ultimately that will then allow us to use all the great tools, including AI, to do all the targeting and let AI know about our different target audiences and start tailoring our messages to those different audiences, right? And when I create content, but also then analyzing the feedback I get, right? Because it'll be a whole different perspective when I start analyzing my data and dissecting it into different audiences, right? Going back to the example from earlier when we're measuring eNPS, you definitely wanna know the differences between your different regions. If you're operating across different regions, I mean, from a— I'm Americanized a little bit by now, but from a German as me, it's pretty hard to get a 10 out of 10 on that eNPS question, right? Whereas an American is very likely to give you a 10 out of 10.

Speaker B: Oh, we all wish for that.

Speaker D: Yeah, so yeah, that's very, very crucial. But I also think just on a general note on how we're using AI, I speak and talk to so many people. And I think most people I speak to, including myself, we're still using AI. I don't want to say wrong, but not in the best way yet. We can all do better. And one thing that I try to do, I try to have conversations with— I use ChatGPT mostly. I try to have conversations with it every day and give it more context. And I don't necessarily save time with it yet. I probably spend even more time on doing something than I used to, but I just try to get more quality out of it in whatever that might be.

Speaker B: Yeah, thanks. Hey James, I meant I was going to ask you, within your organization, are you able to access AI tools like ChatGPT and Copilot?

Speaker E: Yeah. I was using ChatGPT.

Speaker B: I hope I'm not putting you on the spot.

Speaker A: No, no, no.

Speaker E: All good. I was using ChatGPT before we had policy restrictions on it. But we were also very understand— we have an amazing director of internal— or I'm sorry, information technology. And he is one of those people that he'd rather us break something than wait to break something— than wait to use it. That being said, we are all— we are also a government contractor, so we have to be extremely cautious in the tools that we use. So we now no longer use ChatGPT as an organization. There are some people— the person who does all of our social media, she's brilliant. She uses ChatGPT to write her social media content because she's found that Chat is a little bit more, it's a little bit more tailored to that. It has more real conversation and dialogue, whereas Copilot, which is what we use as an organization, it's a little bit more direct, dry, and straightforward.

Speaker A: So—

Speaker B: I, I get that because when I, when I use Copilot, I'm like, please infuse more human emotion every I use it.

Speaker E: Oh yes. I mean, I also use— I told myself I would not make this a plug for Contact Monkey, this whole thing for Contact Monkey, but they have a headline generator tool that I believe is powered by AI. And it— I am a creative. I find myself to be a silly, creative, conversational human. But when it comes to headlines, I'm like, Emojis, I don't know. I get, you know, for those who are also implementers, you write so many damn headlines that you're like, I have to write one more. It does help a lot. I use, so I will use ChatGPT every now and then depending on how public the article is to make me a fun little headline, or if it's within the ContactMonkey tool, I'll use theirs.

Speaker B: Uh, Marissa had put in the chat how she uses that for helping to write, write and edit. So. Marissa, plus one to your comment that you put in the chat. So with that said, then what— what the question is, and Roxanna posted this in the chat as well. So what do you do in an organization where AI has been restricted for use? I don't— Katie, Kevin, have you come across this. I know at my organization, they had even started to restrict cloud-based software that even kind of had AI integrated in it until it was fully vetted and blessed through InfoSec. So what are your, what are your thoughts on that?

Speaker C: For us, with our clients, we can feature tag it so we can turn it off if it is a problem, the ones within our tool. But I think over the last year, it's just becoming more and more. And as long as companies are getting their AI policies in check and implementing AI policies, there's kind of workarounds to getting it in there. Because in our recent survey, we did see 77% of organizations are actively using AI. ChatGPT, Copilot are top. And it's the 3rd kind of top priority. It was 45% voted it as a central topic. AI is what they're looking at in internal communications. And if we look back at this time last year, the world has changed so much in AI. I think it's just gonna become commonplace. And as long as kind of working with your IT teams or security teams on those policies, that would be the way forward.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker D: Kevin? Yeah, I definitely also see— we also see less hesitance and less restrictions. Obviously, there's still lots of question marks out there, and organizations that are super cautious are very restrictive. The use of AI in Halo, for instance, is also fully optional. And we also go a step further. We also allow clients to implement their own or their preferred large language model. So we give them the choice. Do you want OpenAI or Microsoft Azure or Google Vertex? Those are the 3 large language models that we currently support to power our AI features and to obviously have some sort of access to your data. So that's one way. But yeah, I do think that organizations that are still behind, and if you as a communicator work in an organization that's still behind, you should push for it and you should have those conversations and you should be an advocate of putting those policies in place and finding a safe and secure way for your organization because it's going to help doing what you do and it's going to help you in everything. Not only you, but all your, all the other departments. Yeah, very, very extensively.

Speaker B: Yeah. And, and thank you. And I appreciate your perspective on how internal communicators can help kind of influence the integration of these tools that help with our internal comms effectiveness. I know from my organization, like, I saw the question Rebecca had posed was, who owns the AI strategy? And I don't know if it varies probably by organization, and I don't even know if we know within our organization. And I know that from an InfoSec standpoint, like James, it's, you know, our Director of Information Technology, but it's the, it's the, the internal stakeholders who generally are the ones who push for the adoption of a lot of these newer platforms. So thank you for that. And I also want, you know, one of the challenges too, and we've talked about, is taking all this disparate data and putting it together so that we can create themes and, you know, and, and, and be able to tell, to, to look at trends. And Ryan in the chat had, had really, had put in how he's leveraging AI or their, how they're leveraging AI to help build out more of this this trending data and to create more of that dashboard type of feel. So that— but there's a couple of things I want to touch on. We've got 15 minutes left. But one of the things that I think, Kevin, in your area of expertise is just— I was just talking about how traditionally internal comms, they get data. data through open rates. They get data through click-throughs. So can you just elaborate a little bit on just from an overall standpoint, how might AI help quantify internal comms effectiveness beyond just those open rates and click-throughs?

Speaker D: I think it's not so much about AI because you gotta— AI comes into play kind of at step 2 or 3, because you got to build those foundations first that we already touched upon, right? First of all, you need the data. You need to be able to segment the data into different groups. And just once you're able to do that, you would then be able to use AI and analyze all that data better and help it help— let AI help you doing that and understand and potentially create— give you suggestions on what to make out of the data, right? And how to improve my communication How to alter my communications, my tone, how to maybe communicate to different audiences in a different way. It's one of my favorite use cases. I've worked with a couple of organizations that have created different GPTs in ChatGPT that each represent the different audiences. And before every major top-down message they send out, they talk to each of those GPTs and say, this is my message. What do you think the reaction of leadership is going to be? What do you think the reaction of our frontline workers in the US is going to be? What do you think of our South American population is going to be? And all that feedback is super helpful even before you start sending out. It goes into— I love to think about predictive user behavior. That's essentially what this is. All that is kind of the next level of helping you strategize better. But yeah, you need the data and the the properties in the different groups first. But those are some of the use cases where I think you can really go beyond of just letting it help you edit the tone of the message that you're creating.

Speaker B: Well, I thought what you said was a very interesting and very good, insightful way to use ChatGPT, where you have a conversation for your different segmentations, right? Your different audiences. so that then you can then keep building on that same chat, right?

Speaker D: Yeah, you should always have conversations with it. That's what I said earlier. I think most people are still using it wrong because I think they open a conversation, they give it one task, and then they're disappointed in the outcome. But actually, you should have— you should give it so much context and give it so much more back and forth, back and forth. I even have one that I use privately that I call Fitness Trainer. That one, knows all my metrics, all my goals, when my next half marathon is, and it pushes me, it creates my training plans and everything. So the more context you give it, the better it can help you.

Speaker B: I appreciate that. Yeah. Katie, how about you?

Speaker C: Yeah, kind of personally for us on the marketing team here, we create a lot of content. Like, that's kind of one of our go-tos at Contact Monkey. just providing thoughtful informational best practices tips. So we actually have our content team using that one ChatGPT account so we can train it on our tone of voice, our style, the best way to present information, the best way to present data, how to do research. And that has helped us improve efficiency and kind of reduce time to producing content as well, especially when you have small teams. I'm sure that's a lot of internal communicators. small teams. So the content production side is where we use it the most. And then on our demand side, we use the kind of custom analysis ChatGPT, which they're pretty easy to set up. There's lots of YouTube videos out there that are helpful kind of when creating these custom ChatGPTs. Like anyone can do it, just kind of YouTube is your best friend when it comes to learning these new tools.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's great. And so where am I? Like, I got all of these thoughts going in my head right now. So I confess, like, my organization, when AI first came out, like, it was a free-for-all, right, at first. And then there was this clampdown. And so, like, James, you were saying how ChatGPT has has a warmer, friendlier tone. Copilot is just all business. Right? So it's like we got one who's party on the top. We've got one who's business on the bottom. And so I often am, like, on my phone, like, using ChatGPT and then using Copilot because it's, you know, officially kind of approved. So, but I think, Kevin, also what you talked about was just starting to slide into this notion of risk and ethics. And, and so, and James, you had mentioned that you have been trying to get your, or your director of information technology kind of gives you the agency to help influence the direction of some of the technology that your organization adopts. But What have been some of the risks that you've had to work through or address when it comes to being able to leverage AI?

Speaker E: Yeah. I mean, I think the biggest one is, I mean, look, I work in construction. It is primarily dominated by individuals who, they grew up in construction, they, right, they not— technology is scary for a lot of people. And then in construction, it's not something that they're always used to. So it was a lot of the, can I trust this? What's going to happen? There's— they've heard the horror stories that have maybe been exaggerated or just poor use cases, right? So a lot of it was dispelling myths and misunderstanding. So Copilot is a wonderful example because the way that we have Copilot built, it doesn't feed out words, it only pulls in, which the downside is we lose a lot of the capability that like GPT has where it can build and build and build. It also doesn't hold the information that we presented it. So it's dispelling some things like that. It's also just showing the ease of use. I was able to demonstrate to my chief marketing officer the amount of time I have saved. So I also write all of our company award submissions. What used to take me an hour to interview somebody and then another hour plus to write, review, re-review, rewrite that application, I can pop it into Copilot, have it write it. And because our Copilot's built in a way that it doesn't feed out words, feel secure that that person's information is secure. So it's a lot of that. It's a lot of dispelling myths, a lot of showing the value. It helps when senior leadership is bought in, right? Because they have a little louder voice than individual contributors. But it was a lot of that. And then I think a big part of it was kind of the other side of the myths of, is it gonna take my job? Well, right now, for our level of a company, AI cannot swing a hammer. AI cannot lay cabinetry. Or install cabinetry, but it can make the front desk's job easier when someone checks in and auto-notes to one of our people that their guest is here.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker E: Right? It's— so we had— we actually had that come up in a company meeting the other day. I was kind of shocked at that question of like, do we need to be worried? The response was no, we aren't trying to replace jobs. We're trying to make jobs easier, which then of course frees you up to do more work sometimes. But You know, that, that's our focus. But I guess to recap, an answer is it was a lot of dispelling the myths with the facts and then just proving the value of like, look how much time this is saving by doing these 3 things, right?

Speaker B: And I think too, you raised a great point on just the concern of whether AI would be replacing any of us. And I, And we've had this conversation in my organization, and it is— it really— I like your point where it can help streamline and help us create those reports, those dashboards, even create content in a more streamlined way. But there's no replacement for, I think, the human, especially in internal communications where that, that human element is so, so important. And, uh, we've got a few minutes left. I want to ask Kevin and Katie, um, one of the— I think as AI has grown and increased in use, especially from an internal and an employee standpoint, there's a lot of concern over what this means in terms of capturing data, employee data specifically, what an organization is, is learning about staff or their employees, how they're going to use it. I know we've seen that, you know, even externally from a consumer, even in a marketing standpoint, you still got this big cloud of big data. And it's all like, well, how are we using it? How are we protecting it? Can you share thoughts on that from your guys' perspective on data privacy concerns, whether it— especially from a staff standpoint, does it give a Big Brother is watching vibe?

Speaker D: Yeah, I obviously, we're as a vendor, we're super cautious of that. And I always highly respect data security, people that work in data security and make sure that the company's proprietary information stays safe. On the other hand, though, I sometimes struggle with those concerns and those overly cautious risk assessments because ultimately what's going to happen is if you restrict the use of AI in your company too much, Your employees are going to use it anyway. They're just going to use their private devices, right? Just like you said, Elizabeth, you were using ChatGPT on your private device.

Speaker B: Don't rat me out. There you go. Oh, I already ratted myself out.

Speaker D: Right? So, and it happened before AI, right? If you don't give employees a good messaging channel, they're going to start using WhatsApp, right? And create their WhatsApp groups and share proprietary information there. So, and I also don't get it from an employee standpoint, to be honest, because if you are afraid, big brother's watching you, but at the same time you have an Instagram profile and Facebook profile and you, you agree with them spying on you. I don't get the difference, to be honest.

Speaker B: Gotcha. Katie, how about you?

Speaker C: Yeah, for us, when we see this kind of as the supplier side, this is why we built multiple tracking ways, our capabilities, especially with working with European companies, because we do work a lot in Europe. So we have like anonymous tracking, individual tracking, or just that overall tracking to help with that. But also, I think the biggest thing as well, you as the company who's buying the software, whether it's like Contact Monkey, Halo, or something else, you need to be transparent on what you're tracking and why and how you're going to use that information because ultimately it's to improve productivity, it's to improve the bottom line, boost employee engagement, make the place a better place to work. We would hope, not always the case, but it's really to drive productivity, profitability, and efficiency at the company, and it's not to be catching someone out type of thing.

Speaker B: Yeah, thank you. Rebecca, I saw your comment in the chat, and I think where you just in terms of whether AI is gonna make internal communicators, whether it's gonna enhance or make us obsolete, obsolete. And I just think, personally, from my experience, it's, it's just leaning into the data. So AI is just another tool within our toolkit, right, to show communications effectiveness. It doesn't replace us.

Speaker A: It's—

Speaker B: and, and so you're exactly right. Everyone— there's been other people have said it as well, just in terms of leaning into data, but using AI to help us collect and aggregate that data. show the trends so that we can then make more informed decisions and also influence leaders and show our contributions towards business outcomes. So Mike, do we have time for one more question, or are we ready to start wrapping up?

Speaker A: One rapid-fire, 5-word response to this question.

Speaker B: Are you going to pose it?

Speaker A: No. Why don't you pose it?

Speaker B: Okay. So, oh, wait. I don't know which question I was gonna ask the panelists, like, with it in 30 seconds. What's the next big thing in internal comms measurement? But what's your question?

Speaker A: No, that's, that's a great question. Go for it.

Speaker B: Okay. Alright, James, we'll start with you. What's the next big thing?

Speaker E: As I'm grimacing because I don't know. You know, I don't know, but I do think that the The big focus is the people. I think at the end of the day, whether you use AI to understand how the people are interacting with the information or engaging with it, you're focusing on the data. At the end of the day, it has to be focused on the people and what they need. And that would be— that's my big thing, I guess.

Speaker B: That's a true internal communicator at heart. Thank you, Kevin.

Speaker D: There you go. I'll give a bit more of a technical answer. I think that whole predictive user behavior analytics, I mentioned earlier, that's going to be a pretty cool thing that more people will use in the future.

Speaker B: Thank you. Katie?

Speaker C: Kevin stole my answer.

Speaker B: I'm going to go—

Speaker C: I was going to go predictive analytics as well. So it must be big if we both think it.

Speaker D: There you go.

Speaker B: All right. Awesome. All right, Mike.

Speaker A: Thank you very much, Elizabeth, Kevin, Katie, and James. It's been an outstanding conversation. Before we go, I would just like once again To thank Contact Monkey and our friends at the Center for Strategic Communication Excellence for your support for the We Lead Comms debate series. Next We Lead Comms debate will take place in May, and we'll look at generations in the workplace.

Speaker B: Thank you, everyone. Bye.

Speaker C: Thanks, everyone.

Speaker D: Thanks, everyone.

Speaker C: Thank you.