Artificial intelligence is dramatically reshaping how we work and collaborate, making processes faster and more efficient than ever before. In this episode, Can You Hear Me? Co-hosts Eileen Rochford and Rob Johnson shift gears to explore the many benefits AI brings to today’s workplace. Beyond the headlines of AI threats, discover how AI is saving time, enabling smaller teams to manage larger projects, and empowering businesses of all sizes to innovate faster. From automating routine tasks to accelerating creative problem-solving, learn how AI is transforming the future of work and helping organizations reach new heights in productivity and impact.
Choosing the right AI model for your tasks
Emerging Trends for AI and Communications in 2025
Rob Johnson: [00:00:18] Hello everyone and Happy New Year! Welcome to another edition of the Can You Hear Me podcast. I'm Rob Johnson, president of Rob Johnson Communications. [00:00:27][8.2]
Eileen Rochford: [00:00:27] And I'm Eileen Rochford, CEO of the marketing and strategy firm, The Harbinger Group. Happy New Year, everybody. It's really fun to be back and kicking off a brand new year with all of our great listeners. So today, we're going to talk about the promise, I guess, of AI, right, Rob? Our past discussions, we've explored some of the threats of aspects of artificial intelligence. But today, we really want to shift that focus and highlight, honestly, the incredible benefits, the things that could be, you know, if used appropriately, how the benefits that AI is bringing into our workplaces and benefits that are transforming how we work and will work in 2026. [00:01:10][43.0]
Rob Johnson: [00:01:11] Absolutely. And I mean, you and I have been fascinated by this subject for a very long time, and we've had multiple episodes about it. And many of them have been couched around, uh-oh, big change. Sort of thing. And I'm not saying that doesn't exist. We both know that's not true. But I really think that we need to focus. If we're going to be doing the whole story, we need to tell this part of the story. And we've kind of done it here and there. AI is not just about automation or replacing jobs, even though that's what gets the headlines. That's what people talk about. This is a powerful tool for saving time, boosting productivity, and even allowing smaller teams to handle larger, more complex projects. The magic really is how AI can handle repetitive tasks which frees up human talent for strategic, creative, or high-impact work and that's what we all want. [00:01:56][44.5]
Eileen Rochford: [00:01:56] Yeah, no doubt about it. So I think that's where we would encourage our listeners to start their AI journey is really to find those smaller, low risk, repetitive task opportunities to inject some productivity. So that's what we're going to start our conversation. I think a recent survey from Goldman Sachs may have inspired this podcast topic today, if I recall correctly. And that was a recent survey, again, from Goldman Sachs regarding small businesses, and their use of AI. And it found that 85% of small business owners believe that AI has increased their efficiency and productivity. 85%. That's phenomenal. Let's see. Also, many say that AI is not replacing jobs, but is augmenting, enhancing, strengthening their capabilities, which is really important for small businesses to be able to compete. So there's huge potential here. I'll give you one example from that survey. Some companies report saving about or over two hours of work per employee each week just by using generative AI tools. We've seen similar gains ourselves. I'm sure at your company, certainly at mine, certainly many of our clients, just by automating repetitive internal tasks, which have freed up a lot more time for us to think at the high level, the strategic level, and the creative level. That seems to, unfortunately, too often in agency life, get a little bit of a short And what I'm enjoying is how AI is helping us to consolidate, summarize. Extract insights from some of those more mundane is a fair way to put it, I think. Things that we do every day. And therefore, because we're not writing reports from scratch all the time now, we're able to dedicate a whole lot of time to new content creation, new idea generation, all that kind of stuff. So I think those are some good examples just to kick it off. From my side of the fence, how about from yours Rob? Anything you want to talk about. [00:04:01][124.5]
Rob Johnson: [00:04:01] Yeah, I do because I think it's really important. I mean, you're a boutique firm. I am a smaller firm and I am looking for every bit of efficiency I can find to make sure that the things that can be done are done efficiently and it's not something that I have to deal with on a regular basis. So that means it frees up time for me to be creative. It frees time for my small but mighty team to work on strategy, to work business development areas, project management, and sometimes those tools can be used as well in the AI realm. But I really find that for things that for research, for things... I'll tell you my book OverCommunicate that's coming out here in 2026, I remember the editor saying, well, you have to write every word of it. I'm like, I know. This is what I do. I love writing. But where it really helped me, so I'm running a business and I'm writing a book, it helped me when I was looking for specific subjects to discuss, I would use AI to help me find sourced articles or things that were in books that reaffirmed what I wanted to convey. And so, I'm not going to look through a database of a gazillion articles. I'm going to go to the library and deal with the librarian, which somebody on a call one time suggested that. I'm like, nobody has time for that. How are we going to do to make that more efficient? That's one great example that I can think of. I'd also like to refer to our new buddy, Chris Quinn from cleveland.com, who we had on in the fall. 25, who was talking about all these great efficiencies that they found. Everybody said, oh, newsroom, here comes AI, going to replace you. And it was like, no, now my reporter's going to go work on the things they need to work on. But when it comes to going to the courthouse and sifting through court files and things like that, who has time to do that? And as a former reporter, that's stuff we used to do. And it was painstaking and it took forever. And that was one example of a huge efficient. So, you know, I can see it in my world, I think you can see in your world, and certainly when Chris brought it up a few months back, it made perfect sense. [00:06:09][128.2]
Eileen Rochford: [00:06:09] Yep, and a big point that Chris made was efficiency with accuracy. And that's, you can't skip the accuracy stop, whether we like it or not. Everybody likes to just keep charging ahead. But stopping and doing that accuracy check in journalism, where it's important, but honestly, that's been sliding off for quite some time now. We all know that. Sadly. Sadly, but in our work lives too. So I just want to inject that important point here for our listeners that use these tools to create all of the, you know. Wonderful potential opportunities that exist for efficiency, but you have got to build in the time for double checking for accuracy. Even in their summaries that we use it for, we find inaccuracies or they're smushing topics together that should not have been connected. So you kind of have to experiment with a lot of tools and find the things that each tool is best at doing for you. Right. And also recognize that they're rapidly evolving. So next month, some of these tools that weren't so great at one thing could be exceptionally, exponentially better. So staying on top of that too, don't get too sunk into one camp of, I only use this tool for this thing because something better is probably going to be coming along soon or big evolutions are being made. So keep an open mind and always check for accuracy. [00:07:36][87.0]
Rob Johnson: [00:07:37] You made a great point about the executive summaries because, as I was mentioning about the research, as i was going about it, it would spit out nonsense if you just let it. So I was very specific in my prompts. I'm like, I need sourced articles, so it needed to be a publication that was known. It had to have a date, it had to an author, it needed me to read the whole article or get sourced with the book. You know, they need to have page numbers, they can't be, to your point, these ideas that have been kind of jumbled together to of convey what's going on. So even as I was doing that, I could see these summaries sometimes are nonsense. And you have to put eyes on it. You have to make sure that it exists, that it's real, and that you are reading from it in my case. But in terms of getting the correct information, it just can't be some sort of ideation of a computer. To your point, it's probably getting better in a month, but right now, the human still has to know it's not quite there yet. [00:08:38][60.7]
Eileen Rochford: [00:08:38] Yeah, always checking for accuracy when using any kind of AI tool, LLM. Absolutely. [00:08:43][5.0]
Rob Johnson: [00:08:43] I think we've brought up some pretty interesting ideas already, but beyond some of these usual suspect applications, AI is also being used in some really creative ways and ways that maybe a lot of us haven't thought of yet. Maybe some of you have. For instance, use cases like analyzing the subtle emotional tone of video conference participants to help leaders adapt their communication style in real time. How am I doing right now? For us, software can help companies read audience reactions during virtual presentations and improve their online customer service. So that's really cool. And thinking can be useful for remote meetings where leaders can't sense the vibe of everybody in the room, the virtual room, because whenever I do presentation training to whoever it is I'm doing it with, we always talk about, and I know you do as well, you know, the Virtual Room, I just see you from sort of the chest up. I don't get to see the body length. I'm a hands talker. I can't see that in a virtual meeting. [00:09:37][53.8]
Eileen Rochford: [00:09:37] No, no, that's so true. And it's very limiting. So that's an interesting new capability that I didn't know existed. I'm definitely going to look into that. I have been hearing a lot about. Different tools that are coming out that can be tone of written video, audio, and give you some interesting insights. I'm very curious to explore those some more because think of all the possible ways that you can use that. Particularly people in our line of work, when you're writing for specific audiences, being able to get some... Feedback on, well, this is the tone that I'm getting from your delivery of content or what you've written or yeah. So hearing that and then thinking, gosh, but putting yourself into the shoes of the people that you are going to be speaking to and realizing that's probably not the best approach to take. This is good feedback. I've just saved myself some embarrassment and wasted time. In front of the folks that I, you know, it's high stakes. I got to get it right when I speak to them. So that's really good. That's a really good application that I'm intrigued to dig into and their listeners will be too. [00:10:47][69.7]
Rob Johnson: [00:10:47] We're not saying that some of this isn't cause for some anxiety. We know that that's been part and parcel of here comes AI. It's coming for your job. So we understand. We're not sitting here just painting this with one kind of brush, but we've painted it so many other times with sort of here it comes, for better or for worse. And now we're sitting here, I think, talking about some concepts that really kind of energize and excite me, even though I know that if I didn't come up with unique ideas and things that were inherently mine, I might be replaced by AI. So I'm not worried about that happening, and I'm more worried about, oh, FloraSoft software. I'm really not familiar with that, but that sounds really cool. I wonder if that would work for my virtual presentations, which I do all the time. [00:11:31][44.1]
Eileen Rochford: [00:11:32] Yeah. And another thing to think about, or some other applications that exist out there that give you feedback on tone and delivery and things, compare what they give you in terms of the back to what, you know. Two or three human beings say to you. And that would be kind of a cool way to check yourself, right? Like, oh, how is this landing? I understand. I like this, you know, objective feedback from the AI robots. But I also want to hear what a couple of actual humans think, and then find your middle ground. You know, that's a good way to do it too. [00:12:02][30.6]
Rob Johnson: [00:12:02] And any advice we give people, and we've already done it on this episode, it's always like, it's the brave new world, but human beings still have to be there to check things and to authenticate them and to make sure they're accurate and reliable and the tone is right. So humans, we still need to be doing this. [00:12:21][18.6]
Eileen Rochford: [00:12:21] And we still win on the creativity front. So let's just leave it at that. And I think it's going to be like that forever. So, um, the more creative and interesting we are, the more that our jobs will always matter. So yay. Yes. Okay. Yay. So another yay us. Yay, humans. Yes, we matter. Don't you forget it. Okay, so All right, so another interesting use is employing AI-driven narrative building tools that analyze large volumes of data to uncover fresh storytelling angles or emerging themes for new campaigns. Something that probably in the past would have taken weeks and weeks of auditing, consolidation, alignment, all the things, the steps that we had to go through. Now, we can take those large amounts of data in particular. And feed it if you're comfortable doing so. You have to have a platform that you're very confident in how it uses information. Certainly nothing that you would not be comfortable having accessible to the outside world. Just a PSA. And get back this synthesis that gets you miles down the road toward your next creative campaign or your next media angle. There's So sometimes we'll read the information that it would need to be on strong footing and then say, okay, pretend you're a journalist at this publication or even you're this specific reporter at this specific national media outlet and improve my pitch to you so that you're interested in the story that I'm selling about X, Y, and Z. That's a fun thing that been doing recently. And it actually has helped. So sometimes you're like, yeah, whatever, but for real, you can just tell you're, you know, we're getting closer and the responses that we're getting from media are also stronger. [00:14:17][115.5]
Rob Johnson: [00:14:17] Stronger too. Without giving away all the harbinger group trade secrets, is there one platform in that regard that you recommend for people to use? Well, it depends. Because people are always worried about still pitching those earned media pitches. Oh my God, how do I pitch them? [00:14:32][14.9]
Eileen Rochford: [00:14:32] Perplexity is a really good one for sure in a lot of ways. Notebook LM is good for kind of that larger like consolidation of a lot information. And there's more being developed too that I've been hearing about. So we'll put some advice into the footnotes about places to start for different things like this. I just, I want to point out one thing. I just finished, I read it on the plane. I read the ROI of thought leadership and forgive me at this moment, I cannot recall the two authors, but it was a kind of groundbreaking piece that proved literally the return on investment of consulting service, knowledge-based organizations and how they sell to C-suite executives and how true thought leadership, and they define it in there, there's a number of components like has to be a unique and interesting point of view. It has to be, in many cases, data-driven by proprietary research, things like that, not the way we toss around the term thought leadership today. It has to meet this very almost rigid definition of what constitutes true thought leadership. That matches with what C-suite executives think of as real meaningful thought leadership that influences them and sways their decision-making. In that book, they talk about Um, we are, we're in a moment right now where organizations that have the unique benefit of vast amounts of proprietary data can use these LLM platforms to consolidate, summarize, slice re writes to different personas in ways that they've never been able to do with the speed that is unprecedented. So take advantage of that. So if you are an organization that has proprietary data that you pay for, that you even some clients we work with that have 15, 20 year track records of running the same research, but you're not really getting much out of it, try going this out. Feeding it in and asking different questions of what would make this interesting, relevant, useful for my target audiences described as X, Y, or Z. See what you get. [00:16:46][134.0]
Rob Johnson: [00:16:46] I have to tell you the ROI on thought leadership is just like, it's just music to my ears. Because as you know, as a marketer and a strategy person, like we both are, that people like, what's the ROI? I got to see the ROI. And all of a sudden, because some people think, oh, it is a soft skill. And it's like, well, it IS a soft skills, but you better be good at it if you're going to be successful. The more evidence that we can provide, the more successful we will be, convincing them of how important it is to be an effective and impactful communicator. [00:17:18][32.1]
Eileen Rochford: [00:17:19] Yeah. Give this book a read, the ROI of Thought Leadership. I believe one of the authors is from IBM, but we'll put it in the show notes. It just came out this summer. It's pretty fresh, and they quantify it down to dollars. It is pretty amazing. So you just have to remember, you're not going to be able to do an apples to apples comparison because what they're talking about in there is really about knowledge, service providers, organizations that sell services. Ideas consulting that kind of thing. It's not a book really inspired me. I'm right on the plane to our client. We're seeing [00:17:55][36.2]
Rob Johnson: [00:17:56] Great advice. Really great advice. And of course, it'll be in the show notes. So even going beyond what we're talking about right now, AI can help leaders with crisis communications. We talk about that a lot. AI can analyze real-time data from social media, news outlets, customer feedback to identify emerging issues before they escalate. It will then help businesses craft responses, issue statements and monitor the situation in real time. That's very effective because we all know that when we talk about crisis communications, we keep telling clients, you can't get behind the curve, the information curve because if you do, you never catch up. So imagine if you could hasten that process. So an urgent situation, AI can help generate responses to media inquiries, social media posts or customer service messages, ensuring that the brand maintains a consistent voice while addressing the crisis swiftly, and you don't get a second chance. You don't get a bite at that apple. You get one chance to do it right, and your reputation and your company's future is relying on it. So can you imagine, Eileen, how much time that is saving teams? And we're talking about time-saving endeavors here, but in a crisis situation, that time is at a premium. [00:19:05][69.0]
Eileen Rochford: [00:19:06] Yeah, absolutely. And even identifying the source of the crises, for example, if you're being bombarded with social posts. Being able to identify that half of them come from bots is going to influence how you handle that crisis, what you say, how quickly you respond, all kinds of things. So take advantage of what some of these tools can do for you in a crisis situation. A lot of it can save you a lot of heartache too. It turns out to be honestly a false flag, which nine times out of 10 these days, it's bot generated. So yeah, so take advantage of it. Otherwise, you know, you could be hoodwinked by the bops. Who wants to be hoodwinged by bops? Nobody. [00:19:46][40.2]
Rob Johnson: [00:19:46] Nobody wants to, even though we're talking about AI here, nobody wants the bots to beat them. Nobody. [00:19:50][4.2]
Eileen Rochford: [00:19:52] Oh, true. I don't want to be eaten by a bot. [00:19:54][1.9]
Rob Johnson: [00:19:55] No way! [00:19:55][0.2]
Eileen Rochford: [00:19:55] No way. So saving tons of time. Also in crises, I'll just say crisis simulation is another way that many of these AI tools are becoming super useful, well worth your time to look into, why not have some of these, put you through the paces, see how you respond, just lean on it. Why not? It's just going to save you time and it's just gonna make you better at getting the reps when it comes to crisis response. So it'll make it faster and it'll makes you better what you need to do if the real thing happens to you in the future. So I think that's another a great way to. [00:20:33][37.5]
Rob Johnson: [00:20:33] That is such an important point to bring up, Eileen, because probably one of the biggest barriers when I tell people, you know, we should practice, you should get some reps in, we should have a plan. It's time. If you could have a tool, an AI tool that could help with that, it's not the solution, but it's part of the solution as it comes to doing those reps and figuring out how you're going to respond. You can do it in a more timely and efficient way. The chances are your client is more likely to engage with that and more likely to have an actual plan. God forbid, a crisis does befall them. [00:21:11][38.3]
Eileen Rochford: [00:21:12] Yep. And we were just talking to Howard Karrish not long ago, and he talked about how frequently they run crisis simulations. And that made my heart just fill with joy that they're taking the time and putting in the effort to do that. Anyone who does will be just so much calmer when or if the real thing does in fact happen to them. So. And calm, when you're calm, you think more clearly, you make better decisions. So practice actually gets you to a place where you can be calm in a crisis. So try these crisis simulation tools that are available to you through AI Now as well. [00:21:46][34.0]
Rob Johnson: [00:21:46] Look at all that! Look at that information! [00:21:47][1.3]
Eileen Rochford: [00:21:48] So much. Okay, guys. So we've just got on the record, Rob and I, that AI can be good. And we've told you some of the ways. We certainly want to hear from you what you think in your comments on our LinkedIn page and our posts about this show. So I think that's going to do it for another edition of Can You Hear Me? I'm Eileen Rochford. If you would like to comment on the podcast or suggest a topic, which we love when you guys suggest topics, please contact us at Can You Hear Me podcast page on LinkedIn. [00:22:17][28.7]
Rob Johnson: [00:22:17] That's right and i'm rob johnson if you like what you heard please consider giving can you hear me a positive review wherever you get your podcast such as apple or spotify it helps other listeners find the podcast and we appreciate your support [00:22:17][0.0]
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