Recent reforms across the health service have asked for huge savings to be made – up to 50% of management capacity – with ever-increased pressure on communications budget and resource. Political changes and devolution processes in government are ensuring equal pressure for local authorities.
Due to a focus on protecting frontline services, it is support functions such as communications, finance and human resources, where there is a spotlight on achieving potential organisational efficiencies.
This is of course highly problematic for communications colleagues in the health service, as well as colleagues in local government and elsewhere who are working in times of ever-increased pressure on budgets and staffing.
While public sector communications professionals continue to strive to deliver excellence in their discipline, there is a need to consider the opportunities presented by innovation like never before.
Survey
Here at Touch Design, we have surveyed health and local authority communications leads, carrying out a series of one-to-one interviews, talking about the challenges they face and some of the potential solutions. The surveys were carried out on an anonymous basis and we would like to sincerely thank everyone who took part.
In reflecting on these interviews, in this first blog post which has been produced as a result of those conversations, we wish to highlight the topic of artificial intelligence (AI) which was flagged up as a hot issue by nearly all who took part.
AI opportunities
One communications lead told us:
“My main view would be that comms teams really need to start taking more advantage of AI. They are already starting to experiment with this for creative purposes but it will start to move faster.
“This has its upsides and downsides for the quality of content produced, but it also does result in resource and time savings and efficiencies that cannot be ignored, and neither should they be.
“I could use an AI tool now and ask it to produce me a campaign about anything to do with [NHS] services and it would do that, complete with creative ideas, text, imagery and even film scripts, as well as producing a website within an hour. Many will go down that route because it costs virtually nothing.
“However, I think this will simultaneously create a vacuum for genuine human creativity that a machine cannot learn or guess at.”
Time-saving
In a time of reduced resource, it is to be expected that public sector communications professionals are exploring the opportunities by AI.
Another communications lead said: “In terms of doing things differently, we are probably like everyone else, exploring how do we use AI ethically to do some of the less human-related, more intensive processes? Whether that is doing first drafts of social media posts or taking a transcription and doing a summary of a meeting, things like that.
“Do we use AI for image generation? Some of it is still very dodgy, but if you want a clinical image, it’s a lot easier in terms of patient consent if we can AI generate an image of someone on a ward rather than trying to work with a hospital to get an image of a patient on the ward.”
A communications lead spoke of the opportunities provided by AI in terms of content generation and how they had experimented with it writing press releases. “Being time poor, it saved me quite a bit of thinking time,” they said.
Editorial help
A local authority comms lead said uptake of AI within the council was limited at the moment and they had not generally been encouraged to use it. However she was proactively using Co-pilot and finding it helpful for some tasks, for example providing advice to services about structuring a case study, or to ‘escape her own bias’ and get ideas for creating copy more appealing to different audiences.
App potential
A hospital trust communications lead told us how their Trust was considering making better use of AI through launching a patient-facing app. The app would help make it easier for patients to navigate through services and systems, holding information such as patient letters.
Another comms lead told Touch how they were looking into using AI that could turn written words into podcasts, helping provide content to the user in the format that best suited the individual.
Scepticism
Some within the communications community are early adopters and feeling increasingly at ease with using AI. Others remain not so sure. One NHS communications lead said:
“I’m probably a bit sceptical of AI and haven’t used it to support my comms work yet, though I am curious. I can see the potential practical benefits of summarising huge documents into something more meaningful or getting the bones of a plan down on paper as a starting point. But an AI will never be able to take into account the important contextual things that communications professionals bring to the table.
“My organisation is responsible for making complex ethical opinions and using confidential patient data. An AI cannot make an ethical judgement and there’s a huge issue with consent and what information is shared with an AI.”
Ethics, environment and guidance
An issue always linked into the use of AI is ethics. This is of paramount importance in the public sector where communications leads may be tempted to place data in machine learning systems, to ease the task of analysis, yet risk releasing such information into an unknown public sphere. Concern over the ethics of AI and the lack of practical organisational policies in place is set to hold back its adoption while such issues are addressed. Also AI systems, especially large models, consume significant energy during training and operation, leading to substantial carbon emissions, making it crucial to consider their environmental impact when using them.
Summary
It is clear it is early days for public sector comms and AI. Some seem happier to adopt than others. In most cases, communicators seem to be using it to help save time and process and analyse information, yet still see a role for human critique, creativity and improvement.
We will be looking at other aspects of innovation in subsequent blog posts.
Useful resource
To help you with any next steps, visit the Chartered Institute of Public Relations guidance on AI. The information includes ethics guides and lists of AI tools.
Give us a call on 0115 950 9394 or email info@touchdesign.co.uk