Do corporate communications need the human touch?

By Richard Peters

Everyone’s talking about AI – and that’s a good thing! We should be embracing any new technology that promises to lighten our workload, and artificial intelligence based on generative models, which learn the patterns of their input data and then generate new data that is similar, certainly seems to fit the bill. And while we’re all still learning what ChatGPT and the like are capable of, these ongoing discussions are an important way to disseminate the experience we gather from using them throughout society.

The latest wave of AI innovations has the potential to revolutionise, well, everything! But I’d like to focus in on one particular area: corporate communications. Here, as elsewhere, there are plenty of tasks that are ripe for automation, meaning there’s definitely scope for AI to speed things up. But when it comes to copywriting and translation, even the cleverest algorithm can’t outcreate the human mind. If you really want your brand to shine, you need a human to polish your comms.

AI is nothing new for Klein Wolf Peters. The translation industry has years of experience working with automation tools and machine translation. These systems can save a translator time and effort in coming up with a first draft; for instance, by spotting sections of copy that a customer has used before, perhaps in another context or in a slightly different form. Such systems can even produce a reasonable, if often clunky and sometimes spectacularly incorrect, translation of previously unseen text.

Using software to automatically generate sentences, or even whole blocks of text, saves me the seconds it would take to type those words manually. And while “seconds” might sound trivial, over hours, days, and weeks they add up to a significant chunk of time.

It’s in the later stages of producing a translation where automation comes up short and human ingenuity triumphs. A computer program can review my text and suggest where I should put a comma or a dash – but it can’t tell me whether the message I’m crafting is compelling, or if my words will sweep readers off their feet. That calls for the sensibilities of a professional reviewer who has truly experienced language in all its richness: in other words, a human.

Any new work process comes with disruption, confusion, and a period of adjustment, and AI is no different. But at Klein Wolf Peters, our teams of language experts have a thorough understanding of similar systems, so we’re well positioned to take advantage of these new tools as they appear. We are, if you like, already “AI-adjacent” since our processes have always blended the benefits of automation with the inimitable sparkle of human creativity.

Because we’re further along the learning curve, we can save our customers the double trouble of a) discovering how these novel tools work and b) having to restructure their own workflows to accommodate them.

We can give our customers in international corporate communications peace of mind. When they entrust their translation, editing, and copywriting projects to us, they can be sure we’ll make best use of the latest techniques – and that the finished product will be infinitely better for having been given that human touch.