The robots aren’t taking over – but they do have the potential to elevate our profession

There are not many meetings I have attended in the last six months where artificial intelligence (AI) has not been mentioned or, more often, dominated discussion.

Often these conversations are focused on how AI will impact on the work we do and how we do it, the time and financial implications, and the risks. But I have recently been involved in some fantastic sessions by the Healthcare Communications Association (HCA) and the International Society for Medical Publication Professionals (ISMPP) that have considered more about how AI impacts the individual, the skills we will need, and the way we recruit and develop our talent in response.

One commonly held view, thank goodness, is that AI is not going to take over and make us all redundant. The discussions have universally concluded that, although AI will have an impact, human input will remain essential to our work. In fact, most believe that AI has the potential to help elevate our profession.

What does seem to be certain is that AI will be integrated into all our work. And that has implications for our roles, and the skills we need from the start and as we develop in our careers. In one HCA panel discussion, 93% of participants agreed that AI will reshape the responsibilities of healthcare communicators.

There will be an enduring need for the human component to healthcare communications. The human touch is seen as essential to ensure we continue to deliver strong storytelling within our communications. Fact-checking and ensuring every communication is compliant, ethical and without bias also needs that human touch, even if assisted by AI. Ultimately, the human input will help ensure transparency and deliver communications that target audiences can trust and value.

In terms of the data, publishers certainly have a key role in being custodians of research integrity, by ensuring the aforementioned human benefits remain paramount within good publication practice.

Time is always a precious commodity. If AI does more of the doing, it allows us to focus more on the human attributes of thinking and interacting. For agencies, this may strengthen the consultancy component of their work with pharma, which in turn may have more opportunity to focus on their personal engagement with all stakeholders. However much we embrace digital, as humans we still want and value those human-human interactions.

With AI increasingly delivering the starting content for our communications work, how do those starting out in the sector develop the experience to be able to undertake critical review, when traditionally this has come from creating that initial content themselves? We will therefore need to now teach those insights that previously came from practical experience.

In the short term, current professionals will need upskilling in selecting and using the right AI tools and how to critically assess AI outputs. The review of AI outputs may need additional considerations to those we are familiar with for human-produced content.  Identifying fake news or unverifiable information and copyright infringement, both of which are very real and very important considerations with today’s AI tools accessing publicly information sources, are two relevant examples. However, we can assume, and in fact it is clearly already happening, that as we move forward, more organisations will develop their own AI tools populated with pre-selected data/information to hopefully address parts of these specific challenges in the creation phase. And again, the large publishing houses could have an important role here, by providing guaranteed peer-reviewed-only data as a source.

In the longer term, although general industry knowledge will undoubtedly remain foundational to our roles, it will be the human strengths of strategic thinking, consultancy and other softer skills that will become more important.

We are not currently in a world where we are discussing how AI might impact us – as it is already transforming our sector and will continue to do so. We have to quickly adapt to ensure that, as individuals and organisations, we maintain the necessary understanding and skills to remain current and successful in our communications work. We need to be augmenting the technological advances with our important human strengths and expertise, building our human skills in the areas where they will remain predominant.

One thing is for sure – although AI may not take our jobs, if we don’t embrace AI, and adapt and develop the skills we will need for the AI world, then somebody else will.