What’s in Ragan’s AI Toolkit

Artificial intelligence (AI) is moving so fast that all the developments can be tough to keep up with. As generative AI tools like Chat GPT create new opportunities to streamline our content workflows, new risks around sharing proprietary information and new opportunities to craft guidelines for responsible use, many communication leaders are reluctant to dive in.

This is why Ragan’s Communications Leadership Council compiled our first-ever AI Toolkit— collecting resources ranging from exclusive templates, partner research, and articles to certificated courses, guidelines, and videos.  Let’s look at some of its highlights.

Member-exclusive AI guidelines and resources

With AI applications and use cases evolving every day, it helps to have a private place to work through things. That’s exactly how Ragan’s Communication Leadership Council has helped members socialize their progress on the topic, and it’s yielded some great resources. One member presented a proprietary study at our spring member retreat, completed as part of their graduate thesis, on how employees at their organization feel about the quality of the content produced with generative AI. The member had employees look at different pieces of the same content—one produced with the help of AI, one without, and one with a hybrid of the two. The results, available as a deck exclusive to members, are telling.

These results also led the member to construct some generative AI adoption principles for employees, along with a revised code of corporate conduct that addresses the ethical use cases, and guardrails around using AI (don’t feed it any proprietary information, for starters).

Other member-exclusive resources include research articles about what you can include in your own generative AI policy, a list of helpful AI use cases, roundtable discussions among members with insights into how large enterprise organizations are implementing the tech, and more.

Ragan’s AI study with The Conference Board

What worries communicators and marketers most about AI? This was the core question in a joint study that Ragan conducted with The Conference Board. “Practitioners of both disciplines expressed concern about a variety of open questions that remain around the technology,” wrote PR Daily Executive Editor Allison Carter in her summary of the findings. “Chief among them were lack of accuracy and misinformation, legal uncertainties and data security and privacy.”

The full study is available, ungated, in the toolkit.

Ragan’s complete AI Certificate Course

This past July, Ragan held its first-ever AI Certificate Course for Communicators. Week one of this three-part series featured Nova Lorraine, author and founder of Raine Magazine’s “AI for Creatives” podcast, talking with Julie McCoy, president and founder of Content at Scale, around the prompts and tools that communicators can feed ChatGPT to aid in their writing.

The second installment featured Lorraine and Molly Lopez, founder and CEO of Sparo, demonstrating what communicators can do with AI image generation tools.

The last course, which saw Lorraine joined by Mekanism Social Strategy Director Jeff MacDonald and emerging tech lawyer Olubikola (Buki) Ogunsakin, dove into the strategy and storytelling of AI with a focus on use cases that fulfill larger business goals.

The full AI Toolkit is available exclusively to members of Ragan’s Communications Leadership Council.  For more information on how to join and access additional resources, click here.