Artificial intelligence (AI) is a powerful technology that can augment human capabilities and help automate tedious and repetitive tasks, allowing individuals to focus their time and energy on the more creative and complex aspects of their work. For communications professionals, we’ve seen how AI can also help workers overcome writer’s block, generate content, and spark new ideas. These capabilities have presented opportunities, especially for novice workers lacking experience or confidence. For example, generative AI tools such as the GPT-4 large language model (LLM) can generate text, images, music, and code using natural language prompts, providing individuals with inspiration and guidance, without requiring deep technical skills.
AI can also help individuals learn new skills and improve performance by providing personalized feedback, recommendations, and coaching. For instance, in our work on Focus Assist for Windows and our research examining the use of Focus Time in Outlook, we’ve been able to demonstrate that people appreciate an agent that blocks off time so they can get their highest-priority tasks done. In the future, chatbots can leverage typical user working patterns to recommend good times for focus as well as the best times to take breaks, help with triaging email, or catch up on missed meetings, all resulting in less stress and healthier work-life balance for the user. In addition, in the future, system builders may be able to personalize and adapt LLMs to different users, domains, and situations while respecting their preferences and goals.
AI is not only a tool for enhancing productivity but also a medium for expressing creativity. AI can generate novel and diverse outputs that challenge human expectations and conventions. AI can also enable new forms of collaboration and co-creation between humans and machines and among humans mediated by machines. However, AI can also disrupt the practice of design and change our relationship with creative materials, tools, and mediums. As AI becomes more broadly understood and adopted, communications professionals will set new norms and expectations for when and how to use AI, whether and how to disclose its use, and how they perceive the value of work generated by AI.
In these scenarios, AI can raise ethical, social, and cultural issues, such as those around ownership, authorship, responsibility, and trust. AI can also affect the role and identity of designers, as they may need to adapt to new workflows, skills, and mindsets. AI can also influence the perception and appreciation of creative works, as they may be seen as less authentic, original, or valuable.
These are all important questions that the industry can explore together, as this emerging era of generative AI shifts knowledge work from material production to critical integration. In practice, this means that communicators will need to use and develop new skills. They may spend less time generating and collecting content, and more time analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating content. This will require more expertise and critical judgment, as professionals will need to assess the quality, relevance and validity of the content produced by AI, and integrate it with their own knowledge and insights. Communicators may also need to have more creativity and innovation, as they will need to generate new and original content that AI cannot produce and leverage AI's potential to enhance their work. New skills around coordinating multiple AI agents to help with various aspects of creative work will also emerge, with human users working as conductors to orchestrate the work done by the LLMs. And, of course, soft skills will become more valuable during this kind of orchestration to ensure that the more mundane work performed by the AI is packaged in an empathic, trustworthy, and privacy-preserving manner.
To leverage the power of AI and even multiple AI systems, communicators will need to practice this new craft of partnering with AI to create. Skilling up on effective prompt engineering practices, working across multiple agents, acquiring quick summaries of areas of expertise, and packaging AI-delivered solutions in an effective manner will all take iteration over time. However, the field is moving rapidly and the user experience around these steps is improving very quickly, ensuring all of us can harness the promise of AI and human collaboration for increased focus, creativity, and productivity.
Mary Czerwinski is a Research Manager of the Human Understanding and Empathy group. Mary’s research focuses primarily on information worker task management, health and wellness for individuals and groups. Her background is in visual attention and multitasking. She holds a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from Indiana University in Bloomington. Mary became a Fellow of the ACM in 2016, a Fellow of the American Psychological Science association in 2018, and was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering in 2022.