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UK government AI Opportunities Report and our 100th edition
It seems fitting that the 100th edition of the PR Futurist newsletter is a special one focusing on the UK government's AI Opportunities Report published today.
It has profound implications for public relations, communications, and corporate affairs professionals. Hopefully, it puts an end to any doubt that they need to take action on AI right now.
I'm most interested in what you think about it. Let me know and also if you'd be willing to share you views publicly (either by name or anonymously). I know people will let me know what they think, but if we get enough I'll share them in an article.
What do you think in terms of our profession? What do you think in terms of your industry sector?
Stuart Bruce | PR Futurist
News
AI Opportunities Action Plan
The AI Opportunities Action Plan isn't a government policy paper. It's an independent report by Matt Clifford, a tech entrepreneur and chair of the Advanced Research And Invention Agency (ARIA). It makes 50 recommendations and the government has backed all of them — almost.
It identifies three main areas of action:
Invest in the foundations of AI: world-class computing and data infrastructure (including energy), talent and regulation.
Push hard on cross-economy AI adoption: Public sector should "rapidly pilot and scale AI products and services and encourage the private sector to do the same. It aims to improve experiences for people and improve productivity,
Position the UK to be an AI maker, not an AI taker: The more ambitious and surprising of the three as it's about being a builder of frontier AI and selling AI technology to other countries, not just buying it and using it.
There's clearly a big role for public relations, communications and corporate affairs. For the AI action plan and strategy to succeed it needs public support. In his speech Keir Starmer recognised that fear is often one of the biggest barriers to adopting new technology.
PR has a major role in securing the essential public support for AI. The action plan acknowledges the importance of public trust in AI. PR and communications professionals need to ensure organisations have robust AI policies covering ethics, privacy and security. We then need to create persuasive messaging to emphasise the benefits of AI and assuage public concerns. We need to create robust stakeholder engagement strategies and use communications to help educate people.
But to be able to provide this expert counsel to CEOs and the C-suite PR and corporate affairs professionals need to embrace and understand AI themselves. AI is developing rapidly so they need to not only understand now but understand how AI is constantly developing.
It's a given they should be using it effectively to support their own work at a strategic and tactical implementation level. Purposeful Relations's research, supported by other studies, show too many senior leaders think AI is something for the team and fail to embrace it fully themselves.
PR's role is also to identify and manage the reputational risks of AI. This means making sure companies and organisations adopt and use AI safely, ethically and transparently. It means working with stakeholders to encourage them to embrace AI and not impose AI on them.
The other much misunderstood aspect of AI is that it is also an increasingly influential and important stakeholder. What AI says about you, your brand, your company and your people will shape what they think and your reputation. Your communication strategy needs to acknowledge this.
You can download the full AI Opportunities Report as a PDF,
Stuart Bruce
www.gov.uk
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What should PR professionals be doing now?
The scale and ambition of the AI Opportunities Report should convince every company and organisation of the need to take action now.
Public relations and corporate affairs professionals need to:
- Ensure they have AI for corporate affairs policy and strategy in place.
- Understand AI to ensure it doesn't inadvertantly create reputational risks for the organisation as different teams and departments implement AI. It's critical that oversight of AI isn't left to IT teams.
- Implement AI training and development to ensure AI literacy amongst their team (a legal requirement of the EU AI Act).
- Incorporate 'AI as a stakeholder' into communications strategies and plans for 2025.
I'm happy to have brief consultancy chat to help you assess where you are and see if we can potentially help. Please book here.
purposefulrelations.com