In Conversation with Wayne Aspland: Your staff are pasting customer data into ChatGPT. Now what?

There's a scene in the movie Bargain Call, I don't know if you know the movie, where, where the head of the company walks into the boardroom, and it's talking about the GFC back in, in 2000, early 2000s.

And he makes this comment about, "I've seen lots of things, lots, lots of ups and downs over the years in finance, but this is it for me.

This is it.

This is the moment." And I think this is the case for comms.

I think right now is the time that comms needs to step up, not just for i- its own future benefit, but also because organizations genuinely need them.

Mm.

They genuinely need our skills moving forward.

The same thing applies, and you'll see this in the report, the same thing applies to HR and co- and change as well.

We all need to step up and start taking the reins of this AI transformation we're in at the moment.

And the development of AI, we've had conversations about this, but I think it's a real opportunity for, for professional communicators to actually step up and explain and work with senior management to ensure that it's used appropriately within organizations, and that those risks that we all know are better av- avoided, right? It's gonna raise the profession up.

Absolutely.

And, and this is one of the critical things that we need to be doing.

The, in, in the research that I've done, there's something that I've called the training train wreck, and w- what it is, it's basically people aren't being trained very well, and in many cases not being trained at all.

Mm.

As a result, they're developing some very bad habits, and there's been global research done on this to show that a large number of people are taking it easy a little bit because of AI.

They're using AI results without validating them.

Yeah.

They're...

And here's, here's the real kicker.

They're actually using company and customer data in public AI tools, so this is the whole shadow AI piece.

Yeah.

And that's a train wreck.

That, that is, you know, a pending disaster, and it's one of the, one of the really important points about our role in this and the need to train, the need to engage people in this, um, and the need to drive it in the organization, is that this isn't just a, "Ooh, this would be nice to have," conversation.

So, you know, engaged people are much more effective organizations.

This is actually a risk discussion.