The Priyanka Shinde Podcast | Strategy | Execution | Leadership

#21: Leading With AI: Enhancing Communication

Priyanka Shinde Season 1 Episode 21

In today's fast-paced and technology-driven world, effective communication is more important than ever for success in both personal and professional settings. Effective communication is not always easy with the complexity and multiple levels of granularity.

With the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its integration into various tools and platforms, communication has now been taken to a whole new level. AI can become a powerful ally in enhancing productivity, optimizing collaboration, and streamlining various aspects of our daily lives. 

In this episode, I explore practical ways to use AI tools like ChatGPT to enhance and boost communication leading to empowered individuals who can make big impact.

Join me to learn how you can be more productive, collaborate faster and improve your writing skills by leveraging the power of AI

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 Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Unleash Your Leadership. Thank you for joining me today and hope you're doing well. Communication. Let's talk about communication. It's one of the most important. But most complex thing as well. It's hard. For us to communicate in a manner that the other person gets the message.

And that can be due to many, many reasons.   In today's fast paced. World that's technology driven, effective communication is just more important than ever for the success in both professional and personal life.

So much is going on. In this world today, there's so much information overload. People don't have enough time. This multiple devices, multiple sources.  How do you make sure that there is effective communication? With all of this complexity and the multiple levels of granularity that is present.

Communication can really help also improve productivity and collaboration.

 What can we do?  Here's where. AI or artificial intelligence comes into the play. the integration of various tools and platforms. Communication can really now be taken to another level? It can be. Easier to communicate in some ways.



AI. Can really help. And support the communication strategy that you may have.  That would help in enhancing productivity, optimizing the collaboration. And even , streamlining various aspects of our life.

So. How can AI. Help with communication. How can we enhance our communication? Through AI. I wanted to share with you a few things that I thought would be interesting to explore on what AI can do. I want to talk to you about some of the. Scenarios where we can utilize AI and also share with you some examples or even give you some prompts that you can use, especially when we talk about AI today.

You're talking about Chat GPT a lot,  these are language models that are able to understand and really understand the context and meaning of what you're trying to ask it to do. When you provide certain information. With that in mind. And of course there are other AI tools that can also support and you can use it in conjunction with ChatGPT.

For example, first, let's talk about note taking. This is something that a lot of us have to do, especially. I mean if you know, I come from a background of technical program management. And there are a lot of meetings. A lot of us have to attend a lot of meetings, which is a whole another problem.

Which I would not get into today. But taking notes, during meetings can be tedious. ? Often many important details can be lost or even overlook  often . Certain team members unfairly become default note-takers we don't want that. It is also difficult for any note taker to be able to multitask during such meetings. How do you expect them to take the notes, pay attention to what's being said, and then contribute to the conversation in a meaningful way.

If you pull an AI powered note-taking tools like , fireflies, and Otter. These can become our assistance in the meeting. Not only can they transcribe these discussions accurately, but they can sometimes also provide some summarization features.  For example, if you're in a team meeting, And you're discussing some project updates.

You can use a transcription tool, like fireflies or Otter to join the meeting. And take notes for you. Or it might just record the whole meeting. . Now, once this meeting is over, you can ask an AI tool to summarize the key points,. Or action items. Assignees.  You can extract whatever specific information you need from the transcriptions.

, maybe you can use chat GPT. To do that.

This will really help you quickly compile everything into a comprehensive list and share it out with your Meeting. Attendees.  An example prompt that you can use is . Please summarize key points and action items from meeting transcription below, and then you copy paste your transcription in there. You do this in chat GPT and you can provide it a transcription.

And then you can ask it to summarize the key points and action items. Or, you can say list out the action items. Our assignees and due dates based on the meeting transcription. And you paste that in of course there's assumption being made here that in your meeting, you discussed, what is the action item you talk about? Who's going to do it and when it is due,

That's the way that the. Transcription can capture. There is certain limitations into the word count or character count of what ChatGPT. intake. So make sure you're able to adjust that if you're having some conversations that are not relevant either before or. At the end of the meeting, you can remove that from the transcription. So that ChatGPT gets the main portion of the meeting. That's important. To be able to summarize.

Let's move on to another example, status updates. A lot of TPMS and even other leaders have to provide status updates. Providing these regular updates to stakeholders, crucial for keeping them informed of the program's progress, as well as making sure that everybody is aligned on what's going on.

However many of these reports need to cater to different levels of audiences you might need. To send a report to executive leadership, you might need to send a report to  partner teams and the leaders over there. Or might be your core team. You also want to make sure that your, the way you are communicating in your.

Program reports aligns with the company culture.  Keeping all of this in mind can be very daunting for somebody who's still trying to understand what's the communication style that they should use.

This is where. AI. or Chat GPT can come to the rescue.  Let's assume that you are responsible for sending out or preparing a program. A review or status update for a software development program. And you can ask ChatGPT to generate suggestions for writing these reports based on your audience and company culture.

Provide some parameters, like type of audience technical, or non-technical the level of detail that you're looking for. Maybe a preferred tone, like, is it formal or informal? And then ChatGPT can create an initial status update structure for you. You can even take that a step further.

And ask ChatGPT and provide maybe a basic template. Maybe your company or team has a template and you can put it out there and say, how can I make it better? Ask it to refine your content based on what your goals are for that report. If you want to highlight certain milestones or risks or achievements.

Then ChatGPT or similar AI tool can help you incorporate that. And maybe once you've added and created a report, maybe. Input it again into ChatGPT and ask to see if it and ask it to reframe it and make it more clear or concise, or even tweak and remove any Redundancies or optimize the overall flow of the report.

Some prompts that you can use.   Suggest some ways to structure my program status report for a technical audience in a formal tone. Another example can be. How can I refine this program status report to highlight the achievements of the team?

Here's one more example. I want to report. Project risks to management. In a. Non-technical manner. Help me modify the report accordingly.

So try out these these prompts out and see what it comes up with. And then again, of course, use your judgment to make tweaks to the suggestions. But what this will do is get you along faster.

Now you can also use AI power tools. For reminders and collaboration. Keeping tracks of action items. Not that you have a bunch of action items from the meetings. You still need to keep track of them. And there's still important deadlines. And to keep, , on top of all of this can be challenging.

Things are buried in email threads, chat messages, meeting notes, . Integrating AI powered reminders into collaboration tools like slack or Google calendar. Really helpful. One thing that that really works. Imagine you receive an email, , with specific action items or you just need to create a task or a reminder for yourself. Of course, sometimes you can ask Google to do it, or you can manually send that reminders but instead of doing that.

You can connect it to a tool automation tool exactly or not. This is not necessarily fully AI powered, but there's a lot of similar AI. Tools that can be added as  as plugins into your email providers, your chat providers, and so on.  You can really create automations and, , for example, create a zap.

To extract the relevant details from the email and create a task with action items  with specifics and then a due date. And put it on your calendar. So that the next time you hit the, you know, that that's on your calendar and you won't be, won't be missing a deadline.

Now there's a couple of more things that I'm, I'm really excited about. These, , these are just some things to start with some things. A few people have been using more or less. But here's where really AI comes into the play. With emotion recognition and sentiment analysis.

Many companies, process, customer feedback, and that can be huge, . There are so many social media comments that can be  feedback that you receive through your online website. And it's very difficult to go through this large volume of feedback from customers and really understand what's happening across the different channels.

There can be social media emails and it can be overwhelming for a team who's trying to process all this manually and categorize each feedback. By implementing a AI powered sentiment analysis. You can automate this process. You can almost ask , okay, you can provide it. This all volume of data, and you can ask it to analyze the customer feedback and summarize the satisfaction levels and maybe areas of concern that you should work on.

Another great thing that AI can do. It's somewhat helped with some emotion recognition during video conferencing and virtual meetings. A lot of times what happens is. If you're leading a virtual meeting, you may not be able to see everybody on the screen. You may also not be able to see all of the features or facial expressions of somebody, . Because , if you're in a grid, it's going to be small or often you see the speaker view.

In this case, AI can really help. guage The participant's emotions or, , And see if they're engaged or disengaged. Or, , distracted, I don't know. And of course, , that's providing you some valuable feedback on engagement and overall sentiment. Which can be important for you to take action items later?  How can I make my meetings more engaging?

Or what can we do so that people are engaged from the start. And then what you can do is use this information to get more subjective feedback and have conversations with people. This can be really powerful because it will help other people feel more seen as well. Of course, if somebody is camera's off, you can't really do this. And then there's always some things that a human can detect better than AI, which I will always say.

But AI can give you a great start.

Finally. AI I can really help you improve your writing skills. For many people, English may not be their first language. It can also be really hard to just come up with the right way. To to respond to something. , especially with email communication, for example, if you want to understand the writer's sentiments.

  I AI can suggest an appropriate response. It can also help you refine the language. So it's more impactful and effective in getting the message across. It can really help you make sure you're using the appropriate vocabulary. Anyone say, okay, here's a more complex sentence. Let's, , simplified.

For example, if you're trying to compose an important email to pitch a project idea, To somebody senior. And you want to ensure that the tone conveys enthusiasm and confidence. And has all the information. To support the data without being overly assertive. A prompt can look like this, reframe this email and suggest appropriate adjustments to ensure the tone projects, enthusiasm, and confidence, and still professional.

Let's see what comes across. Does it feel like that's you. One of the things with using AI for writing. Is that. The more you train it to sound like you, it's going to start doing that slowly. Or if you know what you want to come across as if you want to come across as warm and personable or professional versus informal or casual, you can provide that data.

In the prompt. And then help reframe your responses.

And. As always, I would still recommend you need to make sure you're reading through. And making sure that is still something you would say. And now you're just syaing it better, but it is still something you would say.

This can also go beyond the overall,  just corporate or, or work life. Say you are a college student you're working on a research paper and you just want to ensure that research is clear and concise. You want to make sure that the overly complex sentences. Can be simplified so that your readers can really understand it. So maybe you can ask it to say, okay, identify and simplify the complex sentences in my research paper.

To enhance clarity and improve reader comprehension. So then what you can do is provide a script of your research. And then ask it to her. , if you don't want it to change the whole thing, you can say, okay, identify the sentences and just give them to me and give me alternate suggestions.

So then you can pick the suggestions you like or don't like that still align with what you wanted to say in your research paper.

Finally, if somebody is in marketing, ? This is another example. And you want to craft. An email campaign that's persuasive for a product launch. You can ask, it can create an email on what you would want to say and then get a second recommendation from ChatGPT to suggest. And see if the language is persuasive enough and is it impactful and effective?

Sometimes it can help you. Help you give some parameters, like what makes a good persuasive email campaign? That's a good prompt as well. Because then it will give you that and you can start putting that together. It can help you jumpstart some of the work you're doing. This does not mean that you blindly copy everything that ChatGPT because that is really important. Again.

All of these tools are meant to support you. They're meant to make your work faster. And they're meant to give you a jumpstart. But there is still a layer of your own  personality and your own. Effort that needs to go in. I hope you found this helpful as we know, I mean, there's so much that can be done with AI and chat GPTM and it has of course revolutionized.

How we communicate, how we collaborate.  Really embracing these tools will empower us to focus on. Interactions that are more meaningful innovation and strategic thinking. And all these repitative things can go to, to AI, ? I mean, who wants to do the same thing over and over again? So. As we continue to explore and integrate AI into our communication workflows. It's really essential to strike that balance. Like I was saying, between the human touch and the efficiency of AI.

I mean after all effective communication is not just about  conveying information, but also about understanding empathy and building strong relationships. I can undoubtedly help us in this journey. But it is ultimately for us to utilize it responsibly and ethically for the betterment of our professional lives. 

Okay. I hope. That you are excited about what AI can do and, , try it out, let me know how it's going and you have other ideas share that with me. And I look into some more things around AI as well. And really, if you're a leader and your teams. Are not using AI. You need to think about how can you move your teams forward faster with AI? 

with various ways. So keep tuning in. Thank you for your time today. And I will see you in another episode of unleash your leadership. Bye and take care 

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