Influencing Generative AI: a guide for health organisations
A stakeholder is defined as “a group or individual who can affect or who is affected by the achievement of an organisation's objective.”
Recently, PR and communications leaders have been converging over the idea that, given its significant and growing power as answer generator or content creator, Generative AI must now be seen as a priority stakeholder.
The scale of opportunity when it comes to influencing this new priority stakeholder led to research and consulting firm, Gartner, forecasting that PR budgets will double in 2027 because of Generative AI.
It also led to impact-obsessed industry body, the Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communications (AMEC), advising that PR campaigns should be designed, executed and evaluated with the explicit goal of shaping Generative AI’s output, sentiment and understanding in a way that aligns with organisational objectives.
So this week’s Vuelio webinar, ‘AI as the new PR and comms stakeholder’, was a timely one. The fact that it featured Dr Anne Gregory, Emeritus Professor of Corporate Communication at the University of Huddersfield and Stuart Bruce, AI Partner of the Public Relations Consultancy Association (PRCA), who trained our core team on AI principles a few months ago, made it even more appealing.
Is AI a stakeholder?
The speakers agreed that AI is a stakeholder because it is creating content in the same way that a journalist creates content, or a politician makes speeches or a think tank writes a policy report.
Similar to some of the above, Generative AI creates this content by synthesising information from lots of different sources and making judgements, based on the quality and volume of those sources, as to what information to trust and, therefore, include.
Although it wasn’t discussed in the webinar, there has been some push back against the idea of seeing AI as a stakeholder, with some academics arguing that you can only be a stakeholder if you have an interest in the outcome and can be held accountable.
In my personal view, whether AI is seen as a stakeholder, a channel or a gatekeeper is not important and, instead, we should focus on the two things that actually matter:
AI now has a significant and growing influence over your target audiences
AI can be positively influenced itself through strategic communications strategies
So how influential is Generative AI now?
Professor Anne Gregory said that for a growing number of people, AI is becoming a “single source of truth.”
I think this is a very powerful idea.
Whereas, a few years ago, a person might use Google to surface the most important information about a healthcare company, product or initiative, in most cases, they then had the task of synthesising that information themselves.
To do this they might have had to make all sorts of judgements as to the extent they trusted the subject of their search and each source of information. Those judgments would have been based on visibility in search engines, media profile, customer reviews, social media followings, community recommendations, quality of the website and much more.
Now Generative AI does the legwork, looking at and synthesising these disparate sources and then presenting its conclusions back in a seemingly well-informed and definitely conversational and persuasive tone of voice.
Professor Gregory pointed out that people often claim that they don’t believe everything they are told by the media or social media, and yet, the evidence says otherwise. In her view, AI is a far more potent vehicle for information because of how the content is presented and its persuasive tone. In her view (and mine), it would be dangerous for organisations to underestimate AI’s potential to influence.
So how can health organisations influence GenerativeAI?
Earned media is currently the strongest driver of visibility when it comes to influencing Generative AI, but the speakers emphasised that, often, PR professionals think too narrowly when it comes to engaging with stakeholders. I absolutely agree with this.
One of the most important elements of our MERTO Map strategic planning method is to complete a stakeholder audience audit, to identify the full breadth of relationships that an organisation has or could establish in order to achieve its objectives.
Only then, when we understand those stakeholder audiences, the actions we want them to take and each of their unique priorities do we start to think about content and engagement. This webinar reinforced the importance of this way of thinking as, while earned media is very influential, in the health space, support from NHS organisations, think tanks, healthcare associations and influential charities will also have significant impact on Generative AI.
In this webinar, Stuart talked about the ‘3 R’s’ - a framework we also dug into during his Evergreen training session.
Reputation - AI is looking for signals of authority and consistency. If a health organisation has a solid digital profile, with media coverage in high authority outlets, and consistency across its own website, social media and third-party websites, Generative AI is more likely to trust it. It applies the same method to spokespeople too and so any spokesperson should also have a digital biography available in a trusted location.
Relevance - AI places a lot of trust in specialist niche titles that demonstrate particular subject expertise. The speakers said that this is increasing the importance of trade media titles. We have had great success with campaigns focusing on healthcare trade media and this development suggests that our journalist relationships are set to become even more valuable. One other interesting discussion was around the fact that many top tier mainstream media titles (The Times, The Telegraph, The Independent etc) are hidden behind a paywall, which means AI can’t access them. The result is that non-paywalled, free-to-access news sites and websites can have greater influence.
Recency - AI likes content that is fresh and new. The speakers advised that, in the case of campaigns, organisations might benefit from keeping them alive by regularly presenting new angles and data to keep them as current as possible. This presents a real opportunity for organisations to select a small number of areas on which to focus and to work hard to establish a regular and meaningful cadence of PR activity around them. For example, our work on veteran healthcare for the Royal College of General Practitioners, which won the CIPR Award for the UK’s Best Long-Term Campaign last year, has been refreshed and repurposed frequently over the last four years, which will appeal to Generative AI.
There was also a lesson about the importance of being part of the discussion. Stuart shared an example of a dispute between a university and a trade union, where each adopted very different approaches. The university prepared a comment and supplied it to a small number of journalists who requested it directly, whereas the trade union was much more proactive in sharing its point of view across a series of comments, with multiple media outlets, and over an extended period of time.
When Generative AI platforms like ChatGPT, CoPilot and Gemini were asked about this dispute as part of a reputation audit, each one majored on the point of view of the trade union, because its point of view was much more visible and verifiable. Having recently supported a healthcare organisation with a dispute involving a previous supplier and an NHS commissioner, I conducted a similar experiment, and came to a similar conclusion. By sharing a point of view that demonstrated a clear position and updating it frequently over several months, Generative AI perceived that the commissioner and the previous supplier were at greatest fault for the issues.
What practical steps should I take to start influencing Generative AI?
As the PRCA advises, the first step is to conduct an AI Reputation Audit, to understand how your organisation and its key spokespeople are currently represented in AI-generated answers. You can cover multiple factors here, including how its products or services are described, how highly it is rated, how it compares to competitors, among other things. Carrying out this exercise across multiple Generative AI platforms will give the fullest picture.
The information gathered here can be used to inform a strategy for correcting inaccuracies and closing gaps. Our MERTO Map methodology is an outcome-focused approach that supports healthcare organisations to focus on their target outcome, understand the stakeholders that influence it - in this case, Generative AI and the platforms that inform AI - and devise a programme of work to drive each one to act in the desired way.
Best practice would then be to put in place a regular programme of work designed to improve how the organisation is represented in AI tools and to monitor changes over time, with agreed metrics and reporting into senior leadership.
Conclusion
In a landscape where Generative AI is becoming a ‘single source of truth’ for health audiences, remaining passive is not a viable strategy. It has influence and so it should be influenced.
A comprehensive AI Reputation Audit can help you to understand how your organisation and its spokespeople are currently perceived, which is the ideal ‘first step diagnostic’ exercise. We can help you with this.
By then integrating these insights into our outcomes-focused MERTO Map methodology, we can support you to develop a structured roadmap for Generative AI Influence, so that you can correct inaccuracies, close visibility and credibility gaps and, ultimately, ensure that your message is the one AI trusts the most. Use the AI Reputation Audit form below to find out more.
Leigh Greenwood is the founder and managing director of Evergreen PR, the healthcare PR agency that makes health happen. He is a chartered PR professional who has been working in healthcare PR, public affairs and communications for the last 20 years. He has worked across the whole spectrum of healthcare and has won more than 40 industry awards for effective health campaigns that generated measurable outcomes.
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