Yesterday, PRWeek’s Crisis Comms Conference was held at Convene 600 in Washington DC. As the conference was focused on challenges related to communicators, so the most consistently discussed topic was the role of artificial intelligence (AI) technology providers and their ability to develop and provide helpful tools for communicators. Either on stage or in conversations, this was the topic of interest for everyone.
Partnership for creating AI solutions
Source: Statista.
At a time when the foundations of AI opportunity are yet taking form, in-house teams of different firms, tech providers, and PR agencies are building crucial connections, but they won’t stay as they are. As we know these are difficult times for communicators who are trying to figure out the real potential of AI for their own selves and their consumers, and it is well known that communicators can not do this all alone by themselves.
It brings in the tech providers, some of them adopt an approach that they offer their services to anyone who shows interest in buying the tech. Now, this approach can be fine if your firm is a strong tech behemoth with large sums of money to spend on tech offerings, especially AI, and if you have the financial stability to put money into it for the long term.
Another viable approach that some PF companies are following is to partner with smaller and new tech companies, basically startups, to develop new services and market them along with using them. A few good examples could be Weber Shandwick partnering with Blackbird.ai and BCW with Limbik for the Decipher offering.
Blackbird.ai developed a media security center by working with Weber to help clients steer unstable political conditions. While Limbik developed a product that uses cognitive AI to assess the impact of various things with broader organizational, social, and political consequences.
Priorities will change with the evolving tech
As discussed above, these partnerships have their limitations, but they do offer benefits for all parties involved. If we talk about tech companies, it provides them an opportunity to add big brand names to their client roster, especially if they are a new company or a startup, and gain significant business from the market that will go on for years.
Source: Stanford university.
With regard to agencies, this approach can help them get into new fields of businesses that they are not familiar with without big investments, as they don’t need to start from scratch, and it also provides them with a secure setting to develop their new solutions.
Over time an agency may get the feeling that the service it developed in partnership does not meet all the requirements of their clients and they do need to find other solutions from someone else. In a similar way, in-house teams may feel the need to take over the entire AI tech operations of the partner.
We think that as the AI tech matures with time and it gets to a stage of doing things rather than just experimenting, the realities will change with a change in focus and priorities.
The original note from PRWeek can be seen here.