AI can “unlock the creative landscape” for organisation in the media, according to Daniel Hulme, chief AI officer at WPP and CEO of Satalia, a company that builds and applies AI technology to solve efficiency problems.

The ability to create content more rapidly will change marketing and communications completely and using AI in our workflows can enable this, Hulme said at the recent INMA World Congress of News Media in London.

“Clients want more and better content reaching people in more moments,” Hulme said. “This will push the boundaries for new story arcs.”

Adaptations of AI

Addressing the World Congress, Hulme shared how six adaptions of AI in the media supply chain can support future business and revolutionise workflows.

Task automation can take place using chatbots and applying software that can recognise objects in the workflow of a newsroom, whilst content generation of images, video, text, and music using the RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) technique will enhance the accuracy and reliability of generative AI.

But Hulme explained how human representation through AI can help reach new people for media organisations.

“LLMs allow us for the first time ever to change how we conceive content,” he said. “Choosing the LLM and understanding the data helps to build representative audiences and reach lots of demographics.”

Explaining predictions through machine-learning technology can support insight extraction for analysing data as it can “surface insights in ways humans can’t,” he said.

Using AI to help with decision-making can overcome obstacles of complex problems as AI is able to look at how best to optimise a solution. But Hulme recognises how human augmentation can create a digital twin to predict how effective someone may work in a specified situation: “Creating LLMs on an employee can help you see if they would work well on a project with certain people.”

Hulme added this caveat: the ethics of using this AI need to be addressed because “AI doesn’t have intent but humans do” in utilising these technologies appropriately, transparently and with accountability.

Innovation, digitisation, and the future

Choosing the right data is important when using AI to transform workflows in an organisation, as Hulme stated this is what makes “AI smart” and offers you something a competitor might not have which can be used to your advantage.

The more innovative you are, the more adaptive you become to understanding how best to make your supply chain more efficient, he said.

“Winning organisations will create simulations to see how best to use a supply chain,” Hulme said, adding that creating digital twins of how an organisation’s physical operations, workforce, and processes work helps to evaluate this.

Leading with the idea that the “nation that leads in AI will be the ruler of the world,” he pointed to the acronym the “PESTLE of Singularities” of what could happen in the future with AI.

PESTLE stands for Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, and Environmental, which are the categories of factors used in the framework to help analyse external factors that can impact an organisation’s success.

How the Political may change as “we no longer know what’s true” when our political foundations will be challenged, he said.

The Environmental aspect of our future involves a whole host of risks that are rising and have a global impact, but Hulme sees how introducing AI to streamline workflows can help: “If we apply AI in the right way, we can half the impact of these products across supply chains through decarbonisation with a 50% reduction.”

Hulme shared how the Social singularity could see AI try and cure death, whilst in the Technological we could become the second most intelligent species on our planet if AI evolves beyond what we can do.

This links to the Legal aspect where Hulme stressed that the use of AI by “bad actors” will avoid a “mass collection of power.”

One of the biggest changes that will happen in the future will be the Economic singularity, where Hulme predicts the majority of labour will be automated.

“New innovations mean job losses as jobs will be displaced and disrupted,” he said. “But if we use AI in the right way, we can free people up to help humanity however they want.”

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .