Artificial intelligence technology platforms are receiving enormous amounts of funding and attention. Today, many of anthonyBarnum PR’s clients have AI in their B2B software solutions. For the last several years AI has been gaining momentum toward transformation – driven by the efficiency and capabilities it offers.
For years AI was hyped as both an important and revolutionizing technology that would be transformative – many futuristic articles have and continue to be published about its potential, its benefits, and the darker consequences of its power. Those of us who have been close to AI narratives, and their application to numerous markets, have seen trends reshape as the technology comes online at increasing scale.
Practical applications continue to emerge across innumerable sectors — from healthcare to software leveraged in industrial environments. Today we are no longer talking about what AI could or should offer. Instead, we’re seeing it infused in technology platforms and solving real challenges.
From our conversations with C-level technology executives, AI product experts, and media covering technology advancements, key trends are emerging. I’ve compiled several important takeaways when driving AI-related narratives in PR.
Reality Check
Let’s first start with the reality on the ground. The veteran software product experts we work with have been clear that – for all the conversation, interest, and future visioning – AI remains in development and is currently most valuable in specific applications. It’s not that it isn’t powerful, but our ability to harness and leverage the technology is not yet near the potential cast by futurists. That said, the value of AI to add enormous efficiency and synthesize down highly complex data is meaningful and a tremendous advantage.
Business-minded executives generally steer away from hanging their product positioning hats on AI as a standalone gamechanger to their market. AI has limits and, thus, needs its capabilities and the differentiation it adds to a platform to be contextualized.
With the business and product perspectives in mind, it’s important for marketers to understand AI is not new to the media and vertical-specific media. The media remains curious about the evolution of AI, but it’s not the shiny object it was a few years ago. As a result, product-related narratives need to highlight how the technology solves the pain-point of its market as part of a total concept –not as its central theme.
Taking AI to the Media
Stay Specific
Because the potential for AI is so outsized and media coverage around its capabilities has been hyped, it’s more important than ever before to stay specific about its value proposition within a defined framework. Thought leadership should be shaped to be relevant to specific target audiences, and descriptions of the technology should be direct about the processes its impacting.
Strong Differentiation
Yes, there is still opportunity for more futuristic visioning about AI. However, to be successful, the visioning thought leadership will need to be strongly differentiated to provide a new perspective. Vision and future related thought leadership perspectives today must be distinct to garner attention. To define that distinction, it’s important for the PR team to conduct research on exactly how other futurist thought leaders are positioning the technology and carve out commentary that is new and insightful.
Real-World Concepts Getting Coverage
AI-related thought leadership that ties into current macro trends is driving interesting and consistent coverage. Here are some examples:
- AI’s ability to reduce manual time spent analyzing data has been well-received as a concept across verticals because of the workforce shortages. With businesses having to do more with fewer professionals — AI is helping to dramatically increase productivity efficiencies.
- There is tremendous interest in how AI can create models that bridge important gaps in data to enable better decision making. With AI’s ability to rapidly frame-out data, some platforms are creating models to specifically aid professionals in decision making. This new revolution in data access is a fascinating one because AI is uncovering more and more inefficiencies that are just now being discovered but have meaningful consequences across industries.
- The ability to rapidly calculate and analyze disparate, vast amounts of data is also of interest to the media. When breaking down specific industry processes, often the amount of data produced is staggering—and unknown to veteran journalists covering a field. It may astound them that a series of transactions equates to millions of data points. Contextualizing how AI can process the never-before-processed data within a specific set of processes is a great narrative.
While we’re seeing AI increasingly be a facet of advanced platforms, and many complex processes resolved through AI, a certain amount of skepticism, carried over from the hype stage of AI, remains. It’s important to balance product thought leadership to ensure the AI is contextualized to the specific ways it is being used to solve pain-points. It’s also important to balance the whiz-bang of AI with realism—and avoid over promoting, while also giving the media real insight into how it is increasingly transformative.
Our team is deeply experienced in creating narratives that speak directly to media interest while positioning your company as a thought leader – get in touch to request a briefing today to learn more about how we can create major coverage for your transformative AI software.
