INTRODUCTION
By now you should be familiar with artificial intelligence (AI) and the different AI tools (e.g., ChatGPT) that communication professionals use. To give you an example of how popular these tools are, according to Reuters, ChatGPT currently has around 180.5 million users, and that number is growing. While AI certainly has its benefits, it is not meant to replace a human communication/PR professional, but rather complement them.
AI can also be effective in crisis communications, significantly reducing the workload and stress of your communication team. Here are ways to use AI tools during a crisis.
- Work ahead. Since time is of the essence when a crisis hits, it’s helpful to get some of the work done ahead of time. Write out potential prompts to help you develop initial statements, FAQs and first drafts of press releases. You can even have the messages geared toward specific audiences (e.g., customers vs. staff).
- Use for real-time automated alerts. AI tools can help gather real-time automated alerts from places like social media, online forums and news articles so that you receive an alert of a potential crisis as soon as it’s published. Think of it like Google Alerts but much quicker. There are many AI tools for social listening, including Vista Social, Buffer and Audiense.
- Translate. Rather than scrambling to find a translator, use AI to help you quickly translate messages into multiple languages. Google Translate and DeepL are two examples of AI-powered translation tools that can translate texts, speech, images or websites in more than 100 languages.
- Generate video and multimedia content. If your crisis response includes video and multimedia content, use AI to produce video scripts, closed captioning and subtitles. This can save you hours of work. YouTube and Rev are two examples of online tools and platforms that offer AI subtitle generation. Each tool is different in what the users need to do but most will require you to upload the video and select the language. Other tools allow for edits, customization and being able to download the subtitles as a separate file such as SRT.