Time and Money Part 1

Money! It’s the hard thing to consider in Climate Change House.

One of the key players in this subject area is the Green Finance Institute. Its objectives are: “To achieve the transition to an inclusive, net zero carbon and climate resilient economy, both public and private finance is needed.”

In an interesting press release in November 2021 it announced a new initiative:

“The need to unlock finance to retrofit homes in the owner occupier sector is now clearly recognised, and the range of products available is beginning to grow, with pioneering financial institutions launching and continually developing new ways of lending for energy efficiency upgrades.”

The idea of such an organisation is worthy. However, most of its thinking is focused on mitigating global warming and not Climate Change.

It is an example of the confused thinking among those that have come to global warming and its impacts late.

There are other such worthy organisations. ESG – short for Environmental, Social and Governance – is a set of standards measuring a business's impact on society, the environment, and how transparent and accountable it is.

According to the CBI, two-thirds of investors take ESG factors into account when investing in a company meaning ESG has the potential to grow a business while benefiting the environment and community.

Green mortgages a long way to go - Olga Lioncat

More than 10 mortgage lenders in the UK have launched green mortgage products since the beginning of 2021 alone, but this is a relatively small proportion of the UK’s £1.58 trillion mortgage market. According to the Intermediary Mortgage Lenders Association, 77% of lenders are planning to launch green mortgages that are cheaper or priced the same as a typical product. Acting as a central knowledge hub, the Green Finance Institute has launched the Green Mortgage Hub, an online resource collating publicly available information on UK green mortgages into an interactive table, alongside a library of articles, reports, tools and experiments related to the green mortgage market. The hub aims to inform and encourage lenders considering entry into the green mortgage market. It aims to be a trusted source of information for mortgage intermediaries, policymakers and NGOs focused on decarbonising the built environment (that is global warming mitigation but not necessarily Climate Change) management.

The Green Mortgage Hub has a list of lenders offering a range of services. However, there is the other side of the coin. The current forms of finance are a form of tax and it is difficult for a large proportion of the population.

In the book, I offer a number of other solutions and I will be exercising them here in due course.

Housing Planning - OOPs

Perhaps it’s now time to examine the institutions involved in developing our homes. These are not ‘homes of the future’. They are homes now for the future.

There is a lot of confusion around. It is important to examine the initiatives of the most influential organisations.

Key among the Chartered institutions affecting housing and Climate Change is the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI). The work of its members is heavily criticised as its members produce a conveyor belt of inappropriate planning decisions. Planning outcomes are reputation-crushing. The carbuncle housing estates attached to practically all villages are a classic case in point.

They are cast in a mould of £350,000 new houses supported by an infrastructure that sheds estate-wide rainwater into concrete culverts rushing towards the next flood pinch-point.

The RTPI website says “Planners can embed climate action in local decision making, faster net zero transport, improve urban greening, create affordable housing, smart cities and protect infrastructure from flooding.” The word ‘can’ is a real giveaway. As France, Spain and the UK enjoy weather over 40C it would seem the threat of such temperatures is not a big issue for planners. 

There is a greater urgency needed. 

Victoria Hills, Chief Executive of the RTPI, said: “Planners are a driving force in addressing the climate crisis….” Good. We look forward to it.

But there is not a solar panel in sight in new Bloor Houses (see left).

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) is another example. It has set itself a professional challenge.

The ‘2030 Climate Challenge’ is a voluntary initiative for RIBA Chartered Practitioners to join and demonstrate their commitment to attempting to meet key sustainability targets on the buildings they design. 

It includes targets for annual energy use, embodied carbon over the building's lifecycle and annual water use. It provides a stepped approach towards reaching net zero. They are not quite sure if this means net-zero emissions to ameliorate global warming or do these ambitions also reflect the dangers of Climate Change?

The challenge is not mandatory, it is a commitment to show leadership among members’ projects and attempt to meet the targets.

The first reaction to such an ambition is to identify that it focuses on mitigating global warming rather than Climate Change alleviation. It is probably unfair to single out RIBA as an exemplar and there are many other similar organisations in the same sort of fix but RIBA is a relevant example.

A Housing Crisis

There is a housing crisis.

But what do we mean by ‘housing’? What is the stock of housing in the UK, and how close is it to meeting population needs?

There is an almost hidden part of the ‘housing stock’. It is the underused and decaying portion, much-hated by the population at large according to YouGov polls. It is dealt with here as well.

In 2021 the Guardian pointed out that house prices appear to have defied economic gravity over the past years. 

The lockdowns triggered by the pandemic led to a 10% fall in GDP, the largest fall in 300 years since the Great Frost of 1709. Yet the latest data show house prices have grown at the fastest annual rate – 13.4% – in 17 years. Are we in the midst of another housing bubble?

One might add ‘or is this a market response reflecting the dearth of houses’. So, how many houses are there?

How many homes?

To house 67 million people, there were 24.7 million dwellings in March 2022, but 0.9% were empty. Some are plain grotty . Many are just too expensive to live in. Many leasehold flats have maintenance charges of £1,200 a year - more than double in 2007.

As of 2019, more than 3.12 million owner-occupied houses were built before 1919. By contrast, approximately 1.5 million owner-occupied dwellings were produced from 2003 onwards.

Most houses are not Climate Change ready. What can we do?

For more see Climate Change House available from Amazon. 

 The last century has been the warmest on record, with the increase in temperature occurring “extremely unevenly” around the world.

Governments and businesses are not doing enough to prevent global warming and the UN secretary general, said that some governments and businesses were “lying” in claiming to be on track for 1.5C.

For example, the insurance industry has moved slowly to reflect the predicted level of risk. While many regional insurers have adapted to the new climate, large firms are not doing enough. For example, reinsurance firm Swiss Re relies heavily on a single measure, catastrophe models that consider only certain kinds of natural hazards (lightning strikes and earthquake shaking) and leave out major atmospheric events (drought).

Driven by CO2 and Methane production, global warming is a huge cloud hanging over the homes of us all. Climate Change is to bring ever more intensive heat waves, drought, cold, storms, floods, fires and even winter droughts more frequently than ever before. Frequency and ferocity mark out these Climate Change events.

For more see Climate Change House available from Amazon here: amzn.to/3RgR4Vf

Drought in Doncaster

Building houses to the current standards adds environmental damage

Nearly a quarter of the world’s population experienced a record hot year in 2021. A year later, the UK had record-breaking temperatures, fires and drought, before the school summer holidays.

Globally, the extraordinary weather events are a catalogue of deadly proportions and, from a Sky News article, something like a wake-up call close to an environmental armageddon.

Building houses to the current standards (with a few exceptions) just add to the problem of environmental damage (Buildings generate nearly 40% of annual global CO2 emission). Its use of resources and energy needs to be addressed. But, additionally, there is a need for restoring and maintaining older properties with similar demands.

Global warming has an evil twin: Climate Change.

Climate Change sets the backdrop to all that has to be done to solve the housing crisis.

It also offers a background briefing for my book Climate Change House

It is available from Amazon amzn.to/3RgR4Vf 

Cut government to pay for cost of living crisis - here's how.

 As the dust settles on the cost of living round-up, the Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng can now focus on the mass of money sprinkled around the economy to aid climate change mitigation (there are other areas of government that also have sprinklers too).
Each of the schemes needs managing, monitoring and policing. Where do these people come from? Who pays for them, their offices and expenses?

It is worth looking at some of these schemes.

The government’s 95% mortgage guarantee scheme for homebuyers with 5% deposits on properties worth up to £600,000 (until the end of 2022) offers the prospect of “taking the market into overheated, dangerous territory”.

In its 2019 manifesto, the Conservative Party pledged to spend £9.2 billion on upgrading the energy efficiency of homes, schools and hospitals. This included Social Housing.

Starting in 2022, tens of thousands of homes are to be built on derelict sites as part of a nearly £2 billion drive generously paid for by the British taxpayer through its agent, Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng.

There is more:

• The Decarbonisation Fund Homes of £3.8 billion over a ten year period;

• Home Upgrade Grants worth £2.5 billion over a five year period.

• Decarbonisation Scheme of £2.9 billion over a five year period.

On 8 July 2020, Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced a £2 billion Green Homes Grant, with vouchers of up to £5,000 to help homeowners upgrade their homes, and up to £10,000 available to some of the UK’s poorest families.

There is also a £1 billion programme to make public buildings, including schools and hospitals, across the UK greener and £50 million to pilot innovative approaches to retrofitting social housing at scale.

The Building Research Establishment shows the annual costs to the NHS of poor quality and hazardous housing at £1.4 billion. This rises to £18.5 billion p.a. when wider societal costs are included (long-term care, mental health etc.). Who should pay? Why the NHS of course, from its annual budget.

Here I have already identified 20% of the billion expected to be spent on the cost of living crisis.

Additionally, there are inspectorates, and planning establishments galore.

They too can be shipped out from under the government's largess.

I cover this quite thoroughly in my book Climate Change House where there is much more and there are some reforms that can take public sector bureaucracy away from the taxpayer.

picture Getty Images

Mitigating the cost of oil

 There were over 150,000 home sales in 2021, after dramatically falling to 32,450 in May 2020 during the peak of the coronavirus (COVID 19) crisis.

It is reasonable to imagine that between 15 and 20% of the housing stock is sold each year and that is a pretty good start at moving the housing stock into Climate Change mitigation in short order.

Financing the renovation of these houses, most built in the middle of the last century, is not hard. It will mean that financing this development will have to be part of the cost of the house (and will be a consideration for building societies).

Part of these renovations will include harvesting solar electricity, heat and water taking houses out fuel demand altogether.

The mechanism will be in the reform of stamp duty to cover the cost of renovation at perhaps 10% of the price of the house.

Renewing 10/20% of the UK housing stock each year and at no cost to the public purse would be both a huge boost to the economy and employment.

Furthermore, the associated ability to have distributed energy production (without the need for huge power grid cables marching over the countryside) with energy saving and nationally distributed storage (batteries) will be a boon.

Revenue generated from second sales will be useful for adding climate change mitigation investment. This can be as fundamental as stormwater protection, drought alleviation, end-of-street power storage (long lived big batteries), community mesh wifi infrastructure and so forth. There will never be enough climate mitigation investment in the home and in the community but is a significant start and at no cost to the Treasury.

Its all in the book: amzn.to/3RgR4Vf

Power speaking to the Powerful

 Barratt Homes, the UK’s biggest builder, announced in October 2021 that it was going to build a “flagship zero-carbon concept home. All of its new homes will be zero carbon from 2030. This is to be welcomed especially because it is well thought through. Barratt may be the biggest builder, but there are many more builders needing to come up to the mark soon. Ten years in a crisis is a long time. There is a housing shortage and a climate change threat. In that time, 20,000 people will die just from heat waves.

Over the years, house prices in the UK have rocketed. So much so, it’s hard to imagine a time when buying a new home costs less than £3,000. If you could afford to buy a home after the war, it was probably brand new. That was around £65,224 in today’s money, and the average salary was roughly the equivalent of £339 per week.

A home should be an affordable, spacious refuge from climate change. A home office is a place for families to take advantage of the internet and the Meta Universe and thrive for a generation. In Climate Change House (amzn.to/3RgR4Vf), I look at these great alternatives and provide references to offer wider perspectives to the reader.

The UK housing industry can easily commit to development that includes added green energy for 600,000 houses over the next three years. Its efforts can make housing a productive part of the economy and an early market to support world-leading technologies. It can be new jobs, new assets and a bonus in national productivity.

It can also commit to solving a considerable part of the Social Care shortfall, creating supportive accommodation for the elderly and frail and upwards of 25,000 new dwellings for the homeless and challenged families in Britain.

At the same time, I show how in the space of a year 15,000 industrial batteries (and at least as many again each year) can be installed, at no cost to the Treasury, to offer a reserve of power to the nation.

These are among the solutions outlined in Climate Change House.

Climate Change House - a new book

We cannot ignore Climate Change it is bigger than all-out war.

In 2022, the house had to protect us from heatwaves and droughts, wildfires, torrential rain and flooding.  But our housing was just not up to the mark. It did not protect people from the record 40.3-degree day and stifling nights lasting for weeks on end. And then we saw television pictures of homes destroyed by fire and flood.

We knew it was going to happen and we know that in the next few years such summers will happen progressively more often and more ferociously.

Are we prepared? Is there an overarching coherent policy shaped by the government to mitigate such deadly events? Will the existing housing stock be renovated fast enough? Will the desperately needed new housing be able to face up to the next 30 years of global warming?  Can they be built fast enough and at affordable prices?

At the same time, housing estates are being bolted on to unwilling communities. Houses are, even now, constructed with huge CO2 emissions and designed for a lifetime of global warming gasses spewed into the air decade after decade. Flats are given planning permission without even a place to store a bike or charge an EV car.

This book takes a deeply researched look at such issues and spreads them out before us. It then goes much further. It examines existing and new technologies that can be deployed to build new properties and regenerate existing homes to make life tolerable for this and next generations. 

Comprehensive and often prescient this is a manifesto in mitigation of climate change and, as if by magic, it will not cost the Exchequer a penny!

The book is published today and is available from Amazon and all good book shops.

amzn.to/3RgR4Vf

A new direction

Over the last few months, I have been writing and not about PR.

I have been concerned with the response to Climate Change as it affects some important areas of life. At present, my concern is another crisis, Housing.

There is a book in the offing.....!

AI in PR Management

I am very sorry not to be at the CIPR Big Data Conference today, because I am unsure how acceptable my thinking could be.  My thinking threatens PR practice as we know it.

We will soon move to a capability that can predict the nature of client relationships as they morph and change.

Hocus Pocus I hear you say.

Let me explain.

It is possible to collect data from search activity from Google, user activity in Facebook and Twitter, new and changed content in Website and much much more.

It can be collected about an organisation, its competitors and industry and national and local content and much, much more.

we can match this information to time, dates, authors, and followers. I leave it to your imagination as the many sources that can be used.

This is PR Big Data.

In no time at all, it becomes too big to maintain on a PR consultancy PC and has to be kept in 'in the cloud'. in a form that allows for heavy-duty computing. A resource like this is available from Google and  IBM and many more.

The first activity is to apply Big Data Analytics to clean the data and get shot of spam etc.

Now, with clean data, we can start to process the content for use in PR.

We need to identify who the contributors are, what subject area do they focus on, how often, when and where from etc. Are these contributors regular contributors or, from responses do they have a particular interest or focus on the subject being written about the organisation (re-tweets etc).

From their contributions, we can identify their attitude to the client industry sector, social issue, political leaning and much more (and such capabilities already are in use today).

This so far is simple deep data mining and not Artificial Intelligence.

But now comes the interesting part.

We can now start using AI.

AI analysis will evidence who leads the conversation and about who and what aspects of the discussion is about the client and competitors. It will map the history of subject interest and who clusters around this subject and who leads the conversation.

This can be offered in time sequence and thus a picture will emerge of the Client Relationships, the nature of the relationships and which relationships need to be addressed because of opportunity or misunderstanding.

In addition, the data will show how fast issues that affect relationships are developing and is this relationship improving or declining. Additionally, the analysis will show the rate of change in the up until today by month, week, day, hour and minute.

Now comes the clever bit.

Because there is a history emerging from there data (and there is by now a ton of it), it is possible to predict what will happen next and to asses the likely hood of such predictions coming to pass.

In addition, the Consultancy response to such activity will emerge and the AI programme will begin to predict what the usual response (social media, conference, event, meeting all the tools we know about) for each movement in the database. AI will then begin to offer advice based on the historic activity and its effect (AI is very good at identifying actions and effects over time).

There is also a very big role in issues and crisis management.

Stop there. How on earth does the practitioner cope with all this information. A spreadsheet of such content would be a dazzling array of meaningless numbers.

We need the means to create a visual display because we can process visual clues faster than numbers and can process more information.

Here is where Virtual Reality comes into its own. It can show the data and how relationships have been developing over time. In addition, it can show what is probably going to happen (with a prediction of certainty) and, of course, it can offer a solution based on past practice. It will show such content as it were in a galaxy of stars that presents a picture of the organisation's (changing) relationships.

Now, the strategic PR person can draw up plans and employ the Communications Agency (call it marketing if you like)  to implement the plan.

Big data and AI changes PR.

What of the consequences?

The sentient Consultant with this kind of capability will be of a different order to most other Agencies and practitioners without such tools will be at a competitive disadvantage and so too will their clients.

Things like monitoring, evaluation, landscaping etc all become subsumed into an AI form of practice.

Welcome to today!

Grandpa, what was PR like in the last century?

Living in a previous century

I was a public relations manager. 

I wore the uniform.

A dark blue or pinstripe suite, company tie and shiny shoes.

I played rugby but left the language of rugger on the rugby field.

I worked for quite a large private limited liability company.

Most days I met the Chairman during the day and Managing Director at the close of play.

We seldom talked about press coverage (except at monthly review meetings). It was pretty much a formula designed to inform prospective customers and customers and a host of other groups in industry, our industrial sector, employees, local and professional communities, competition, banks and the City.

That is not to say we did not work hard on media relations. Typically it included two feature stories per month. One, a case study of our products in action and one about one of the functions of the company (e.g. it might be a perspective on Health and Safety, Regulatory Affairs, Global Markets, the economy etc.)  We built up a significant library. Across the media, their editorial features offered us an opportunity to use our library and so we re-wrote stories in our library to provide such editorial copy. In all, we probably issued 20 releases per month of which most had a single journalist as the target and mostly it was a response to a request or editorial need.

The primary measure of media relations was comparative positive and negative share of voice. Among our competitors, we seldom came second in positive and almost never ranked in negative coverage in the relevant media.

We encouraged prospective customers and key publics such as suppliers, professional groups, politicians, community groups, trades unions, schools, competitors, journalists etc to visit our premises. Emplyees with the closest relationship with such groups would be host such as sales managers, finance director,  purchasing director etc. Only R&D was out of bounds and so every department was always prepared to receive visitors. 'You find us as we are', was a necessary disclaimer but woe betide the scruffy department.

To help this process the Public Relations Department worked with every department to describe what they did and what their plans were (well, except for commercially sensitive information) in a company briefing document. It was an 'open' document and was the definitive document covering everything including financial reports, history and biographies of the directors.

 It was a very plain looking document. It was a public relations document an so did not have all the bling of a marketers publicity stunt.

The PR department also ran open days for prospective customers, existing customers and all the other groups with an interest in the company, including the press.  It also included tours of the facilities (over a quarter mile of factories and offices). Directors and senior managers were available to talk about almost anything but always deferred to our experts.  For example, I would answer factual questions (from the briefing dossier) about finance but for anything else, I would call on the FD to comment.

It was a public relations policy that staff should be members of work-related professional and community groups. In this way we contributed to the wider community and built up a groundswell of positive, trustworthy relations.

I used to go to Town, District, and County Council meetings and some committees. I met local MP's at local events (and often hosted their events using our facilities). I maintained a dialogue with councillors and Parliamentarians on matters that affected the company, our industry and business at large. This was not a barrage of demands or briefing notes but conversations at events or 'gossip' with their PA's and researchers.

We always asked for feedback and tracked the responses. Everything we did had some sort of measure and results were shared with all the directors as a matter of PR policy.

As a consequence, the Public Relations department was the internal and external eyes and ears of the company and helped guide a network of people in their role as ambassadors.

And then came the Internet...and that was fun and is a different story.

#AIinPR - A response to Jean Valin's paper

Introduction

This is a paper responding to “Humans still needed An analysis of skills and tools in public relations”  by Jean Valin APR, FCPRS, FCIPR (Hon).

In an exercise like this, there are three big problems.

We look forward to an extension of what we know. Can we think more laterally and thus not be caught out by developments?

Did we really automate printing envelope labels to affix to envelopes and stuff press release and add a stamp before posting or do we simply send an email?. PR jobs have already been automated but who envisaged such an evolution as dramatic as email 25 years ago?

We have difficulty transferring technologies to PR practice. There are great technologies we know about but can’t imagine in a PR work environment. OR we can image it in a PR environment but not our environment - at least not until we retire.

Let's take empathy as an example. We imagine it is a human trait that will not be usefully deployed in PR in the recognisable future. But now we discover research saying “... expect the technologies that surround us to become emotion-aware in the next five years.”

That is not to invalided Jaen Valin’s work. It is a great foundation for focusing and evaluating the impact of the big changes that are obvious today. It makes us think more carefully about how to manage a massive transition coming our way.

How big might this transition be?

• Consider one of the major elements of PR: communication. Imaging that revolutions such as painting, writing, printing, radio and television, the web and social media were but a prelude to telepathy?  
• A key area of PR is the development of trust  and ethical debate in an era when technologies like blockchain automated many trust based activities and (existing) AI system can listen to a boardroom conversation and take all the evidence and arguments into account and challenge the reasoning of humans (and even make ethical judgements).

In this review of the #AIinPR context, I have challenged some assumptions we have examined so far and proposed a way in which the PR sector can put its practitioners in the forefront of relationship development.

Humans still needed

The question we keep asking if humans will still be needed at some point in the future. Of course, this is the wrong question.

From a macro perspective, countries with advanced PR industries have stagnant or declining populations and where there is huge, life-threatening, population growth (Africa, India, China etc.) the sector is comparatively immature. From a technology perspective, research, development and deployment is often small sector specific and takes a long time to transfer from one sector to another. It needs both creative minds to link development from one sector to another and it requires intelligence to adapt such transfers for PR specific applications.

Finally, there is the problem of adoption. PR people are very conservative. Will they use such capabilities? How many practitioners have built a bot? An AI Bot.

Meantime,the PR industry has some big jobs to do. The social, economic and cultural issues of our time need attention. This management of cultures is a PR issue which has to call on PR capabilities such as communication, politics and organisation strategy development. If  the ‘connected ape’ has mobile data traffic that will increase sevenfold between 2016 and 2021 how do we cope with the consequences? Such capabilities need the help of AI and other technologies but are much more important.

Yes, humans are still needed and mostly in identification and application of capabilities to give more time to the big issues as well as applying technical developments to support clients’ efforts in creating environments to succeed in a technically advancing society in a time of almost unsustainable global population growth.

Questions to consider.

Now, let’s return to “Humans still needed: An analysis of skills and tools in public relations”.

Sentence by sentence it is possible to apply the three tests:

1. Is this a linear approach?
2. Is this response limited by technofear/lack of knowledge
3. Is this too far in the future to be relevant to my kind of practice

Perhaps then we will look for a different response.

We need brave people to ask these question:

1. “Can this emerging technology be adopted for PR applications?”
2. “Can this emerging technology be adapted for PR applications?
3. “How far along the hype cycle is this technology?
4. “How can this technology be introduced to acceptable, ethical and common PR practice?
5. What is the narrow and wider threat of this technology?

The reason such questions are so important is that the serried ranks of technology development are already upon us. They will either make PR irrelevant or will offer a competitive advantage to competing interests. In some cases the career threat is in third party use of technology.

As an aside, one can consider threats that come out of apparently nowhere: The very idea that a foreign agent can tweak a technology (Facebook?) and thereby subvert democracy is, for a corporate affairs or political PR practitioner, a challenge to their livelihood (what happened to ‘smoke-filled rooms’, coffee mornings, Corbyn music festivals/rallies and political receptions?).  In the Public Relations practice of the political agent she is held responsible if laws are broken in pursuit of the campaign – libel and copyright infringement on and off-line being amongst the most likely. If other people take part in doing something, they may also end up with a share of responsibility – but the primary responsibility always rests with the agent and cannot be avoided. A Kremlin gang using Facebook can easily deny a practitioner her career.

Examining #AIinPR  from the Global Alliance Global Body of Knowledge perspective

#AIinPR examines AI from quite a narrow perspective as we shall see as the following descriptors are matched to emerging technologies:

1. Simplification – technology that simplifies a public relations process, or provides a tactical service
2. Listening and monitoring – media and social media listening and monitoring tools
3. Automation – automation of tactical tasks
4. AI for structured data – machine intelligence applied to structured data
5. AI for unstructured data – machine intelligence applied to unstructured data

I have followed the report as in considering the three categories.

1. Skills with zero tech or AI
2. Skills or portions thereof that may have a minor contribution from tech or AI tools
3. Skills where tech or AI is already more prevalent

I looked at the paragraph:

“Skills with zero tech Of the 52 skills in the GBOK, 17, or 32% of our lists, were deemed to currently have zero tech support. Given the high human aspects associated with judgement, interpretation and experience, we don’t see the ‘zero list’ changing much in future. Fundamental human traits such as empathy, trust, humour and relationship building can’t be automated – at least not yet. Skills such as: flexibility with constant changes, mentoring, familiarity with theories and its application, strategic thinking and ethical considerations are unlikely to be overtaken by AI. There might be tools that inform our decisions now and, in the future, but predominantly, these will remain the domain of humans.”

One by one, and with few exceptions, we find extant technologies that are potential tools for PR even in areas where activities with apparently zero touch are concerned.

I examine them here:

Judgement

Professor Chris Reed at the centre for augmented technology at the University of Dundee commented on a  debate where IBM used artificial intelligence capable of persuasive argument. As applied for human debate this capability might be applied in boardroom decisions were there lots of conflicting points of view and the AI system could listen to the conversation and take all the evidence and arguments into account and challenge the reasoning of humans, suggested Reed. There is also an application where this capability can increase the level of evidence-based decision making. Reported in the Guardian, Reed suggested that the same system could be used in counter-terrorism identifying if a particular person represents a threat.

Interpretation

RAGE AI has developed artificial intelligence technology that scans mountains of structured or unstructured documents. The engine sorts through the data it ingests and provides analysis or interpretation of any patterns it discovers. “RAGE works in both assisted and unassisted mode—assisted by human experts or on its own.”

“The use of machine learning to power business decisions and product recommendations is becoming widespread. We experience it when we buy on Amazon, watch TV on Netflix, hail an Uber or tag friends on Facebook. There are more creative experiments out there like The Next Rembrandt app, “machine music composition” and “TV show script generation” that use machine learning to create new art (with mixed results).”

Experience

Experience is now synthesized.  Spotify can use experience to provide answers that its users need (the right music). Experience information is used to provide sales displays and Facebook uses huge consumer experience to match advertising collateral to marketing segments.

The idea to fully replace a designer with an algorithm sounds futuristic, but the whole point is wrong. Product designers help to translate a raw product idea into a well-thought-out user interface, with solid interaction principles and a sound information architecture and visual style, while helping a company to achieve its business goals and strengthen its brand.

Empathy

MIT suggests that empathy and much more to be available to the practitioner: “Nonetheless, the field is progressing so fast that I expect the technologies that surround us to become emotion-aware in the next five years. They will read and respond to human cognitive and emotional states, just the way humans do. Emotion AI will be ingrained in the technologies we use every day, running in the background, making our tech interactions more personalized, relevant, authentic, and interactive. It’s hard to remember now what it was like before we had touch interfaces and speech recognition. Eventually, we’ll feel the same way about our emotion-aware devices”, says Rana el Kaliouby at MIT.

Trust

Trust is already being affected by technology. Of course, we now know there are open technologies that can be trusted it has been the subject for discussion among business consultants for some time. Deloitte say “Beyond creating efficiencies by removing the legal and financial intermediary in a contractual agreement, blockchain is assuming the role of trusted gatekeeper and purveyor of transparency. In the emerging “trust economy” in which a company’s assets or an individual’s online identity and reputation are becoming both increasingly valuable and vulnerable, this latest use case may be blockchain’s most potentially valuable to date”.

Blockchain is a technology that is now part of the PR trust development equation http://bit.ly/2JyHVbQ.

It is being considered in a number of quarters including as a policing technology to ensure trust in brands.  

Humour

“...computers and robots are already pioneering their own comedic stylings, as an accidental byproduct of learning the fundamentals of humour in humans. Computational humour may primarily be an effort on the part of the artificial intelligence community, but it also stands to enrich the comedy world with an unusual outsider perspective.”

Relationship building

Hitachi is building relationships to help in customer community building:

Finding customers who generate new value is an important factor in increasing revenue at companies. In the case of outcall sales in particular, how sales representatives acquire new prospective customers has a direct bearing on their performance. Unfortunately, the know-how required to acquire prospective customers is an intuitive skill that is learned by sales representatives through experience and, in many cases, it is not part of the institutional knowledge of the company. In response, Hitachi has developed a customer acquisition support service for identifying introducer models (key people), and for visualizing the human relationships between customers in the form of a network. Along with an AI technology that generates a list of existing customers who have a high likelihood of providing leads on new prospective customers, this article proposes applying this service to support sales, starting with financial institutions.

In effect Hitachi is using AI to identify opinion formers and their communities and the means to use this capability to build communities.

Mike Kelly et al are working on how to make better use of the vast amount of accumulating evidence from behaviour change intervention (BCI) evaluations and promote the uptake of that evidence into a wide range of contexts to implement background behavioural change and at the same time create relationships. It sounds like a PR dream!

Flexibility with constant changes,

The CBI tells us that by 2025 (6.5 year’s time) “…. All of these changes and many others will combine to create a work experience that is very different. Workers will be constantly connected; freelance and flexible work will be commonplace, and employees will be able to enjoy a highly personalised and collaborative work experience.”

Mentoring,

AI is being used in education in many ways. Adoption of best practice and harnessing existing tech can be used in mentoring based on open source, industry wide, experience. The US Navy is already showing the way. This is a CPD course in the making.

Familiarity with theories and its application

This is another case of using AI to interpret experience to expose theory and practice to practitioners. Imagining AI bots offering experience is not so difficult in 2018. By 2019 it could be commonplace.

Strategic thinking

Accounting and consulting firm Deloitte has developed a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) based method that can produce strategic market analysis and benchmark reports in the blink of an eye.

Hywel Ball, EY’s UK head of audit, says new technology such as data analytics, AI and robotic process automation is changing both what and how audits are undertaken. “It is enabling us to search, sift and sort through large quantities of data – from company reports to social media – these tools are helping auditors to identify potential areas of risk and to understand a company’s performance at a more granular level,” he says.

They are also providing insights into areas that were once thought to be impossible to measure, such as culture. “These insights can be really valuable to clients. What was once called the auditor’s ‘nose’ – or gut instinct – is increasingly being automated by advanced data analytics,” he says.

“AI can automate a lot of knowledge gathering and will help free up our people to focus on higher-value strategic work and provide more fulfilling responsibilities. These developments will, in turn, create opportunities to develop new roles and positions for the future, while the skills we need will also continue to evolve.

Ethical considerations

DeepMind Ethics Society (DMES), a unit comprised of both full-time DeepMind employees and external fellows, is the company’s latest attempt to scrutinise the societal impacts of the technologies it creates.

There might be tools that inform our decisions now and, in the future, but predominantly, these will remain the domain of humans.

Researchers aggregated millions of human responses to teach an AI how to behave when faced with an ethical dilemma.

Skills with zero touch - a perspective.

Jean Valin put forward a perspective that there are PR skills beyond the reach of AI in the near future. I have put forward a contrary view and have shown that most ‘zero touch’ activities have an AI counterpart.

Our problem is finding out how we can harness these capabilities and make them part of PR education and practice.

Of course, there is more to be done to help make the transformative technologies servants of PR practice and competitively ahead of those who wish to invade our space.

There is much more to do. A lot is to develop a more complete response to Jean’s work. It is a great start.

In the meantime, there is a lot of fundamental research that needs doing. We need a much more profound understanding of many areas of PR to inform our responses to the challenges of the emerging transformative technologies.

David Phillips

June 2018