Amsterdam / Chicago,
15
March
2023
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Your personal AI assistant in PR technology

March 14, 2023: From the Product Cockpit of Presspage

We at Presspage just launched a personal AI assistant to help communications professionals with managing and answering all their questions from the media. We are excited about the language capabilities of the current generation of AI. Read this blogpost from our Product Team if you want to learn why we believe this changes the work of communications professionals for the better. 

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AI has long been a promising development, but not very tangible for the larger public. The launch of ChatGPT in November ‘22, an AI chat interface that is optimized for human interaction, changed this. Suddenly, the potential of AI was visible for everybody.

AI frenzy

Of course the sudden attention spurred companies to think and communicate about ways to incorporate AI in their service, genuinely interested in the value it could bring, or simply hoping to ride along with the market attention. 

At Presspage, we are generally interested in everything that could potentially deliver value for our customers, but wary of riding empty trend waves. So when ChatGPT released its API - late February 2023 - we tested the waters. What struck us immediately, was the ease of use and its almost human sense of language. It wasn’t something that needed a lot of knowledge or explanation. This, in theory, would fit very well with the intuitive user experience on our platform.

We were impressed. But we also found numerous reasons not to cheeringly hand over all communications responsibilities to AI. The most obvious one: AI is not always getting its facts straight. Twitter is filled with hilarious examples of AI errors and fake news. More subtle, but therefore harder to mitigate, is its lack of intuitiveness, a broader context-awareness of your organization, the society and sentiment and a certain authenticity, which are all necessary ingredients to make a communications strategy a success, and a piece of content spot-on. 

Open door alert: AI is not human and therefore lacks the human touch.

Tweet showing AI logical error

But to return to our initial enthusiasm: conversational capabilities in different tonalities and languages is something AI, more specifically ChatGPT, does remarkably well. So we focused on that. What could we do to help customers with this strong feat of AI? 

Introducing your Personal Assistant in inquiries from the media

One of the areas that we have seen our customers spend a lot of time on, is the one-to-one communications with journalists. This is why we introduced our Inquiries solution in September ‘22. At the moment, this solution smoothes out the whole process around answering the journalist: logging, remembering, reusing, analyzing etc. But next on our roadmap is taking it one step further: to also reduce the amount of work on the primary task: to actually answer every inquiry individually. 

And that’s where we decided to first introduce AI, as your personal language assistant. 

Instead of typing the whole answer, including all the formalities, you just have to jot down a list of bullets with all the facts you want to share with the journalists. Clicking on the AI button will then generate a complete answer, already in email style. Depending on the type of relationship you have with a journalist, you can then choose to make your reply more formal or more friendly, just by clicking the AI button again. Moreover, your AI assistant speaks 90+ languages! So you can choose to communicate in any language of your choice. 

When using AI like this, a communications specialist will spend less time on every individual request, while still keeping the conversation personal and factually correct. Leaving more time for a proactive communications strategy. 

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Using AI to answer an inquiry

AI and communications professionals going forward 

The core of everything we do at Presspage boils down to ‘less tech, more touch’. We believe that equipping communications professionals with the right tools to reduce the burden of performing repetitive essential tasks, will free up time and space for proactive strategy, creative storytelling and relationship building. We also believe that this is not just a nice to have, but actually a must have. A company needs their corporate communications team to spend their full potential, to have the biggest positive impact on company goals and reputation.

The current generation of AI already provides a perfect assistant to help you deal with some essential, but very time-consuming parts of your job. We are curious to see what its next generations will bring. Without ever compromising on authenticity, creativity or simply the truth, we will keep stretching new AI capabilities to its limits, to see what value it can potentially hold for our customers. As a company full of nerds, we have already written rap-style recipes, requirements and documentation with it. If we see a way to responsibly integrate AI with other parts of our solution, we won’t hesitate. 

Do you have any suggestions for us? Feel free to reach out and tell Folkje, our lead product manager. She would love to hear your thoughts.

Want to try our personal AI assistant yourself?

To find out why Presspage is crucial to the success of your communications , book a personalized demo now.