Transcript for "Hype or Hope: AI's Impact on Company Culture & Comms": And welcome everyone to our event today, hype or hope, AI's impact on company culture and communications. Before we do intros, we want you all to go into the chat and introduce yourself. One of the things I love most about this Gold Coast platform is the dynamic nature of the chat. So please go in, who you are, where you work, and what city you are joining from. That's always interesting to see. And a few rules that we have here in this event. Please, please, please, if you have a question, do not at least put it in the q a. This is one area where which AI could help us out and automatically take questions or in the chat, put them in the q and a. It's not there yet. So as you have questions, please remember to put them in the q and a. So if we have time at the end, we can address those or answer them later. Couple other things about this. This is not a tech talk. We are not gonna get into the nitty gritty details of AI. Is it LLM? Is it GenAI? Is it AI agents? All of that. Some of that stuff. No. We're gonna sit above that and talk about the culture that we are building around AI. Yep. Absolutely. And, you know, Chuck and I have spent some time thinking about this talk and what we want to cover, and we really landed on, you know, the this idea of separating out hope from hype. There's a lot of hope, reason for hope, there's also a lot of hype. And, as we were putting together the promo for this event, Chuck put together a little promo visual and our our talented designer Claire said, oh, well, you need to judge it up a little more to get people to stop scrolling through LinkedIn and actually click on it. And so Chuck in his brilliance added in a unicorn and a shark to represent our hope and our hype, which I thought was brilliant and half joking, but I think did actually get people to, stop scrolling. So that's where we're gonna start. When you think about AI and everything that we're seeing and, experiencing right now, are you team hype? Are you team unicorn? Are you excited? Are you enthusiastic? Sorry. That was team hype is the shark. Team hype is the shark. It's noisy. It's hype. It's a little bit, blurry. Or are you hopeful? Are you excited? Are you optimistic? That's our unicorns. So drop into the chat a GIF or an emoji. Tell us. Are you Hope? Are you Unicorn? Are you Team Hype? Are you Shark? Because we'd love to see where where people are on that. Yep. I wanna go back into the chat here and and see we've got, quite the Canadian, attendance here. And and we already have Canadians not following directions per huge on here. Melissa Murray. Team hype team Blue Jays. I think we're all sort of team Blue Jays. I think if you're in the baseball world, I think you're out where I think a lot of us are team Blue Jays. I hated I I don't know who could stay up for that game last night and win 18 innings. It's insanity. But, yes, go into the chat. We've got California. In addition to Canada, we've got a couple of people in California. We've got Georgia. We've got Minneapolis. We've got more Canadians in here. Yeah. Team Sleep for anybody who tried to stay up. Good call on there. So, yes, go on and use that GIF button or find the emoji and put something shark related if you're hype or unicorn if you are hope. But let's get into there there are lots of unicorns, which is good. That's good. But if you're a shark if you're a shark, that's that's absolutely okay too. But let's get into, some of the things we wanna talk about today. And one of them is, as we know, it almost felt cliche doing an event like this around AI because it's it's literally everywhere. You cannot go look anywhere without AI, and there's a reason for that. But there's also a lot of noise when that happened. It's very easy to tune out that noise that comes into play. And and we have there's a lot of, again, hype, hope, fear, help, all these words that are used to describe it. And, unfortunately, a lot of this is is fear mongering. A lot of it is feeding into you know, I was at ICology World Conference, this past summer, and someone asked a question like, is AI coming for my job? Mhmm. That's a question we see out there in the in the ethos, in the sphere that we're all we all live in. And that's a it is a fear. I'm not gonna take away that some people are concerned about it. But so much of this is around, like, these headlines here, this AI company wants to take your job as if they're actively out there looking to take away, what we all love and doing. And so we wanna separate from that and really focus on this impact that AI is having on all of us. Yeah. Absolutely. And I think impact is a is an important, concept as well because a lot of what we're also seeing, we're gonna get into even more detail with some of the headlines, is the fact that a lot of companies are experiencing disappointment. And it's not just because the technology is not living up to expectations. It's very often because the humans are not living up to expectations or not achieving what's needed, which often comes down to culture. And so when I have conversations about AI, I never have them without the concept of culture because I think culture is truly either the greatest accelerator of AI adoption within organizations or the greatest barrier. And so that's really where we're gonna spend a lot of our time talking. But before we really get into it, just to do a quick introduction, of of ourselves for those of you that don't know us, although I see a lot of great familiar names, in the chat. I'm Anne Mellinger. I'm the CEO of BINC, which is a culture advisory firm, formerly known as Brilliant Inc. Some of you may remember us by our former name, but we are now, we have a consolidated name and a consolidated focus exclusively on the world of culture. And so excited as always to be sharing the stage with my my good friend, Chuck. Yes. Hello, everyone. My name is Chuck Gose, the founder of ICology, which we are celebrating our tenth anniversary this year of ICology, which started as a podcast, all to lift other voices in the world of internal comms and now is a community bringing internal communicators together. So I could just say if internal comms is your passion, psychology is your community. And as as you mentioned, Anna, it's always great to partner with people like yourself on these types of conversations. So let's get into where some of these things are sitting now with this AI conversation, and let's talk about the hype cycle. And a lot of us have probably seen this, come into play with other technologies. So it's really nothing new. This hype cycle exists when any new technology, when any new advancement comes in. There's this big build up, there's a fall down, and then there's a normalization that happens. And we've already we're kind of at that part of the of the build up and now coming down where that skepticism starts coming into play. There's a little pessimism on there. We're gonna talk about optimism a little bit later when it comes to this. And I always think when I hear that optimist is only think of uncle Frank from Home Alone, where he's like, you be optimistic. I'll be realist. I probably butchered that quote from the movie. But I feel like we need to have the talk around where this hype cycle comes into play because it's a natural thing. Any new technology, any new advancement, we get we build it way up, then we start to tear it down, and then it levels out into the real business approach that we all face. Absolutely. Yeah. It definitely feels like we're in this phase of, a little bit of disillusionment, but it is helpful to just kind of remind ourselves that there there are lessons from history. Not to age, Chuck and myself, but we have been through a few of these cycles in our careers and certainly, you know, others before us have seen. Right? There was a lot of hype and a lot of build up around, you know, when first with the Internet, of course, and then, you know, more recently with mobile. I think that, you know, we can all remember a time when everyone was talking about how mobile was just gonna completely change the field of internal communications and how we reach employees, and and it did in many ways. But, again, it's it's always been following that path of, like, a ton of excitement, a lot of noise, a lot of hype, and then a a fall off before leveling out somewhere in the middle. And it certainly feels like we're on that roller coaster ride. But, again, it's important to remember that it follows that curve. And when we really think about what it means to ride this way, we wanna make sure that we're we're not giving into where we are in terms of hype or or disillusionment, but that we're actually using this time as an opportunity to learn. Yep. And when we talk about that learning stuff, which I'm actually gonna go back to slide here. Obviously, we know organizational learning took place before the Internet. However, at least Anne and I aren't that old, Anne. So thanks for leaving that off. Thanks for leaving that off off the slide. But we're gonna now talk about, this area where we've gotta think about what actually determines success when we talk about AI. And it but it's not just AI. It's anything. We talk about this productivity theater. Everybody wants to look at what are we actually measuring. I know when there's a lot of internal communicators on here, measuring is a bit of a of a four letter word. For For a lot of us in our career, we know there's a way to do it. And often, we can start measuring outputs instead of outcomes, and that's the same thing when it comes to AI. We need to start looking instead of measuring the usage, how many people are using it, how long they're using it, how many prompts are they using, all of those various things. We need to start looking at the impact. So where do we start to see progress showing up in real behavior? Not dashboard. Not something you can flash up on a screen and show, but real impact across the business. Let's get out of the productivity feeder, which I love that phrase, Anne, so much. I'm gonna sort of use that more and more and more. Yeah. Okay. And how do we start looking at the impact that this is giving all of us? Exactly. Exactly. And I think yeah. I I we'll definitely talk more about productivity theater because I think it's really important as organizations are figuring out what does success look like. We're talking about adoption. Is it just that we want people using it? Because if that's all you care about, then then people are gonna just start using it for show, and it's not necessarily gonna have the impact that you want anyway. And so, again, I think that that point of, you know, this how are you defining success with AI and where can culture and communication really play a role? Because at the end of the day, technology introduction of any new technology, whether it's mobile, whether it's AI, whatever it is, it really is going to amplify what already exists within your culture. If you have a culture that has a foundation of fear, then that's gonna be amplified by the technology. If you have a culture that's built on a foundation of trust, then that's gonna be amplified. And, you know, there are a lot of there are a lot of examples out there of, you know, where fear sort of led. We saw it recently with Duolingo where, you know, the organization decided that they were gonna be replacing a lot of their humans with AI, and it got out on LinkedIn before it was even communicated to employees and people were freaking out. Something similar happened with payments company Klarna, where, you know, again, the organization sort of treated AI as, you know, a a technology change and said, oh, great. We're gonna replace two thirds of our customer service people, with AI. And very quickly, earlier this year, they had to roll that back. And that came because, you know, they they basically went too quickly. The CEO basically had to acknowledge, look, we we were wrong. We did this too fast, and we have to pull back and bring the humans back in. And there are also plenty of examples, we're gonna share a few now, of organizations that did it right, that really looked at this and said, okay. No. This isn't just a tech rollout. This is actually a change. And when an organization treats it like a culture first change and a change management effort, not a new tech rollout, that's when you really see success. This is an example that I love to point to. It's from a company called Easycater. They are, a marketplace for corporate catering, and they have achieved really impressive AI adoption, and they did that by addressing the fear head on. Right? Go back to those headlines that Chuck was sharing earlier, and we're talking about a bloodbath, literally the headline street about a bloodbath, and the the AI is coming for our job. So instead of simply ignoring that, easy cater said, listen. We get it. We understand what's out there. And they put together this AI responsibility pledge, which includes the fact that they were very clear to say, AI tools are meant to enhance the human workforce. They're not replacing you. And that's something that's such a contrast to what we just saw with Klarna, right, which just straight up said, you're actually being replaced. And they then had to walk that back. Whereas, EasyCater said, I love this. EasyCater said, we're gonna make you awesome to two customers instead of one. And from an employee perspective, if I'm sitting and putting myself in the shoes of those employees, you can either tell me, you know, I'm replacing you with AI or I'm making you better, twice as effective as you are. I mean, that is just so much more empowering. That little switch, can really make a difference with how employees experience AI, and that's all about communication. They also you know, EasyCater, it wasn't just about this pledge. It wasn't just about the words in the pledge, but also they followed a couple of other principles. First of all, leadership they demanded that leadership model AI behavior, And so they really are are actively asking leaders to use AI tools themselves so that if you're encouraging employees to adopt them, you know how you're doing it first. They address the job here explicitly through through this, you know, through these statements, but they also this is another really important one. They were willing to accept the fact that they had to take some short term productivity losses. Right? Again, think about these troughs and these cycles. Right? Very often to achieve a productivity increase, which all companies want, you've gotta take a little bit of a dip. And so almost seeing it as you're willing to go down to about 80% productivity. You're in this learning stage. You've got, you know, not so great outputs from AI, but we're learning, we're working, and ultimately, we're gonna get that higher productivity over time. Smart companies are taking that long view. It shows some pretty savvy leadership as well when you think about knowing the maturity of being able to say, hey. We're gonna have to take a step back to take a bunch of steps Yep. Forward. I don't think that you probably see a lot of that. I wanna go into I I love this example here from another company that's getting it right and for people that have been a part of events. I've been labeled a little anti HR from time to time, Anne, so I'm gonna give credit here to the CHRO of Thomson Reuters. They were the ones that spearheaded the AI adoption efforts. Not IT, not marketing. It was actually HR that spearheaded this marketing effort, and they already had an existing long running product strategy related to their AI. But the CRTRO recognized that there's a lack of focus on internal AI workforce strategy. So their external product talked about it, but they haven't really been talking about it much internally. And because we've seen whether it's New York Times, AP, they've talked about how there's this anxiety that exists in journalism with use of AI. So the CHRO worked with the head of technology, the exec team, and they created a a top down, bottom up strategy that they focused on the four t's. And I think if you you see these four t's, again, when things a lot of change management, this comes into play. So the t's are tone, training, tools, and time to experiment. I think the training and tools were the obvious ones on here, but I thought the ones that stand out to me, one, are the tone, so what you talked about before and with easy cater coming on coming in with a responsible tone around it, and also the t, which speaks to the maybe the lack of productivity that's gonna come in, but able to give people time to experiment and time to play. And anybody who I've talked to about AI, that this is the absolute critical point. It's not that this is gonna do all the work for you. To your point, Anna, it's gonna help you do it, but you gotta experiment with it and figure out what works better. And one of the quotes from their CHRO was, once people get past the fear and anxiety, they didn't move to curiosity. So looking back at those news headlines that we talked about before, people are still stuck in that fear and anxiety. We haven't given them time to even move to the curiosity. We have to give them time to experiment and adapt, which is key to any change management. So they did a global day of learning around it. They worked they aligned us to performance objectives and broader company objectives and everybody's favorite acronym, OKRs, to create expectation of this is how we're gonna measure the impact of AI. We talked about that productivity theater. So they've also have owned a new set of values, which I know you talk a lot about, Anne, which is act fast, learn fast. We've seen the whole hire and fire fast. It's a little different. Act fast and learn fast. And they value they put this into the values as we iterate in days, not weeks or months. We're willing to risk fast failure, and we quickly learn from our mistakes. We are decisive and commit to decisions, turning them into action. Now that's a lot of words there, which also comes down to leaders needing to back that up because they've also created a suite of AI tools, which gives employees the space to experiment. So that a lot of you might, have had this from your company where they don't want you to, talk about company stuff and public tools, but they're not giving you the tools to use it responsibly. They've created their own private ones, so they don't risk data security. And they've given people the dedicated time to go and learn and ask questions even at places like town halls. So I know we said it's not just about the usage, but 60% of their employees are using what they call this open arena, this place where people can play and experiment in a responsible way. And I think that's what, ultimately, a lot of employees are looking for is they want to experience it, and they wanna play, but they don't wanna get fired for it. They don't wanna get in trouble for it. So how do we give them that space? And that's exactly what Thompson Reuters has done? Yeah. It's a great example. So many things that they got right. And just to drive the point home, one more example worth looking at comes from Shopify. They had a, a memo that the CEO actively shared on x, really framing that AI usage is a baseline expectation. And what I love about this one, it hits on something you mentioned already, Chuck, was they they tied it back to values. One of the excerpts I'll just read from the memo, the CEO said, this represents both an opportunity and a requirement deeply connected to our core values of be a constant learner and thrive on change. I love that statement so much because it really emphasizes that, number one, it is based on their values. This isn't just something that we're doing. It's not just it's very clear this is not a tech rollout from those words. Right? It's clear that this is actually about the entire organization evolving around this. It's coming from the CEO. It's very clear that it is a requirement, but also that learning is an important part of this, which goes back to, again, what you were saying about productivity theater. Right? We're not just asking people to use it symbolically. We're asking them to learn. We want to make sure that people are using it and learning it, that they're not just doing this to check up check the box. And so a lot of what Shopify has been focused on is building a strategy to understand the impact of AI. So similar to Thompson Reuters, they've created space for learning. They've encouraged employees to demonstrate what they've tried to share, what's working, what's not. And, you know, I think what what this really comes down to is that we, as communicators, have the opportunity to drive a strategy of total transformation within our organizations, and that we can tailor that effort around what we know about our people and how they experience change. Yep. So great examples. Let's now move into, I think, one of the topics that is most top of mind for probably a lot of you on and what I get asked about at events. I mentioned at IABC World Conference, the question was asked, is AI coming from my job? And that's a natural again, getting into the fear part of all of this. And my simple answer to them was no. It's not. But it might be coming for your next job because we don't always know where the evolution of things are coming. And so we have to stay on top of things. But this is one of my favorite quotes around this, and I think this is something we can all take to heart. Where a candle is blown out, a lamp is turned on. And, Anne, when you and I were talking about doing this event together, that was one of the first things that I I mentioned to you, was there's all these studies around anytime there's new technology, then there's a conversation, there's a there's a fear. The same thing happened with the tractor. When the tractor came in, people were fearful of what it would become. The automobile, people were fearful of what it become. Maybe we should have been a little more afraid of the automobile. I don't know. However, there's this natural thing that comes into place. However, what we end up finding out though time and time again is the opposite thing happens. That, yes, a few jobs do get eliminated, but, actually, new jobs get created. And so the World Economic Forum estimates a net gain of 78 new million jobs because of AI by 2030. That doesn't necessarily make you feel better about your existing job, but all jobs need to evolve over time. So, for example, I thought this is a fascinating study. 6,000,000 US workers today are in occupations that didn't exist in 1940. Wow. And your job might have existed in one sort of way, maybe like a pre madman era way your job might have been there. They're all doing what you're doing though. Mine certainly wouldn't have existed. But think about the jobs that used to be around that just aren't. But there are not jobs now that exist that didn't back sixty five eighty five years ago. Sorry. I did the math wrong there quickly. Eighty five years ago. Who knows what jobs another eighty five years will be like? We don't know, but there will always be this evolution that comes into play. And one of these was in the banking industry when ATMs were revealed. I I I don't think I remember a world when there weren't ATMs. And but I remember they weren't as prevalent as they are now. There was this fear that you wouldn't need bank tellers anymore. But the opposite thing happened. The number of bank tellers in The US increased even with ATMs coming in because banking became more prevalent for people. They needed more out of banking. And so, yes, some jobs might go away, but other jobs will evolve and new jobs will be created as a result. Absolutely. And, I mean, I am by my very nature typically a pretty optimistic person going back to your quote from home alone. I'm a pretty optimistic person, and I will also admit that I've been a little more on the scared end of the spectrum when it comes to AI, until I started reading more and more, Ray Kurzweil. I I I'm a big fan of his writing and his work about AI. He's a futurist. He has a lot to say on the topic. He's been writing about it for since, like, the nineties, which is crazy. And he talks a lot about the reason for optimism, a lot of these historical patterns that Chuck has been talking about. And I think it's important to acknowledge that, number one, we're not saying be optimistic, just rah rah cheerleader. You do have to acknowledge. There are yes. There is a net gain of 78,000,000 jobs per expected, but there's also going to be a huge drop off and an elimination of a lot of jobs. And we're already seeing it, and our friends in the industry are feeling it. And we we're not overlooking that. We're not saying ignore the loss of jobs. We're certainly not saying ignore the fear because if you don't understand what how your people are feeling, that's a great risk as well. But there is a real business benefit to expressing optimism, and there is the benefit to using that as a choice. Again, Goldman Sachs' own data is giving us reason to be hopeful about AI and what it can bring, and it goes back to basic change management theory as well that when leaders adopt a more optimistic mindset, you're more likely to bring people along the the spectrum of change. Right? We are as communicators, we really have the opportunity to shift how the organization is approaching and adopting AI. And I believe that we should be considering deeply optimism as a key part of that. Because, again, we're not just here to translate. We're not just here to say, like, here's the AI strategy for our organization and why you needed to to adopt it. No. We are here to actually help architect the culture that is going to be able to bring our organization into the future. And every message that we send can either help build that confidence, can help address those very real fears, or it can amplify the fear. And so, we really wanna make sure that we're, you know, that we're thinking about that, and and I'll share in the chat a little more. I'll link to a few of Ray Kurzweil's books so that others can can take a look at that, because it certainly shifted my perspective, and I think it's an important one as we really think about ourselves, not as messengers, but architects of change within our organizations. Yeah. I really think that's that might feel subtle, but I I want people to really focus on this theory of of I think in the past, a lot of us probably have seen ourselves as a as a messenger, not as a mouthpiece, as a messenger. But the thing was as builders, as architects, as designers out there, and and that this mental shift could really help put things in. And we're also gonna talk about a potential new role for you to think about yourself as, which is as a bridger. And these are people who are connecting functions and workflows. And I think a lot of us in the comms space are often bridges without even realizing it. And this term bridger comes from Asana's workplace research, which simply discovered there there's a lot of specific people in organizations who will, perhaps even disproportionately at times, influence AI adoption. And these people are called bridgers, and they connect functional groups to part of their daily work in AI. And when bridgers adopt AI, people around them are more likely to adopt AI. So we've used that word advocacy and influencer a lot in the internal comm space. This is a prime example of it. Again, 90% more likely to adopt just because if you're in that role, people are gonna more likely do it. And this sounds like people like us, people who are interacting with people across every single part of the organization. We are often the people who see all the dots and can make those connections, and others don't have the complete picture that we do. So, really, this is a chance for us to think of ourselves not as this solo artist out there, but as someone who's that connector, that collaborator because our influence reaches far beyond, just our role. Absolutely. And I think it is important, you know, for us to step into that and and to really tap into that influence. But I think we also, again, have to be aware of and acknowledge what's holding us back. There is a lot of research. There's a number of different sources out there. This is just one from Slack, and a and another study, that basically is finding that roughly half of employees right now are hiding their use of AI at work. They're hiding it mostly because they fear that they're being seen as lazy. And it's funny in other conversations I've had about this, I've always sort of been an advocate for talking loud and proud and openly about how we use AI. In fact, we're very open with our clients as well about when and how we use it. And it is something that, again, we have a part to play in sort of addressing those fears, but we need to be aware of them because it is something that is a barrier. And we have a role, as Chuck said, as these bridgers, as these people who can be advocates and demonstrate to the whole organization what healthy experimentation looks like. And I also wanted to I wanted to reference something too that came up in the chat. I wanna make sure we're not losing it. Beth Wood made a comment about, you know, this conversation is making you realize that it's important to look at what other departments are doing. And I think that's a really important point here is to really look at, you know, we may have, have depending on the structure of our organization, we may have a rather limited viewpoint in what the, you know, what and how the organization is doing in terms of AI adoption. And if we think back to, you know, the example of Thompson Reuters, the CHRO stood up and said, hey. There's not enough of a focus on employees here. And it doesn't have to be the CHRO. It can be you. It can be the head of internal communication to stand up and say, this is not a technology only effort. This should not only be driven by, you know, one team that's using it. This is something that needs to be looked at as an organization wide change, and we certainly have a role to play in that. So I just want to call that out. Thank you for sharing that, Beth. Yeah. And I think this point this these two data points point to, I think, why there is that fear and anxiety that exists out there. And it and it's not exclusive to the world of comms, not exclusive to HR, marketing. There these these are out there. However, there is one, I guess, group that doesn't seem to be have the same fear and anxiety around it, which is people that are in computer programming and coders, where they are very open about how they're using AI to help them write code and will often, even times, bury the prompts hidden in the code so so the future developer can see what they use to keep building from that point on. But even thinking about how we're all using it, on a recent episode of frequency, Jenny Field and I each talked about personally how we each use AI, and we're using it very differently in wildly different use cases even though people might think of us as kind of doing a lot of the same things. So those uses can be very unique. And to your point, Beth, just asking the question because even within certain departments, people could be using it very differently from one another, and they're not sharing. Yes. Haley, please listen to that episode. Subscribe. Listen to all the episodes of the frequency. But that's the most recent one that we talked about about our personal use. But I wanna get into some of those best practices and going back to that easy cater, all around setting the expectations, making people feel safe, feeling that there is a boundary for them to exist in. It seems like in conversations I've had with communicators, and this is a wild exaggeration, which I'm really good at, is half are like, you will be fired if you use AI. The other half are the wild west. No one knows the rules. And we know one of those is not the right answer. There's a there's a middle ground that exists where people know how to use it, know how to use it responsibly, also feel like they're not getting in trouble for using it. And to your point, Anne, remembering that that CHRO drove those Thomson Reuters, adoption and those four t's, tone, training, tools, and time. Time being the critical one, letting people be patient, with it and letting them learn on their time. And that's really where Shopify comes in is setting like, no. We we are going to use this. This is how we are going to grow. This is how we are going to accelerate as a business, and giving people the space to do that is absolutely critical. I wanna go into the chat here, Anne, before we progress because I just saw the em dash. Oh, this is such a triggering this is such a triggering moment for me, Anne. Yeah. Because I there there's now this community of m dash apologers. Apologies out there. Yep. Yep. People let let let's be honest here. You might have used the m dash a little bit before. Come on. Come on. We need to give AI credit here for reintroducing the magic of the em dash to our vernacular. And I think we are all now learning how to properly use it. I love that the em dash, because there's a hyphen, there's an m dash, and then m dash. Oh, man. Now the m dash we've got an whole m dash I love this. Happening. I love that. That's all I have. We we I'm gonna do it in time. Look, we're gonna move on. We've got time at the end. We're gonna talk more about this m dash nonsense. So carry on. I think it's great. I love I I'm such a a grammar nerd. I could talk about this all day. I could also talk about the Oxford comma, which is another one that is typically a dead giveaway with with AI. Funny enough, I have a kid who is applying for college right now, and he is never uses AI in his college essays. I think they put the fear of God into the kids about it. He never uses it, and I will tell you I'm reviewing them and there's tons of em dashes. So somehow, you know, he's using them and, he he's not using AI. So, yes, they're out there and, it's, yeah, it's pretty funny. And and, Eric, that has always been something I've seen that there's an Oxford comma in most AI generated, most AI generated content. So if you want, that's another maybe less common giveaway, is is having the Oxford comma in there. But it's it's it's pretty funny, and I think, you know, the point that was made earlier I'm just scrolling up to see yeah. Melissa, you know, made the point that I think it really is important to coach the team on what good output looks like. There's been a lot of talk recently about work swap, and I just shared something on LinkedIn today about it, you know, that we're in this phase again of, like, AI generated content is work swap. It's not very good quality. And, again, I think that's an easy thing to say, but as communicators, number one, we know there's been crappy content floating around our organizations long before AI was ever on the scene. So just all of a sudden blaming AI and crappy content is not really a great answer. Instead, maybe let's think about it as a period of learning. Right? That we're in this we're in this, period of learning with it and that works off is something that's gonna happen. Gosh. Thank you, Janet, for the, Vampire Weekend, Oxford comma drama, reference. We couldn't have a conversation without without dropping that in there. I love the way we think. I love webinars with communicators. We're just so quick and witty. And speaking of superpowers that we have as communicators, I believe again, Chuck just talked about the power of being a bridger. I believe that is just one of many superpowers that we bring to this cultural evolution around AI. Right? We help organizations make sense of all kinds of business decisions, and there's no one better suited to really help our organizations get clear on what are we trying to achieve here with AI, what's the narrative around it, and let's help our our employees make sense of what it means. It doesn't mean we're replacing you. It means we're enhancing you. Whatever that narrative is, I think we have a big role to play in that. We've talked a lot about the fear. We are well suited to understand where our organizations are with this, where our people are, to have those conversations, and really understand where people are on the spectrum. I saw something recently that talked about, I think it was Carol Dweck's lab talked about how, if you have people who are really fearful and you come at them with a lot of optimism, you're actually more likely to make them more fearful and more withdrawn. Whereas if you have a group or a team that's really excited or optimistic about AI and you come to them with optimism, they're more likely to move further forward. So, again, this idea of understanding where are our people and how do we shape our communication strategy around what do we how do we talk to people who are more fearful, how do we talk to the people that are more optimistic and enthusiastic. I I think just all of it speaks to tapping into our superpowers as communicators. Yep. And when we think about this, when we want an honest answer here we just talked about how we want communicators to play the role of Bridger, but we wanna know where you feel like you are now. So let's open up this poll and ask and and share, like, where do you feel like you sit on this are you a skeptic? Are you an explorer? Or are you a bridger? And we wanna see. Okay. We've got nothing wrong with explorers. No. No. And, I mean, you know, bridger is like you're really one of those people who's like you're demonstrating it, you're leading it, you're encouraging others to do it. You know? I think it's it's it's good to be honest about where we were. I mean, as I said before I started reading more Ray Kurzweil, I was pretty far on the skeptical side of things. I wanna know where more of my sharks are on here. I wanna know the people that are a little, like, this is a little overhyped. This is a little much. Mhmm. Yeah. So I'm going to keep that up. We're using polls for the first time here. So if I screw this up, we'll come back to it. And I think I just screwed that up. Anyway, that's okay. We'll keep going. That's okay. Yeah. So we want to get that that answer from all of you of where you are. And then when we think about this truly is, like, where are we taking this? Where are we going with this conversation? We've talked about some big successes other companies have where we think the role of communicators play. We need to involve everyone out here. And, ultimately, it comes down to we need to stop thinking about simply are you using it or not, but how is it built into the systems? How is it a part of your daily life? And I think sometimes the bigger way to think about it is how are you using this on the personal side of things? No different than when social media first came out, which obviously had its own hype cycle. And I think now we're on that where everybody's probably done with it. But we think about the the role and how people are engaging and experimenting and playing, and you're gonna get some things wrong, you're gonna get some things right. And it's really not about that personal productivity anymore, more about the organizational design and how is this feeding into how we all operate on a day to day basis. How is it not replacing you? How is it enhancing what you do or even augmenting the work that you do each and every day? Absolutely. And and so as we've been kind of driving home the point throughout this conversation, it's really about us as internal communicators stepping up and stepping into the role of helping our organizations shift to make real impact when it comes to AI. And so some of the best practices that we've talked about today include, first of all, segmenting by mindset. Right? Really get in there, talk to your people, understand where are they on the spectrum of fear, explorer, bridger? Where where are people today? Are they optimistic? And let's make sure that we're able to actually tailor our communications based on where they are. We wanna identify who those bridgers are. Certainly, as internal communicators, we can play that role. But there are those super users. There are those really highly influential people within your organization who are using it, adopting it. There's key leaders, and you wanna make sure that you're finding them and empowering them to act as bridgers. You wanna look at, you know, as Chuck just kind of referenced, are we optimizing systems, not just tools? We're not just saying use this one tool to write this one thing more quickly, but, actually, let's look at the entire organization and how we can work together more effectively. Measure the impact, not just are you using it. You don't wanna simply make sure that people are doing this as a check the box, but, actually, what is the human impact that this effort is having? And finally, leading with strategic optimism. We've talked a lot about history, how history tells us, and a lot of the data out there tells us there is reason to be optimistic. Don't ignore the fear, but try to stay focused on the optimism and really create that hope for the future. I'm curious from anyone in the chat, and I'm gonna use air quotes when I say engagement survey. If you have surveyed your employees and asked them about their attitude, approach, questions, interests around AI. I haven't I haven't seen any examples of it, so I'm not saying it hasn't happened. But I'm curious, have you gone to your employees and asked them how they're using it, how they're not using it, what are they afraid of, what are they excited about? I'm curious if if AI has entered into the engagement conversation. So if you've done that, go into the chat because I'd love to learn more about it. We can pull up your your chat onto the screen. When we get back to the phone into the chat. We just just to share. I'm gonna drop into the chat. Becky Sennett, who who leads research at bank, recently wrote a blog on this topic with some even, like, some sample questions to consider if you are gonna do a survey and gather feedback from employees, on AI usage. So I'll drop that into the chat as as well. I love that. I didn't even know that. That's awesome. There you go. There you go. As we get into that, we talked about that that measurement, which, again, has haunted internal communicators for centuries. We have to get out of that productivity theater, which, again, new phrase favorite phrase of mine, and get into actually measuring the impact and the outcomes. And so we have to move from using it, not using it, like, just to go to the singular prompts to actually having an impact in the business. And instead, we're actually looking at measuring things like confidence, clarity, and collaboration, and not simply usage counts, prompt counts, time in the tool, those kind of things. We have to start showing the true impact that the technology is having. Absolutely. And, you know, culture and AI, they're connected in a way that's not linear, but it really is more of a loop. I really believe that culture, I said this, I think it's the greatest barrier to adoption or accelerator to adoption. It affects AI, and also AI reshapes culture. And so really thinking about the interconnectedness of these two things can really make sure that we are, shaping the next phase of our organization, that we're really playing a driving role in where our organization is going next. And I think that's important because the hype is going to fade. The hype is already fading. You know, we looked at the hype cycle at the very beginning, and the hype is already fading, but, truly, the hope is what we build from it. And I believe that we, as communicators, have the power to humanize this technology. It can be scary. It can be overwhelming, but we have the opportunity to build real hope and real opportunity with our organizations. Yeah. I really think this is the so the competitive edge. I'm not saying we need to compete with other parts of the business, but this this is what makes us stand out. We have the opportunity to lead with culture, measure that impact, measure the outcomes, not the out push. We know that that's what matters and make that optimism the advantage. It's easy to be the naysayer. It's way easy to be the naysayer. But if we lead with culture, address the fear, be that bridger, We know some of you were still in that exploratory phase. That's great. We can move. That's part of that evolution. And then measure that impact on the business. Absolutely. Yeah. And we're we're we're running really well on time to have a few minutes to answer questions in the chat. So if you do have questions, if you wanna put them in the q and a, not the chat, although we're doing a great job of staying on top of the chat, that will be great. But I think one thing I would love to hear, you you know, as we're kinda closing this out, that was a great recap, Chuck, on sort of, you know, what we can do. It's interesting to reflect on where our organizations are right now. And so we'd love to hear from you sort of where is your organization right now? Is it still stuck with some hype? Is there disillusionment, or are you experiencing real impact when it comes to AI? Would love to hear in the chat what you're doing. It sounds like some organizations are Beth shared that there was an AI training locally. People were using it weekly. Interesting that people are using ChatGPT. I see that Haley talks about getting, one of the the hard things is getting people to ship from using Copilot's ChatGPT. I've seen that as well. A lot of people don't realize chat GPT is in Copilot now. And so the merging as these things change, we already have habits to break. I'm the same way. I'm, like, all in on chat GPT, and it's hard to break those habits. But, again, I think habits and behavior changes where we really thrive. I wanna bring in here. This is one of the things I love about these, events like this is being able to share what's what's worked for our one. So Melissa Murray, who is proudly team Blue Jays, having CIO present to the team as advanced dramatically, use a similar learning model to chat GPT. And, again, this is where a leader's voice really does have that impact Yep. On people because they, hopefully, they trust the advice of your CIO when it comes to technology out there. And you made a great point too, Anna Brown, that there is this convergent where all the tools are becoming all one thing. So it's not really like you're you can still go to one place or go to another place, but it's all kind of becoming more and more integrated even down to where, OpenAI now has a browser that you can use, which I have in my screen over here because I've been playing and experimenting with it. And you don't talk about a mental change of someone who's used to thinking of you go to the browser and you search as your first thing. With OpenAI's browser, it is not search. It is you are using AI to find the information you're looking for, which is the same it's the same ask, but a wildly different result that ends up happening. I'm curious, Anne, the agency that you run, it's hard for me to say, like, I'm a company of one. Right? So I I don't have a good perspective on this. Yeah. How have you dealt with some skepticism or fear Yeah. As as the leader of the industry. Absolutely. No. It's been interesting, and I was just thinking about this. I I was thinking about it more from the perspective of tools because we're constantly looking at what tools we're using, what we're paying for. You know, we we and I have really tried to embrace the spirit of of experimentation. Again, we're small. We're able to be agile. So we will try different things, talk to people, and also recognize it's constantly changing. For our team, we live and breathe in Slack. Everything we do is is in Slack. Even now, ChatGPT, you can connect to Slack so that it searches in your Slack. It also can be connected to your OneDrive. These are all very new things, and so it's important to stay on top of those things and, make sure that you're, constantly, you know, iterating and changing your strategy because the tools are changing so quickly. But, you know, again, we're a small group, and so we're able to have really open conversations. And so every week on our team meeting, I'm asking, how are you using it? Is it working? What's what's not working? Are we paying for this thing and no one's using it? Because I don't wanna do that either. And so just creating that time and space for experimentation is so important. Can I ask a an unrelated favor, Anne? Yeah. I'm personally suffering from Slack withdrawal where I was a bit of a lot of junkie. Can you can you invite me to a private Slack channel just so I can use it? Thank you. Absolutely. I can easily do that for you. Thank you. I wanna bring in this chat from an organization that custom GPT to reuse language across our company. It's something we're able to do with human hours. That's that's, I think, what sometimes gets lost in this AI conversation is the only thing about replacing what we do instead of allowing us to do things that we couldn't normally do. And I talked about this on the episode of frequency where I used, Gemini. I could've used other tools. We like Gemini's image creation tool. I was asked to do a panel. I don't like being on panels, so I converted it to something else where I made it where we're all in, like, this video game. And I converted the panelists all to 16 bit video game characters. I didn't I love that. I could've found a designer to maybe help me do it or somebody on Fiverr. I don't even know where it would've been. I did it in about twenty minutes, and it allowed me to do things that I could never have done myself or taken forever to do. It augmented it, built on what I didn't replace anything at all. And so I think that's the the real learning here is it's it's a chance to build on what we're doing and shed a lot of the things that either we don't enjoy doing or honestly don't bring a lot of value to the organization. We do have some questions in here. We do have a a couple minutes. Yep. I'm gonna bring in a quick one here. Oh, yeah. From my Greg. Well, let me bring why is it not let me bring in a question. Okay. I'm just gonna read it aloud. Sorry, Greg. The question is, you seem to be implying a deeper understanding of employee segments. I'm gonna assume that's you, Anne. Can you talk about some employee listening best practices? So maybe that was why I've mentioned up the surveys and getting sent them out from employees. But how do you, best listen to employees for some of the best practices? Yep. And I had dropped in earlier in the chat, and we can, you know, share it out separately as well, a blog post that our research team put together on sort of how to listen. I do think that surveying can help if you have well crafted questions. I always love a little focus group. I love having, you know, you know, again, think about who those bridgers are, who those people that who those people are that that have a wide influence, and make sure that you're talking to them and see what they're seeing and hearing and experiencing. So, you know, there's definitely some good ideas in there. I think it's a mix of both qualitative and quantitative. I also dropped another link into the chat just a moment ago, in relation to the question about paid versus not paid, also the question about privacy. This link that I shared is from Ethan Malek who, if you don't subscribe to his newsletter, I definitely recommend it. He writes a ton about AI. But every few months, he gives a guide on how to use AI, and he talks about which ones are good for free and which ones aren't. There's a great visual on this article. The bottom line is you should really be using paid whenever you can. You should hopefully be getting it through your business, but if you're not, it's probably worth a bit of money, to spend to make sure, not just for privacy, but actually it's better quality, and he talks about that in the article. Yeah. I think that that's a question that Beth had that she put in the q and a around paid versus free, and I think it is Yep. You you get what you pay for. And I have access. So I I pay for professional chat GPT. I wish I could do the next level up with that's, like, $200 a month. So there there's tiers to this. I also get Gemini as part of my Google Business account. And I have experimented a bit with Claude. So I'm I'm actually curious in the chat for others. Like, what are the what's your primary one, and which one are you experimenting with? Because I think if you're using a tool primary, I think it's worth investing in. It. I think it's worth paying for the version and and doing it. If you're experimenting, then play with it for a little bit. But set a bit of a timer on it because if you're using it a lot, then it's probably worth investing in Yes. In the paid version. We did have an anonymous question come in, which is perfect, around privacy concerns. Do you have any concerns, Anne, as a business owner with Slack being connected to a tool like ChatGPT? Yes. And, I mean, again, this is where I it goes over my head, but I lean on and trust my, technology advisers to, let us know when things are, you know, safe and we're we do only use those paid ones. And, again, we're very open about our AI policies with our clients. I think that's really important. And, you know, to your question about tools, I'm very much the same mind as you, Chuck. Through my bid through the business, we have a paid version of chat g p chat GPT. I also, on the personal side, pay for a paid version of Claude, and I use both. And I like to see and kinda put them up against each other because different tools are good at different things. Again, that article from Ethan Moloch that I shared, he actually says which tools are better for different kinds of things and when it should be free and when it should be paid. So I think, everyone should should take a look at that. Yep. We got a about a minute left. I'm gonna bring in a couple chat items as we wrap this up, and I wanna, again, Melissa Murray, team Blue Jays. Hear about an environmental impact of AI use. And it is worth the conversation, but I've also seen some data that's like, AI use is not even scratching the surface of overall, like, energy usage out there. That it is a fraction of a fraction in the across the country of people using AI versus people turning on televisions at night. So, yes, there is an impact and it's good to recognize it. But let's be mindful. Let's not get sucked into the hype of this. Like, it it there is an impact, but it's probably not the same impact as all these other things that we're doing that have the environmental impact. It's a good conversation. Just make sure we're having a conversation around it. And then there is another one here, that I wanted to bring up. Shoot. Oh, this is a good thing about chat is when everything jumps so fast here. That Meredith, we use free AI to replace Google. I'll have to monetize it. Well, they have monetized things like ChatGPT and Google Gemini. Like, there are people who are paying for it. So there is the mono monetization there. I am curious to see what happens with the OpenAI, browser. Because right now when you search, it obviously pulls up search responses. And there is apparently I'm just now seeing this on my my browser. So this is all live people. There's a limit that they're putting into place of this Mhmm. Let's say you're limited based on how many seven days or something like that. So it's kinda fascinating to see, like, what role this is gonna play. But it's more the psychological shift for me that came into play with thinking of, like, searching and prompting. Are are those gonna be synonymous with one another Yeah. Very soon. Yeah. I think that one of the bottom line points too to make here that that's coming very clear in the chat and the conversations, in the sharing of articles and ideas and, data points is just this is all moving and changing so quickly. And one of the best things we can do is keep reading about it and keep talking about it. There's a vast amount of information out there. Try to carve out time every day to stay up on what's happening. Choose your level of depth in terms of technology, but staying up on it is really important, and talking amongst each other, having conversations like this, I think, is so important. Yep. And with that, I'll mention that inside psychology, we have a section called AI insights, which is all about getting communicators sharing the prompts they're using. What are they learning? Articles, data, research. You know, Benjamin Ellis here is talking about beware of the AI company PR and environmental impact. There's gonna there's gonna be numbers on both sides of this. So it's more just understanding the impact of it. And then Beth shared this, which Beth, since you quoted it, I'm gonna I'm gonna assume that it's true that one prompt, he was driving a car for five seconds. I don't know. Maybe that maybe that's true. Maybe that's not. I don't know, but we're gonna trust you on that. But it is just making sure that we're understanding your point, Anne, doing the experimenting, doing the discovery, taking the time to learn, subscribing to newsletters, joining ICology, being a part of AI insights. All of those are opportunities for all of us to learn. So with that, I wanna thank you, Anne, for joining me for this conversation and providing your insights. And, of course, thanking all of our, attendees and people that jumped into the chat with your experiences. Always great to have that. Please reach out to Anne and I. We are quite noisy on LinkedIn. If you're not already connected with us, please connect with us there, so we continue this conversation. And if you're had a big learning from this or you wanna share some of us, do a LinkedIn post and tag us. And so that we can keep the conversation going each and every day. I'm Chuck Gose. She's Anna Mellinger. Thank you all for joining us today for this conversation about Hyper Hope, AI's impact on company culture and comms. Thanks for joining us. Thanks, everyone. Bye.