I was pleased when Jim O’Leary, CEO, North America, and Global President, Weber Shandwick, agreed to talk about his AI journey.
O’Leary says this AI-powered approach has also allowed him to essentially scale himself. “Knowledge doesn’t just live in my head or inbox,” he says. “It exists in a widely accessible way that informs our work and systems.”
For an all-hands email, for example, O’Leary’s writing agent—which is accessible to everyone in the CEO office—is capable of producing a high-quality draft tapping the central repository for relevant meeting notes, timely articles he’s saved via a news curation platform, and his library of memos (to get his writing style and tone right).
I asked O’Leary if he’s contemplated creating a chatbot that employees could query instead of coming to him for answers. He says he hasn’t turned himself into a bot, but Weber Shandwick employees do have access to a proprietary platform called Halo, whose AI agents leverage the consultancy’s intellectual property to produce client-specific press releases, proposals, and more.
O’Leary says his office’s embrace of AI has, in turn, stoked employee usage of AI software. “I think it’s empowering the team,” he says.
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