Communications has always been part art, part science. Creativity, empathy, and strategy are best paired with research and data. Now AI is bringing more science to the art by accessing previously unavailable intelligence.
Sean Austin, founder of Helios Life Enterprises, previously leveraged AI at Spotify to analyze music data. He’s now applying similar techniques at Helios to profile CEO communications during earnings calls.
AI can detect stress levels, deception, and other vocal nuances that provide powerful insights for investors as well as the communication teams coaching the executives.
In this episode of “The Disruption Is Now,” host Greg Matusky talks to Sean about how AI is augmenting the investor relations and corporate communications practices by giving their role new work and new value.
AI tools like the one Helios has developed are transforming best practices in PR, content creation, media training, and beyond. Rather than replacing jobs, it’s ushering in new skills and areas of expertise that will give communicators an even more important role in their organizations.
Watch now:
Key takeaways:
AI tone analysis provides communicators powerful feedback. AI technology developed by Helios can detect stress levels and deception in earnings calls and other high-stakes executive communications. Tone of voice can vary for many reasons, but with more insight into how messages are delivered, coaches and PR professionals can better identify areas of improvement for executives.
Music recommendations set the stage for executive communication analysis. Sean draws parallels between his previous work developing AI systems for music recommendation at Spotify, and his current company analyzing CEO communications. In both cases, AI is augmenting experts rather than replacing them, by processing huge volumes of data to uncover previously inaccessible nuance that leads to better results, whether in music discovery or investor communications.
Generative AI allows “coding” through natural language. Greg discusses how tools like ChatGPT allow non-technical professionals to generate applications by providing natural language prompts and instructions. For example, he “coded” a press release generator with a 700-word prompt guiding users through the process.
Key moments:
- What we can learn from “conversational intelligence” (1:39)
- Why we don’t need to fear AI (4:04)
- How Sean’s time at Spotify inspires his work at Helios (7:34)
- How AI can assist investor relations teams (9:43)
- Using AI to code in natural language (12:43)
- Why Sean is a big fan of generative AI tool Claude (11:23)
- How AI democratizes coding and data analysis (14:38)
