To start, AI tech is integrated into many of the tools we use daily, including Adobe Creative Cloud, Slack, Microsoft 365, Grammarly, Jira, and others. Many of our clients—tech and non-tech alike—are eager for us to use AI to boost efficiency, especially when their budgets are constrained. Though we have much yet to learn, and the reliability and strength of this tech are still works in progress, AI is already helping us deliver more, faster, while still maintaining the high standards our clients expect.
To be clear, we’re not blindly churning out AI-generated graphics, copy, video or other deliverables. We most often work with AI like a process assistant: speeding up and documenting workflows, improving planning, and freeing us up to focus on the high-touch, creative work our clients rely on us for. Tools like Copilot for Microsoft 365, ChatGPT, and Claude are helping us streamline compliance checks, analyze financials, plan sales campaigns, maintain accurate meeting notes, answer audit questions, and support non-native English speakers or those with accessibility needs in their communication. This week, I used ChatGPT 4o to slice and dice scrolling screenshots for future OCR processing, among other things—a task that would have otherwise required me to spend quite a bit more time and money to accomplish.
AI isn’t replacing creativity or hard work, in other words. It’s helping us deliver thoughtful, high-quality content-related services more efficiently. At the end of the day, I just don’t think it’s financially viable or sustainable for a client services company like ours to opt out of this monumental shift. Working with the available tools, with humans firmly in the mix and in charge, doesn’t mean we’re ignoring the deep, unresolved issues around ethics, safety, and privacy. We have twice-weekly AI discussion/training meetings where we routinely look directly at those issues in all their thorniness. For us, right now, the best path forward is not in rejecting AI altogether, but in engaging with these questions head-on: getting comfortable with AI, understanding its limitations, and using that knowledge to guide our internal teams and clients toward ethical, responsible AI use as the tech evolves.
Our goal remains the same: to help clients solve business problems while creating good jobs for (human!) content professionals and related experts, even if those jobs look a little different in an AI-powered world.
Please join us on Tuesday mornings for our regular, open-to-the-public AI chat—RSVP on our site for the meeting link. And you can always reach me at kreilly@steyer.net with your questions, comments, and ideas. I’d love to hear from you!
Thanks,
Katelyn
Photo by Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash