Artificial intelligence (AI) has rapidly become a cornerstone of strategic decision-making in many industries, including communications. In the face of an ever-changing media landscape and complex consumer behaviors, AI provides invaluable tools for gathering insights, predicting trends, and measuring outcomes. For communication professionals, AI can enhance reputation management, drive consumer engagement, and inform business strategies, making it an extremely powerful asset.
In particular, this essay will highlight three specific areas – proactive reputation management, influencer marketing, and the impact of trust on business outcomes – that illustrate how AI is helping to reshape and improve the effectiveness of communication strategies across various industries.
Protecting Reputation: AI-Driven Narrative Monitoring
In today’s operating environment, reputation is fragile, and the speed at which issues can escalate presents unique challenges for business leaders, encompassing communications professionals across the C-suite bench. AI has become a crucial tool for identifying emerging risks and preventing potential crises. Using AI agents that employ techniques like recursive topic modeling, communicators can analyze large volumes of data from digital platforms, news outlets, and social networks. This allows them to spot patterns or themes that might signal an emerging threat long before it reaches mainstream attention.
Importantly, this can be done much more effectively and efficiently – instead of multiple teams analyzing different data sets and trying to identify insights – AI agents are able to analyze that information centrally, consistently and more expediently. AI can provide a data-driven way to monitor, visualize, and manage reputational threats before they escalate. And, communications teams can focus on identifying mitigation strategies, informing their business partners about potential issues, and solving problems before they become crises.
For example, one of our teams deployed AI tools that created a 25% lift in overall share of voice (FSOV) for our client versus its competitors. The success was attributed to AI’s ability to pinpoint specific topics with the potential for significant positive media traction and limited vulnerability. Earned media stories that aligned with AI-recommended topics were more impactful, allowing the team to focus on narratives that positively shaped public perception while mitigating negative ones. This approach demonstrates how AI can provide communication professionals with a data-driven way to monitor, visualize, and manage reputational threats before they spiral out of control.
Driving Purchase Consideration: Identifying Effective Influencers with AI
In influencer marketing, AI has become a game-changer, especially when trying to move beyond superficial metrics like follower count or name recognition. Traditional methods for selecting influencers often rely on visibility or brand recognition, but AI can offer a deeper analysis of influencers’ actual impact on their audiences. By analyzing factors such as engagement patterns, sentiment, and audience demographics, AI enables more precise identification of influencers who are most likely to drive desired consumer behaviors.
In one specific example, AI tools identified influencers who were 130% more likely to generate purchase consideration compared to those previously chosen by our client based on the traditional approach of name recognition alone. AI-driven insights can help refine influencer selection to ensure that the marketing efforts resonate more deeply with target audiences, improving the efficiency and effectiveness of specific initiatives. By providing granular insights into audience behavior and influencer impact, AI helps communicators better understand which voices are most persuasive in driving engagement and purchasing decisions.
Boosting Sales: Measuring Trust with AI
Trust is a key factor in consumer decision-making, and AI offers sophisticated methods for measuring and analyzing it. AI-driven tools can measure specific trust dimensions – such as integrity, ability, or dependability—that can then be analyzed to assess their direct impact on business outcomes. This capability is particularly valuable for brands that are looking to build or restore trust with key audiences.
For one specific global consumer goods manufacturer, we found that for every 1% increase in trust, sales increased by €100 million. This insight came from analyzing trust across different dimensions and linking these insights with sales data. Of course, this finding may vary meaningfully by organization, existing trust levels and many other factors, but this specific linkage between trust and revenue has tremendous potential. The ability to identify which aspects of trust most influence consumer behavior, for example, will give marketing and communications organizations newfound insight and enable the potential to increase the business impact.
Conclusion
Integrating AI into communication strategies benefits reputation management, influencer marketing, and trust measurement. By leveraging AI, communication professionals can make more informed decisions, anticipate emerging issues, and optimize engagement efforts in ways that were previously difficult or impossible. As AI technology continues to advance, its role across communications will likely expand, offering even more tools to navigate the complexities of today’s business landscape.
Matthew Harrington is the global president and COO at Edelman, a top communications marketing firm, specializing in corporate positioning and reputation management. With 25 years at Edelman, he has advised major clients like GE, Samsung, and Starbucks on crisis communications, M&A activity, and IPOs. Notably, he managed the first internet crisis response during Odwalla’s product recall, earning a Silver Anvil award. He is a member of the USC Center for PR board of advisers.
Brian Buchwald is the global chair of artificial intelligence and product at Edelman, driving innovation since joining in January 2023. Prior to Edelman, he was the chief strategy & business development officer at Talkwalker, president of global intelligence at Weber Shandwick and co-founder of BOMODA, a market leader in big data insights focused on China’s evolving consumer landscape. Additionally, Brian has held senior positions at Hulu, NBC Universal, and DoubleClick. His insights on the intersection of AI and consumer understanding have been published in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.