By Kerry Sheehan, Chart.PR, AIinPR Vice Chair,

If you fancy knowing how AI will help make a super PR you, Superhuman Innovation: Transforming Business with Artificial Intelligence is a fascinating account of how artificial intelligence and machine learning enhance companies' and brands’ capabilities to innovate and deliver superior products and services.

Many books talk about AI, as we move further into it and read up on the constant stream of developments, advancements and the conversation around ethics and bias. But, Chris Duffey takes it to another level using AI to co-write the book.

Aimé – the co-author of Superhuman Innovation – is a creative AI assistant, which comes from the French phrase for ‘beloved’ (bien aimé) and also represents the idea of AI + me. Aimé reflects a foundational belief that AI will become humanity’s beloved co-creator and intelligent personal assistant. Chris Duffey and conversational AI agent, Aimé, have an insightful and lively dialogue describing the ways in which AI and machine learning can impact business innovation, supercharge the workforce and ‘up level’ humanity to superhuman capabilities.



In the context of this book, the AI function is a suite of technologies each building on a different set of concepts, approaches and infrastructures. Aimé is part conversational text and part conversational speech, and, via machine learning, will only get smarter over time.

The brilliance is the ability to dispel AI myths and highlight opportunities and limitations. AI is in use every day and Chris Duffey perfectly summed it up that AI will make us more efficient in all our tasks. As we’ve already said, AI really is the PR’s intelligent assistant.

Virtual pal Aime and Chris have authored this insightful guide on how the human machine interaction with AI can scale and harness big data.

With 80 per cent of the work involved with AI and machine learning is acquiring and preparing the data (Harvard Business Review), Superhuman Innovation argues that AI will supercharge the workforce and the world of work, and can be harnessed to deliver powerful change to how companies innovate and gain competitive advantage, particularly when a whopping 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created daily.

Chris and Aime give you a practical guide on how AI and machine learning are impacting not only how businesses, brands, and agencies innovate, but also what they innovate; products, services and content - key for all communicators.

In a world of product and pricing parity, the delivery of superior, hyper-personalised experience and of service has become the new PR and marketing, and the new real competitive edge. With AI, companies can harness the power of data, personalisation, and on-demand availability at the touch of an intelligent button. Superhuman Innovation discusses how AI will serve the next superstar innovators of tomorrow, by enabling them to see deeper insights and set sails for higher goals.

The book details the 5-pronged Superhuman framework of the key tenents of AI, which describes how it enables innovation through offerings of Speed - key for all communicators to know in their own roles and for the organisations, brands and clients they work for and advise:

• Speed
• Understanding
• Performance
• Experimentation
• Results

There’s also some fascinating insight into the world of business adoption of AI, and that it  essentially boils down to a set of tools to give businesses strategic advances in their market place - AI, ultimately, must affect the bottom line.

In terms of speed, AI can help organisations address the balance between short term and long term goals.  Every business has a data strategy regardless of whether it’s formally defined. If businesses don’t state or think through their strategy, one gets defined for them. But data should be driven by the business strategy, not the other way around. Businesses struggle when they allow data and infrastructure to define its strategy.

The book is supported by great case studies, illustrating the varied and innovative uses of AI across different industries. Companies featured include: Amazon, Apple, The Us Postal Services, Adobe, Google and many more, including Netflix which sites sleep as its only competitor!

The underlying aspects of Aimé embody three systems: AI Voice Recognition, AI Content Understanding and Summarisation, AI Content Creation and Generation. Voice Recognition and continuous dictation enables for human to system interaction through a voice-user interface (VUI) for tasks such as speech-to-text, text-to-speech, voice editing, formatting and spelling. AI Content Understanding and Summarisation technology reviews data bases, articles and research papers into quickly digestible content through approaches such as sentiment analysis, labelling and organisation of higher-level concepts based on contextual understanding. AI Content Creation and Generation is the ability for the system to develop concepts and ideas to aid the content creation process. The writing algorithms are designed to emulate the human writing process and help contribute ideas, titles, content and drafts.

AI and conversational agents are still in their infancy and because of that Aimé is not perfect. Aime is a mix of science and art designed to help deliver smarter, more efficient results faster by handling and analysing vast amounts of data. Aimé will learn and get smarter over time. The hope and vision with conversational agents such as Aimé is that they will be of service to humanity, helping us to not only work more productively but more intelligently.

Artificial Intelligence and voice systems like Aimé are a signal of how AI assistants will empower us across all aspects of our personal and professional lives. As AI matures it will continue to seamlessly fit into our habits and needs. But, it’s important to remember that AI assistants don’t work as well without us. They need us as much as we need them!

There’s a saying attributed to Albert Einstein that the true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination; this is one of the major themes conveyed in the book. In the case of AI, the true measure of intelligence is intelligent imagination. What we mean is that imagination can now be more informed and more tangibly enlightened through the unlocking of data.

Humans crave new experiences. AI can now up level humanity to be even more creative: Computational Creativity. The strategic relationship between human creativity and computational creativity is not only powerful but can be a force for good.

In summary, without data it is impossible to provide optimum experiences. It introduces a wide set of challenges. Have a look at these challenges, they bring phenomenal opportunities.

The book really does unpack AI to make you feel confident and excited about these future-focused technologies, which must be firmly part of the communicator’s knowledge and toolkit.

Superhuman Innovation: Transforming Businesses with Artificial Intelligence by Chris Duffey has been published by Kogan Page. CIPR members can get a 25 per cent discount of all Kogan Page books: www.koganpage.com/listing/cipr-members.