AI: How to create knowledge, execution and more time to do the work that really matters

Definitely one of the most common questions I am getting right now circles around AI and what teams should be focused on.

To do this effectively, news organizations should outline the opportunities for their teams, identify the most relevant tactics for their operation, develop workflows, and track the results to measure the impact.

I will spend some time today going through how to think about and achieve this.

1. Create knowledge on the possibilities

Some of the things you can do with AI today are pretty mind-blowing and helping your organization understand what you can actually accomplish is a good way to get things started with your AI strategy.

Recently, I was doing an AI training session for editorial teams at a business publication conference and one attendee remarked that they thought they were ahead of the curve but now they aren’t so sure after discovering some of the things that they could use AI for.

A rollout where you show all of the possibilities doesn’t mean that you have to commit to doing all of those things, but making sure your staff understands where things are headed and how the usage of these tools really has to be part of how everyone operates going forward, is really critical.

It’s important in this kind of rollout to not only show what you could do, but provide some guardrails on what your organization should and shouldn’t do with AI. That will help with buy in and acceptance if you can be specific.

2. Use a workshop to decide your priorities

Once you understand the opportunities that you can explore with AI, go ahead and build a bullet list by topic that you could consider implementing in each department.

For example, if you are in editorial, consider a list of options around optimizing your content (SEO, GEO questions and search in social media) and if you’re in sales, consider a list of bullets around prospecting that you could use AI for.

From there, get teams together and workshop the ideas in each area. This will allow you to decide if the idea works well for your media company and what kind of workflow you might need to build to support the idea. 

I like this approach because it takes the idea from a PowerPoint or Google Doc and makes it much more real-world like by inputting your own prompts and things that are specifically local for your company.

In the end of this process, you should be able to build a short list of what you want to focus on by department.

3. Show how AI can be used for bigger work

Understanding why to use AI and how it can afford you to do more work that is meaningful to your organization, is really important.

This is a message that has to come from the top of your organization, that the purpose of using these tools is to find ways to make our jobs more efficient, easier to do, and it opens us up to the possibility of doing more of the work that has a greater impact on our business.

For example, if AI can be used to build newsletters faster and organize data for regular monthly analytic reports, it may provide more time for a digital editor to create additional content or better social media graphics, and reels. 

You can think about the implication of that idea across really any department. But to truly know the impact that the work is having, it’s really important to track what AI is providing you. 

This means understanding previously that it took you 30 minutes to build that newsletter and now it only takes you 10 minutes. Now that you can understand the time gained, you can allocate that time to other meaningful tasks. But you have to understand the time gained.

Our AI program

We have developed an AI program that publishers are currently using to do much of what I noted above, from helping train teams on the possibilities, decide on the most effective things  to use AI for and then execution help on getting those processes in place.

Below is a pretty useful flyer that you can download here that provides more information on the services. I’d be happy to tell you more about how we can help you today with your AI strategy.

Email me at David@davidarkinconsulting.com!