Re-inventing Communications with AI: Insights from Microsoft’s Steve Clayton

ChatGPT has landed

When ChatGPT launched in November 2022, it marked a transformative moment for communications professionals, reshaping the potential to craft narratives, manage messaging, and execute communication strategies. Two years later, AI’s presence is now a game-changer for the industry.

Back on launch day, Steve Clayton was heading up Corporate Affairs at Microsoft and decided to give ChatGPT — a tool that he describes as “like an alien visitation from a piece of technology”  — a whirl. Steve gave it the task of writing an internal introduction to his new boss, translating it into French and finally writing the intro as a poem. In a reaction familiar to many using generative AI for the first time, its ability to create, translate and reformat good-quality content at lightning speed made the hairs stand up on the back of Steve’s neck. He was left pondering the future role of communications professionals — trained human storytellers — with this technology now performing their day-to-day tasks quickly and efficiently.

Augmenting the work of comms pros

Fast forward to today and Steve leads a newly-formed Communications Strategy team at Microsoft, charged with applying generative AI across the corporation’s communications disciplines from PR and social media to employee comms and issues management.

The way he views generative AI technology and the philosophy he’s embraced has evolved considerably since that initial reaction two years ago and alongside the introduction of Microsoft’s own Copilot tool in February 2023. “It’s a copilot, not an autopilot,” says Steve. “It’s here to help us augment the work that we do and frankly replace a lot of the stuff that we don’t enjoy doing in our function.”

Steve’s team at Microsoft aims to “bake” AI into people’s daily workflows which he describes as more focused on behaviour change than technology implementation. He shares a practical example: Instead of investing time reading through a detailed 200-page pdf, he can simply ask Copilot a question about the content and it will extract the key piece of information he needs. Steve’s second screen in his home office is no longer a “reading screen” to allow him to comfortably read through long documents, but a permanent web browser with Copilot embedded. He saves countless hours by asking Copilot questions related to any content on the web — an example of the behaviour change his team seeks to embed and help the organization “form an AI habit”.

Creating content with generative AI

Steve’s team also works to help comms professionals across the business make the most of AI in their roles specifically. In a pre-webinar survey conducted by The Andrews Partnership, 63% of attendees said they were already using AI in their roles and of those, 70% were using it for content development, an area where Steve shares some key practical applications:

1. Get past the “blank page problem”
   To get over the intimidation of being faced with a blank Word document, a generative AI tool like Copilot can help you produce a fast first draft based on an existing document such as a presentation or PDF.
2. Create powerful conclusions
   If you find you’ve expended all your creative energy writing the first three or four paragraphs of an article or press release, give it to Copilot and ask it to create a compelling close for you.
3. Generate headlines
   When the main body of your content piece is ready, ask Copilot to create five headlines and use them as starting points.
4. Create ideas for social media posts
   Steve cites generative AI inspiration for social media posts based on other content pieces like blog posts and press releases as one of the team’s most productive current uses for Copilot.

Using AI-generated content as a starting point and not an endpoint is vital, says Steve. AI can help comms professionals quickly get that all-important first draft created when faced with writer’s block, but putting in the time to check and adjust the final piece so it lands well with your audience is also critical.

Steve illustrates the point through a personal example: When he asked Copilot to create a short internal memo based on a 15-slide PowerPoint presentation, he spent time editing and rewriting the copy it produced so it sounded authentically like him. “Anybody who reads this would know it isn’t really me,” he says of the initial AI-generated content. “It doesn’t quite have my language. It doesn’t have my tone. It doesn’t have my style of communication. It doesn’t have the emojis I’d use. And so, I adjusted it, but I used about 40% of the content, and then I sent it to the entire department.”

When it comes to questions about labelling AI-generated content, Steve is unequivocal. “We have a very clear policy internally that any content that we create and publish externally that’s AI-generated, we mark as AI-generated.” He adds that AI’s role in content creation is often more focused on inspiration or creating a first draft and the final content is created by a human.

Using AI to test your messaging

As well as generating content, AI can also help communicators test and anticipate how communications might land with their audience and interrogate the rigour of arguments and narratives. Steve shares some use case cases:

• Refining key messages
  Give Copilot a piece of content — a blog, press release or announcement for example — and ask it for the three key messages it contains. Use Copilot to mimic the audience you’re trying to reach and if those messages aren’t right, it can help you re-work your content.
• Predicting audience reactions and finding blind spots
  Give Copilot a reactive or proactive statement you’ve written and ask how it might be received by your audience. Ask it to poke some holes in your statement or what it would say to disrupt or challenge the argument you’re putting forward.

Moving from hindsight to foresight

In addition to content generation and testing, AI has a role to play when it comes to communications measurement, says Steve. Most of what’s measured today falls into hindsight (measuring real-time news or the impact of specific comms efforts) and insight (longer-term trend analysis and competitor comparisons) and AI can accelerate those processes with simple prompts like “Tell me the latest news today about Microsoft and AI in the Asia Pacific region.” However, armed with AI, comms professionals can now move into the more strategic territory of foresight.

In an increasingly fragmented media landscape, AI can enable communicators to efficiently predict the right places to land a specific story. “Ask an AI system that’s ingesting all of the digital content and all of the media content on a global basis: Who should we pitch this story to?” says Steve.

The system used by the team at Microsoft is a partnership with media and consumer intelligence company Meltwater that spans AI-powered media analysis, reporting and measurement and is now available integrated into Microsoft Teams.

Accelerating earned media with AI

These practical ways to apply AI to content creation, testing and planning are part of a wider effort within the Microsoft communications team to atomise and optimise all their key processes. That includes the journey of an earned media story or as Steve puts it, “The process of how do you get from a story idea to that announcement appearing in The Sydney Morning Herald, or the Financial Times, or The Times of India, or The New York Times.”

For Microsoft that is a 20-step journey (below) that they then scrutinised for opportunities to enhance with AI and automation. Steve explains: “The shading [in the diagram] is intentional. In step one, the shading is light because we think there’s a very light use of AI in the story ideation phase. That’s a human, creative storytelling process. But when you get to step four, AI has huge potential to help us decide who are the media targets and help us reason over the media landscape.”

There are also steps in the process identified for automation as opposed to AI and ones where Steve is clear that AI does not have a role to play: “We’re not going to use AI to confirm the spokespeople. We’re not going to use AI to train our spokespeople. We’re not going to use AI to build and nurture relations with journalists”.

“We want to use AI to get rid of drudgery and repetition and allow people to spend their time on the steps in this process where they can apply their intellect and their storytelling and PR skills in the places where it’s most important.”

A digital home for AI tools

To help embed AI as part of daily workflows for communications professionals, the Communications Strategy team at Microsoft has created an internal digital destination called “Communications Copilot” to house their AI tools. These serve common tasks including:

• Researching journalists’ profiles and create likely questions they might ask on a specific content pitch
• Creating social media posts in the Microsoft tone and style from pre-existing content
• Transcribing and summarising YouTube videos such as keynote presentations and competitor announcements

With many communicators managing an array of lengthy documents ranging from approved statements, policies, announcements and calendars, a conversational AI interface could help locate the right information quickly. Steve gives an example: “Tell me what’s on the calendar next week. Are there any tier-one announcements? Are there any announcements that involve the CEO next week?”

The ambition, says Steve, is to evolve their AI tools into an integrated, conversational Teams experience for communicators that spans measurement and reporting, creation and operations as well as community and culture.

Four AI principles to embrace

What does the advent of AI mean for communicators and how should they approach the technology? Steve breaks down his advice into four principles:

1. Experiment and pioneer
   “Just be out there and play with and use the technology. Understand the boundaries, understand the limits, understand the downsides,” he says. “Because this technology is coming and it’s coming fast and it’s here to stay.”
2. Operate with a sense of urgency
   “In my 26 years at Microsoft, I’ve never seen a technology move so quickly from ChatGPT to where we are now,” says Steve. “The technology change is radical and profound.”
3. Don’t lose sight of your value
   It’s important to cherish the art form of communications while inviting some science into our processes, says Steve. “There are lots of things that AI will never be good at like representing the ethics, morals and values of a company. It’s not good at creating beautiful, brilliant, unique storytelling.  AI will automate some of the things that we don’t love doing in our profession and allow us to spend time doing what we love, which is empathetic, impactful and emotional storytelling.”
4. Culture change is key
   Regardless of the size of your organisation or team, be a champion for this next phase of communications with AI, says Steve. “Take people on this journey of figuring out how the technology helps us in our daily lives.”

Getting Started with AI

For those not yet using AI or looking for more advice and insight, Steve recommends a library of Copilot prompts and guidance the team at Microsoft has created as well as The University of Southern California’s 2024 Relevance Report, a collection of over 30 essays with advice from experts (himself included) on where AI will take the comms industry.

Steve believes much of the fear and hesitancy around AI is misplaced, especially when people associate it with films like The Terminator and The Matrix. “Hollywood had given us a bit of a  technical debt,” he jokes. To show how accessible AI can be, Steve shares a fun, simple task he often tries: he opens his Copilot app, takes a photo of the contents of his fridge, and lets AI suggest ideas for lunch — a far cry from the menacing cyborgs of sci-fi movies.

“AI has changed not just the way I work, but the way I do things when I have questions in life,” concludes Steve. “I think the most important thing is to get out there and use it, find the boundaries, use it in your work life, use it in your personal life and say, what is this technology going to help me with?”