Building and Leading the AI-Enabled Enterprise Comms Team - with Megan DiSciullo

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Daniel Nestle: Welcome, or welcome back to the trending communicator. I'm your host, Dan Nestle. So how do we know what's trending in communications and marketing? One answer, of course, is to listen to the trending communicator. I mean, it's in the name of the show. And, you know, we can know more about what's trending by hearing what trendsetters and trend watchers are saying. In my long experience, there are a lot of smart people in our profession. But are they all trendsetters? Are they all trending? You know, smart doesn't always mean forward thinking, innovative, risk taking, and trending. But today I can tell you with 10,000% certainty that I'm about to have a conversation with someone who is all of the above and more. She's got one hell of a trophy case. PR news, top women in PR, PR week.

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Daniel Nestle: 40 under 40, Sabre and Shorty awards for her campaigns, corporate initiatives, and that's just one shelf in her decade at one of the world's leading consulting firms, she's built and led her comms team to win PR week's best places to work in communications and was robbed. I mean, she got an honorable mention for best in house team from the same publisher. She's always pushing the envelope, a champion for integrating technology and recently generative AI, of course, into communications. So much so that she's become a recognized thought leader and model for enterprise comms leadership. I'm thrilled to talk about AI, the cutting edge of corporate communications, what it takes to build a career like hers. Anything under the sun, really.

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Daniel Nestle: With my guest today, please welcome to the show the newly minted senior managing director of us and Mexico communications for PwC, the marvelous Megan Desiullo. Megan, it's great to see you.

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Megan DiSciullo: Well, thank you for having me. And I know your listeners can't see it, but I'm blushing.

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Daniel Nestle: Well, it's all true. It's all true. And I am, first of all, we have trending communicators on the show. That's what it's about. And in the last few years, I have, you know, I've been really involved in the profession as a whole. You know, Paige, society, prsa, whatever it is, mostly page society. And, like, one name keeps coming across with me all the time. And that's Megan de shulo. Megan de shule. Megan de shula. We've been on panels together. You know, there was the whole. There was the innovation award, which, you know, full disclosure, I won that award, and Megan was the. Thank you very much. And Megan was the. Was the runner up, I suppose, as it were.

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Megan DiSciullo: But it's happy to behind your sales.

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Daniel Nestle: Oh, my goodness. But it's kind of silly in a way. There are very different reasons for that. But I'll tell you, that was the only award, I think, that Megan hasn't won, apparently, according to everything that I've seen. But it's interesting, because I wanted to start off. I'm going to ask you to talk about your journey, but first, I want to have a little bit of a confessional, and I don't always do this. And trust me that you'll have a lot more time after this to chat. But I first met Megan, gosh, almost ten years ago, when she was a brand new PwC, leader, you know, coming out of Edelman and moving into PwC.

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Daniel Nestle: I was at Edelman at the time, and it's relevant to our conversation today, because the stuff that were working on at Edelman at the time was this cutting edge, leading edge of communications. And I had a mad genius boss named Dave Rosen, who, by the way, is wonderful. And he and I formulated this. This crazy thing called predictive analytics. Nowadays, you know, nowadays, you can just kind of go on to perplexity or chat GPT or something and get your answers for these kinds of questions in seconds. I. But what were trying to do was to take a particular client of ours and determine what topics were relevant to their industry and then give them a playbook for what you should be writing about and writing content about for the next six weeks to three months.

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Daniel Nestle: Short horizon, but supposed to be really, really on point. So I was tasked with doing this for PwC, and without getting into the gory details, I said, it takes, like, a few seconds to do that. Now, back then, it took 65 hours of serious work over one week, and then 75 hours over the following week, in the parlance of agency life, that would be called over, servicing the client in a massive way, just by hourlies alone. We were way in a hole on that project. Now, Dave Rosen, like I said, a genius could do this very quickly, but nobody else could. It was fairly complex. Anyway, did this big project, came up with this big presentation, and I remember, first time I met Megan, and were working with a. With Brendan. Gosh, Brendan Mullins at the same time, right?

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Daniel Nestle: And Brendan and I were, like, working on this, and he's like, you're gonna be great. So we invite Megan in. The legendary Megan Desiule, who had just left Edelman recently and she's had this massive reputation and you know, I was a little scared, I will tell you. I will admit that, which. It's very silly, I know it's very silly. But I was also kind of scared because I didn't have confidence in the product, like in the predictive analytics. It was just like, it was so kind of high level and difficult to follow. I remember putting this in front of Megan, and Megan looks at me and goes, what?

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Megan DiSciullo: Sounds about right? That's about right, yeah.

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Daniel Nestle: Wait, what am I supposed to do with this? And I was like, I just put in like 135 hours of work on this thing and I wasn't. The sad thing is that I completely understood the what of it, because I couldn't figure it out really either. I mean, it was a lot of great topics that you could write stuff about, but it was a little kind off base. But anyway, Megan Washington was like, whats this all about? So I had that interaction with her and felt that, oh geez, I really disappointed the client. Dave was nice about it and Brendan was nice about it. The next time I saw Megan was seven or eight years later at this page society thing. And I could not have imagined a nicer person, a more gracious person. I dont think she even remembered that.

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Daniel Nestle: I kind of had that, you know, that massive project that didn't go right until I reminded her. Because I don't, you know, you tend to kind of get in your own mind about these things, but to say that we hit it off is an understatement. I mean, we've been on panels together, like I said, and we think so many of the same ways. But I just put that out there as a way as. For two reasons. First of all, the show like a. That, that you are one of the most, I don't know, forgiving certainly, but also forward thinking people and not afraid to call it the way you see it is kind of a big thing.

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Daniel Nestle: And I guess the second reason is because it just goes to show you that when you are in this business and when you're kind of doing what we do, your worst enemy is probably just inside your own head. And I didn't mean to make this an episode about mindset or imposter syndrome or any of that kind of stuff, but that's the background to how I met Megan. And to say that now we are like, we're talking about AI and Comtech and I'm. So when I got to the point where I was like, oh shit, Megan de Shulo is my peer and my friend, I could put the past behind in a lot of ways. I don't know if that makes a lot of sense. Maybe it does. You play an outsized role, believe it or not, Megan, in my own psychology. So thank you.

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Daniel Nestle: Thank you for all of that.

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Megan DiSciullo: I love that confession. But here's what I will say to you. One, we are a service business, regardless of where we're in this industry is small. And so one of my mentors told me early on, Megan, always be direct, so people know where you stand and there's no misinterpretation. But always be kind, because you never know when you will need people or just, this is a business of teaming. And so, you know, people want to work with people who are kind. And I remember that from my agency days. I would put a lot more effort into the client work and the clients that I really wanted to succeed because they were kind and they were helpful and they were confident, and they were smarteendez than the clients that weren't.

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Megan DiSciullo: So now that I'm on the client side and also on the server side, because I see that I have internal clients and I have a sizable team that I lead, it's one of my mantras. In fact, when I interview people, I tell very senior people who work for me, and they can vouch for this I have a no assholes role.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah, good one.

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Megan DiSciullo: When you go and you come here and you're a leader on this team, you are kind to people, you are cordial, and we team together because we end up spending so much time at our job, and at the end of the day, you want to work with and for people that you really like and that are like minded.

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Daniel Nestle: Absolutely. And, yeah, I can say there's no better words ever spoken, probably, about what you should be looking for in a job. And it's good to be around people who are the, your supporters and your advocates and so on. And when they cease to be or when the situation changes, it's no shame in moving right on. But, yeah, that was a slight digression from the beginning. I really want to get into your career, Megan, and how you got to where you're at, and then we'll talk AI and stuff. So why don't we start that way or start again that way? Wherever. Give us a little top line view of how does one become the senior managing director of communications at the largest or one of the largest consulting firms in the world?

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Megan DiSciullo: Yeah. So I have always been interested in this concept of purpose, and it was since I've been in college, I was in business school. I was taking an ethics class. And in the ethics class, were talking about almost that Milton Friedman philosophy, do business have an opportunity and a right and a responsibility to contribute beyond the bottom line? And I, as a college student, thought, yes, absolutely. But at that time, jobs in purpose or corporate social responsibility didn't exist. And I had done several internships, and I think everyone should do internships. I know they're really hard to get really coveted, but they give the right training ground. I did one at Flushman Hillard in their social impact marketing practice, working with NGO's and government, and I loved it.

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Megan DiSciullo: And I really wanted to parlay that type of work full time for companies to play out this theory that companies do have a big responsibility to be on their bottom line, to contribute back to their employees and society, communities, et cetera. And Richard Edelman, to his credit, was very forward thinking in that, and started a practice in 2005. And I was lucky enough to get plucked and be able to help build that practice with a number of really talented professionals who are now really on the forefront of what today we would call the corporate affairs space. But were not only doing crisis comps, but were actually working with companies to do strategic philanthropy work, build new programs that would help contribute back to society, help rethink the entire stakeholder landscape.

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Megan DiSciullo: One of my first assignments, and it was one of the most formidable that I have, was working with the business Roundtable right after Hurricane Katrina to build a coalition of companies that were going to advance rebuilding and recovery efforts. And what does that look like in major disasters? And how can companies band together, whether it's manufacturing companies or consumer good companies or airline companies, to give their products and services in the right way to help towards a common goal. And so worked in that space. In New York, in Chicago, I did a stint abroad, working in Europe and doing that, and it was a Europe was way further ahead in their perspective. And so it was great to see the different perspectives.

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Megan DiSciullo: And then I came back, and I, after nearly a decade at Edelman, wanted to try to create change from the inside out versus the outside in. I think many people who have been in agencies want to see what that looks like from the other side and get closer to the business. PwC was one of my clients, and it was one of my favorite clients, and I really felt like they were on the forefront. Bob Maritz was the senior partner in the time and really believed in this concept of giving back and being on the forefront of social purpose. So they created a role for me doing communications just in that space. And I got into that role and was able to do almost every job up until today. I helped reframe the entire communications department. I built our crisis department.

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Megan DiSciullo: I built our public affairs department. I built our social media department. In 2020, our then CEO, Tim Ryan called me and said, hey, Megan, I really love what you did with our external comms department and really modernizing it. Can you help bring the two functions, internal and external, together and supercharge that moving forward? And, oh, by the way, I would like change management to be a big part of the role because we're going to go through a major company reorganization, and comps and change are really important to that. And equally, I'm going to lay out a big strategy refresh for us that doubles down on trust and sustained outcomes to help our clients and our brand really differentiate us in the marketplace. And I want you to play a lead role in that.

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Megan DiSciullo: So took on that job and merged the teams together that we now have our modern day communications department. But what was so interesting about that merger, too, is that was at the same time we started to think about this idea of comtech and how do we use technology to supplement and complement our professional judgment. What is the suite of technology that we can use and the tools that can help with the tasks that we need to do from an efficiency standpoint, from an accuracy standpoint, and from an experienced standpoint. And that was our first foray into building a tech stack and modernizing our function and our first foray into sort of using tools in a different way. And that has been really helpful to us as we've started on our genai journey, because we have that education and that muscle memory.

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Megan DiSciullo: And so it's just been wild and fun and interesting all at the same time. There's never been a dull day.

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Daniel Nestle: That's great. It sounds like that kind of, I guess, pivot or aha over to tech. And by the way, Comtech or Comstech?

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Megan DiSciullo: Good question.

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Daniel Nestle: I don't know.

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Megan DiSciullo: I've seen both.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah, I've always leaned toward Comtech because I think that's the way that page society already originally framed it, Johnny Wada and so on. And Comstech seemed to be the Edelman version. And I don't know whether it's a the versus the situation, but I think Comstec is starting to win, much to my chagrin. But either way, Comte. Comtech. Total side note, not relevant. Just curious. The whole idea, though, of being in Comtech, and you said 2020, we started to work on that as an industry, I think as a profession, as the PRofession, formerly more like in 20, 1617 ish. And we started to get the ball rolling. And what does this stuff mean? Originally, were talking about it as, okay, well, marketing gets it. So what if we take the marketing technology stack, the Martech stack, and just substitute plop it over?

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Daniel Nestle: Got to do the same thing. We have to identify audiences. We got to figure out what the best places are to reach them, where they should reach them, what content is resonating with them, all this kind of stuff. And more than anything else, we can measure it all along the way, make our decisions far more strategically, efficiently, cost effectively, blah, blah. And you said that PwC really started, or full on embraced that around four or five years ago, and you were at the forefront of that. So how did that shift? Walk us a little bit through how that happened and where you kind of landed with what works and what doesn't work. And you can answer any way you want, but there's a lot of talk out there about if you can't measure it doesn't happen, blah, blah.

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Daniel Nestle: I think that's only partially true, especially in communications. But what's the balance between Comtech and coms? And, yeah, how did it all kind of get going? That's a really jumbled up question, but I think I'm giving you the reins. Go for it.

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Megan DiSciullo: Yeah. So I'm going to hit a little bit on page society. When page went out with its, I think now strategy, right before its current strategy, a big part of it was around brand and culture and data and analytics and Comsteche. And I was checking off. I was like, okay, we're involved in brand, we're involved in culture. And I started to get stumped. I was like, I don't know anything about data. I got into this profession because I love to storytell, I love to write, I love to talk to the media. In fact, I got out of finance because I don't want to do anything with numbers or spreadsheets or excel. And now you're asking me as a leader of a comms function to embrace data and analytics. And I was stuck.

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Megan DiSciullo: But I started to really think about the possibilities, and especially since I am in an accounting firm that loves numbers. Numbers is the love language at PwC, I started to think about how it could help us tell our stories better internally and externally, about our value. And then I thought about, because at that time, I had a very small team, frankly, productivity and efficiency. How can we do our jobs more efficiently with the resources that I have. And so I had a great leader who was my performance in digital comms leader. Brittany Long was my partner in this. And we started to build the tech stack, and were like, great.

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Megan DiSciullo: We have all these different tools and technologies, from a project manager to our journalist manager to, you know, social media tracker to, you know, all these things that will help us be more efficient and more effective at our jobs. I was like, great, I'm doing Comstec. This is amazing. But what I didn't realize is that the true challenge and opportunity for communications leaders today is not only picking the right tech stack and figuring out what's the right problem that you're trying to solve, from strategy to execution, it's then helping communicators embed that into the workflows. And that is truly where great change management comes in.

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Megan DiSciullo: You have anywhere in between, just like a change management curve where you have early adopters who, people who are all in and jump into the deep end, and then you have the very opposite where people say, gosh, is this going to take my job? And there's then everybody in between. And so the real lesson to me over the time that we've been investing in technology and tools is helping people understand the why and what it can do to help you, not only with your job, but with your stakeholders. And so let me give you a real life example. As we started to invest in tools and technology, were able to measure the health of our channels, whether it's our internal channels like Yammer, or our social media channels like LinkedIn and X and Instagram.

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Megan DiSciullo: But even more importantly, were able to move from a channel function to an audience function. So now when I look at the value of my communications function, what we're doing for the business, how we're building and protecting the brand, or driving culture or helping drive our strategy. I do it through an audience lens, and then I'm able to measure the health of each of our different audiences. And at PwC, the communications department has a bird's eye view, just like a CEO across all of our different departments.

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Megan DiSciullo: So I'm able to, in partnership with marketing, have a really great view of our buyer, but also take a look at our media, take a look at our policymakers, take a look at our partners, and look our regulators and say, how are we meeting the needs and the expectations of those stakeholders, and where are we doing well? Where are we not doing well? Where do we need to do something different? And that's been the value of comtech and measurement in a way different way than what I would have ever expected when we started this journey.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah, it's like opening the lid on a fresh potpourri. You don't know what you're going to get exactly. But then when that happens, wait a second, everything's delightful. Now, I know it's not always the case, but when you're going through this whole thing, this whole exercise of, okay, here's the cool tools and the tricks and the shortcuts and people on the team are, like you said, in various kind of levels of receptiveness on all of this, from the early adopters to oh my gosh, it's going to replace my job. What I found at the same time was that the spark of customer centricity, that has been the mantra of I don't know how many companies, every company really for quite a while now.

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Daniel Nestle: Let's stop navel gazing and let's start looking at what our customers and in our case, stakeholders want need where they are, rather than lording it over them and just telling them what they need to know. That's a massive change. I understand the need for change management at that time and I think throughout the various points of my career, the change management piece is probably missing in a lot of cases. But one thing that I always ran into, and maybe I would love to hear how you solve this issue, or if you did, is the comms team. And from a comms perspective, you're looking at these different stakeholders and let's just name one or two of them. You've got investors, you've got government, you've got media, you've got your customers and you've got the people who actually interact with the business.

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Daniel Nestle: You have employees and there's more. Each of them have very different kind of preferences and channels often, and they often don't have jive with what marketing wants to do. Right? So marketing is out there saying of course, and its very important to have paid advertising, its very important to have really good email marketing campaigns, et cetera. When we would come along and say were making these discoveries, we have some intelligence that we want to share. If it didnt kind of point in the same exact direction as what the marketing team wanted to do, we ran into a little bit of an issue, let's just say.

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Daniel Nestle: And when we decided, okay, we have these great audiences, we know how to reach them, we can do it almost for free with email marketing, for example, what we'll call email communications then either people are extremely receptive to it or they said no. Email marketing is the domain of the people who run our Salesforce team, et cetera. So did you ever run into those conflicts, and if so, how did you solve them?

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Megan DiSciullo: I think the partnership between marketing and communications in today's environment is critical. There's a lot of overlap in what the two functions do and a lot of complementary tactics that they can take advantage. Though in large organizations like PwC, we serve different objectives, but we work together, their hand in glove. I think data is the ultimate neutralizer. Whether the data is coming from the comms team, the marketing team, or from our client insights team, the data is telling us key insights about our audience that we need to know, whether it is things that we have, frankly, capability, but not credibility in the marketplace, then we need more marketing and comms in that area, places where the buyer wants more information from us about certain topics.

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Megan DiSciullo: One of the things that we learned from our policy research is that policymakers and Hill staffers loved our work in taxonit, were very well regarded, but they were craving for more information on workforce data and trust data on AI. And so we started to do a marketing communications campaign around those sorts of topics, and it was well received. And so the data should be a guide for the strategy and frankly, a mix of integrated marketing and communications topics. I'm in a business that's b, two b. No one buys an audit off of Instagram. And so there needs to be a lot of partnership between many teams to make something happen and to make the work stand tall. And I think that's really important to know that as communications team, partnerships with others teams is critical.

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Megan DiSciullo: One of the things that one of my bosses told me is that communication should always be the great backup, right? We never want to be first chair on anything. We want to be second chair supporting the business in all different aspects. And I think that's really exciting. We're there to serve the business, but we're also there to connect dots across the business in a way that no other function can. And in fact, that's what I tell my team. Our superpower is not that we do media relations or create great social copy or write great emails. In fact, we'll talk about this later. I'm sure Genai is doing that just well and just good enough, probably better in the future.

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Megan DiSciullo: Our superpower is the ability to connect dots and create stories and experiences for our stakeholders in a way that no technology at this point can do. And so embrace that and embrace the tools and the functions that you can collaborate on to be able to do that.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah. Once people start to understand that the tools that we have are enablers of these discussions, that's when it gets really powerful. It's just hard to get some of the, I think in legacy organizations right, in orgs that aren't and haven't been accustomed to anybody outside of Team X taking on some of the activities that Team X normally would do. It makes for sometimes an uphill battle. And that's where change management, culture change really needs to happen. And there's no amount of money, I think, that you can put down on the value of pilots and tests and stuff to use that data and show examples and gain permission and gain buy in over time. A lot of times you don't have a lot of time for that. I do think it's different in the b two B world for short.

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Daniel Nestle: Like B two B, you're more naturally. You're more naturally attuned to longer cycles and decision processes and understand that the influence over decisions to buy or to partner come from a multitude of sources. When you're looking at somebody who can walk down to Home Depot and pick up something off the shelf, it's a much simplified decision process. But just as important, clearly, right. It's just harder to figure out where does thought leadership play in that? Probably it doesn't necessarily at that moment, but it does six months earlier. It does ten months earlier. That's the hardest part to show the attribution of that whole process is the most difficult thing. I mean, Comtech helps, but I don't know where I'm going with this.

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Daniel Nestle: I was just trying to think about how we then pivot over from Comtech and integrate our marketing teams and our comms teams, get that culture going, looking at it as an enabler, then we start to say, well, we've got this baseline efficiency going. We're making progress in these different ways. We're showing data. We have dashboards, for crying out loud, where do we take our team? So what does that mean to. Okay, we now have a whole new function of data science, essentially within our comms team. Does that take away from people's day to day job of coming up with those stories and being the dot connectors or do we need to expand the teams? What's the mix? Did you come across that in your time? How did you deal with that?

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Megan DiSciullo: Yeah, let me just hit one point before I get to your question. I think it's really important for your listeners, and one of the things that I have found in having change management, a part of my function is that it has made me sharper as a communications professional about the experience. You put in the point about pilots as a 75,000 person organization, we can't just roll something out to all 75,000 people. And so it has really helped me be more attuned and understanding to the entire change management process and how it's connected to a good communications experience. And if you put out, even if it's a tech product that's in the 1.0 version and it's not a good experience, you've lost people.

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Megan DiSciullo: So it doesn't matter how many times you communicate about it if the experience isn't great, especially in today's world where people have little appetite and little patience. Right, I get, you tell my technologist, we get an iPhone with no directions, no instructions, we just turn it on and we go, it has to be as seamless and frictionless as that. And so as a communications professional, it has taught me so much about the value of pilots listening, getting change agents on board, then doing the feedback session, and really rolling out a great experience for our people, for our partners, and for our buyers in the right way that will make them feel great.

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Megan DiSciullo: And so I, obviously, a lot of the change management that we're working on can be applied to our internal audiences, which they are equally a key part of our brand ambassadorship, but those same principles can be applied to other audiences. So I think that's so important for us as communicators to think about really good change management principles and how that can be applied elsewhere.

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Daniel Nestle: Oh, totally. Which, by the way, is a really great way to start. Like, to segue into the conversation about enabling teams and in this case, with AI and going through the whole comtech process once as you have, or an ongoing, it evolves, so you don't do it once and walk away. It's something that you just keep updating and changing, just like Mart, hack, et cetera. Now we have this big new thing, and I keep calling new thing, and were talking about this earlier, Megan, that it's new to, it's still new to so many people, even though I know you and I have been looking at AI almost since November 30, 2022, when Chat GPT launched, which makes it feel like it's not exactly new, but it's still very, very new. And then adoption is still nothing.

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Daniel Nestle: What it appears to be to people like us who are in the bubble, that change management piece, getting AI into the teams, working to enable your teams with the tools they need in that seamless and frictionless way that you mentioned. I've seen companies failing at this in a big way. They leave the AI implementation to the technology team, to the digital team. The digital team is wonderful. They are not dot connectors. As wonderful and amazing and perfectly digital as they may be, they are not dot connectors. They are not the nerve center of the organization. What are companies doing wrong? What are they doing right and what did you guys do wrong and right that you can talk about here in terms of getting folks onboard the AI train?

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Megan DiSciullo: Yeah. So, PwC, I'm very grateful to be at an organization that has leaned into Genai as a big bet. April of last year, we made a public announcement. We had a billion dollar commitment to make an investment in that. A big part of it was investing and working with our technology companies like Amazon and Microsoft and Google. Most recently, we just launched a major relationship with OpenAI to advance the technology ecosystems and companies. Another part of that was to continue to build on our commitment to responsible AI, and I'll touch on that later, of why that's so important, of continuing to build trust and transparency and the right policies in place around AI as we're investing in the technology.

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Megan DiSciullo: But the more fun part was the firm's commitment to being client zero and investing in all of our 75,000 people to upskill them and bring a them along and give them the tools and the trainings to do so. So sitting at the nerve center of the communications department, I had the privilege to work with the team to launch this commitment to the marketplace, which was outstanding and really well received by both our people and our clients, but then do the hard work of upskilling our 75,000 people on these tools and technologies.

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Daniel Nestle: Let me ask you, before you go any further, when you say do the hard work of upskilling, you're talking about the entire employee base, right? You're not talking about just your comms team, right?

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Megan DiSciullo: My comms team, but not exclusive to that. All 75,000 folks, auditors, tax professionals, consultants, business services folks, everyone.

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Daniel Nestle: And were you, was your team at the center of leading that kind of program of upskilling with anything?

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Megan DiSciullo: It's a team effort. So we worked hand in glove with the business. We had two business champions who are absolutely wonderful. And then we worked with our products and technology team to drive that change management throughout the entire organization, as well as our l and D team. So it was truly a partnership of the best experts across the organization.

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Daniel Nestle: That's amazing. Did your comms team or did your particular group of people play any role in the actual hands on training of people with AI or with creating use cases or examples or whatever it is that you all did? What was, did that sit with you and your team?

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Megan DiSciullo: Yeah. Again, it was a great partnership between our products and tech, our l and D and us. And so it only comes together when some of the parts work collaboratively. But we helped support the business in rolling out tools and trainings. And one of the fun things that we did is we tried to make it fun. We did gamification learnings. We had prompting parties, we had really great outside speakers come and talk to us about the future of ay to get people excited about it. And we started to really make it fun. And for something that was not required learning, right. We don't have to do this. We had over 90% of our people opt into it.

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Megan DiSciullo: And that shows just from our employee population that one, there was a desire to learn that the learning modules were easy and fun, and we made it a social hour. Right. We would all come into the office and we would do the prompting parties together. We would compete across the firm. And so those types of trainings that sparked a little competitive spirit, but also really hit on both theoretical and the practical showed us that is the good mix, right? People want the inspiration from what's next and the big theory, and they want the thought leadership. Then they also want the real time training of how to prompt, because that's a huge barrier. And one of the things that I was learning was how to prompt alongside my juniors, which is a great democratization of learning and rarely happens in any sort of professional.

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Megan DiSciullo: Usually it's the more senior people teaching, the more junior folks. And in this case, were all learning alongside ourselves, together, and at the same time building the use cases across our tax team, across our audit team, across our consulting team, and across our business services functions, which is inclusive of finance and marketing and comms and human capital, and really learning what was working and what wasn't, the firm gave us. We call it Chappie WC. It's a secure AI prompting tool. I recommend anybody that's in enterprise to be able to be on a secure tool. Don't be using consumer tools just for data privacy, efficacy, client data, et cetera. But were all learning that tool together. And then the products and technology team was working hand in glove with the different functions to build bespoke tools that were good for those functions.

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Megan DiSciullo: So for us, we had several tools that were built specifically for marketing and comms to help us work with our day to day. So that's things like, we have a delivery planner that helps you plan and map campaigns. We have a content generator that enables you to put a piece of content in there, whether it's for a thought leadership piece or a press release, and then it would emit it, or to spit it out all personalized for the different audiences. So that's something that would take someone a day and a half. And then we have a quality and risk checker, which doesn't replace our risk organization, but gives you the first review of spelling errors, grammar errors, risk words that would enable you to move faster as it goes through the risk review process.

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Megan DiSciullo: So in addition to our enterprise tools, were given to three or four tools. And it's just, it's fascinating, exhilarating and fun to be a part of that at the ground floor, to co create that with a technology team that's really bespoke for what we are. One of the pieces in our content center, which I just love, is we've really focused on mass personalization with Genai and our contact tools, how to reach our 75,000 and people more uniquely and more in a more personalized way. Taking a page on the marketing playbook and the Genai tool has helped us write in a tone that's unique. So writing a newsletter that's more casual, versus writing a LinkedIn post, which is more formal, versus writing an email, which is in very sort of quickly writing it's just. It's fascinating to do that through the help of Genai.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah. What I love about all of those tools, by the way, is that a lot of it is okay. This is all the grunt work that we had to do all the time and spend, depends on who you are and what your role is. But sometimes 20, 40% of your time in a week would be on sweating over emails or over a plan, a typical framework plan that you worry so much about the forum and the layout and all this business, that you don't spend enough time on the thinking. And these tools, whether they're the ones you spoke about or the ones that I've seen or have used, the most value you get from that is when they freeze you up to do that thinking. Right.

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Daniel Nestle: And that's the biggest kind of, you know, the biggest benefit that I get from folks who are suddenly kind of understand once you understand, okay, all prompting and, you know, this is what it is and this is what it means. That's that kind of first initial wall to get through with the user, like with the, with the AI partner, you know, and once they get through that wall, then it's about, oh, my goodness, im going to save all this time, and blank sheet fever is no longer a thing. Writers block can be easily kind of overcome, and it frees you up to think. And thats where some magic really happens, at least in my experience, because once people start to think, then they become either incredible or dangerous, or both. And, and I mean dangerous in a very good way here.

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Daniel Nestle: I don't mean, although we can probably talk about the nefarious actors out there using AI. The thing is, and I was wondering if this happened in your, you know, as you were going through all of these activities to enable the PwC teams, you start to have people who are in one function thinking about their own use cases, and then they start to say, well, what if? I could imagine. I could, I wonder if it could. And that could is such a powerful word, because then they go to the, to your chatbot or whatever tool you're using and see if it can happen.

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Daniel Nestle: And all of a sudden you have people who are not, you know, who are not salespeople writing sales scripts, and you have people who are, not necessarily hardcore marketers who are suddenly saying, holy cow, I have a really great plan to reach this audience, or discovering new audiences, or creating Personas from synthetic data. We're getting a little ahead, but there's so many things that people who are not normally, or have not normally been seen as within that particular area of expertise or function, that they can now contribute to that particular area of expertise or function. So it takes a lot of leadership, openness, and this kind of experimental mentality to welcome that, and a lot of forbearance across organizations to not feel threatened by that.

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Daniel Nestle: Did you see a lot of, do you see any of this in your, in the way that you all rolled out AI?

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Megan DiSciullo: Yeah, I'll say. For my function, because we had the baseline of using contact tools, this just become another contact tool. It didn't become the first thing, the only thing. This just became another tool in the stack. So we had that muscle memory, which was a great part of the change management, because it felt, it made people feel less scared or nervous about it. Also, to be very clear, I see Genai, at least in its current function and form, we'll obviously see where the future goes to be a productivity and efficiency tool. There is still a need for really great counsel, really great crisis management skills, really great relationship building skills, really great dot connecting skills. And so that's a. That human lead and that tech power that makes it sizzle.

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Megan DiSciullo: But I think that puts a good push on us as communicators to continue to differentiate our value beyond just. I'm a great writer, or I could do a great newsletter, or I could draft a great pitch. It's to really upskill and up level the value that we're providing for business organizations. So that any of these tools, inclusive of Genai, become a way to make us contribute and add more value, as opposed to a takeaway. And it's just something. It's a way that you can take resources away. One of the great things that Ben Boyd, we both worked with him at Edelman. He was genius at Peloton. Now at Trevani. I was having a conversation with him about a year ago around AI, and he said, it's garbage in, garbage out.

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Megan DiSciullo: And so there is still a real need for the understanding of how to work the system and then how to discern around this system. And I think that's up for us as communicators to continue to chart our own story and narrative versus having it be charted for us.

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Daniel Nestle: In that vein, I couldn't agree more. You know, a lot of it is in the framing when you're. When you're sharing this new, powerful. I don't even call it a tool. I mean, it's a. It's the wheel. I mean, it's such a. It's such a game changer. But this force, let's call it. I don't know. I don't. It's not mystical either, because that's the one thing you have to demystify it. Right. You. You absolutely need to demystify this platform with people before they realize, you know, I think before they really start to dig into it. And I've had a lot of fun doing that and a lot of open eyes, like, wide open eyes going, wait, wait, wait. You mean it's just a big, giant pattern recognition machine? Yes, that's what it is, essentially. It's just really good at it.

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Daniel Nestle: It's really good at it. So I think once you have. Once you get through that, the adoption or adaptation to using this to prevent that garbage in, garbage out is to actually see it as. It's amazing. We're 50 minutes in, and this is the first time I'm saying this name. Ethan Malek calls it co intelligence, and I think that's right. You know, it's not a tool. It is a co intelligence. And how would you work with a co intelligence? I say to people that I treat it like an intern that knows everything but is not wise. And great analogy. Yeah. Therefore you just, you have to keep giving it direction and you know, it's going to give you all kinds of information and then it really wants to please.

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Daniel Nestle: So it's going to lie sometimes, you know, so there's all of these different kind of items that you do not get from a SaaS product or anything like this. So when the IT teams and the digital teams take it on themselves, or when an organization says, okay, those are the ones who are going to put this in the organization, what you said earlier about it has to be a team effort. It could be, is absolutely true. You need the communicators, you need the people who are connecting dots, really to make it clear to those who interact with AI, to the co intelligence folks that it's not about, okay, putting this particular information in a cell and then learning these formulas. And that's not what it is.

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Daniel Nestle: It's about being your human self and in some ways your best human self to interact with what is essentially an extremely precocious child. So it's a mindset thing at that point. And of course, learning how to best work within the confines of the different platforms is not so much a technical skill as it is a communication skill, I think. How do you talk to it? What are the best ways it responds to instructions in a certain way? You're not learning to code, you're using your natural language. How do you talk to people and starting there is so critical, but it is garbage in, garbage out, as you said, it's like that, but it's also dangerous to give it, to let people loose with it.

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Daniel Nestle: And it's also the kind of thing that you can slip up with very easily and cause havoc within the organization. So I want to go back to something that you kind of hinted at earlier and talk about ethics and how you are, like what organizations need to do, what you're doing, what you recommend, even that needs to get done to make sure that whether it's AI or not. But let's just focus on AI, what the ethical implications and what are, and what companies need to do about that.

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Megan DiSciullo: Yeah, it's a great thing that now government is getting involved and businesses are advancing. I think the policy discussion around AI is critical, especially as we look at some of the unintended consequences of what happened with social media and what is now playing catch up. I think those conversations early and often and to be iterative, are critical to building trust in the technology right from the start. But I think companies and organizations and communicators, as arbiters of trust, should play an active role with companies in developing responsible AI policies. What are the guardrails? What are the use cases? What are the things that should go in it? What are the things that should not go in that in order to protect confidential information, data and privacy and client data.

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Megan DiSciullo: And it's one of the things that I talked with my agencies about is I don't want them on their tools. I want them on our tools, right. Because I want to be able to protect our information. If organizations are not doing that, there is an opportunity for communicators to play a convener role, to pull those right sized groups together, whether it's policy and legal and tech, to help advance a philosophy or policy paper around what responsible AI could look like. It's good hygiene and it's good brand protection because organizations want to work within the right confines and it also avoids unintended consequences. So that is another place where communicators can play an outsized role in helping shape what organization's philosophy is on AI.

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Megan DiSciullo: And I think that's critical as we are at a point where I think we did a CEO survey and then we did an AI prediction survey on top of that, because CEO said this is the year of transformation and AI is going to play a huge role in that transformation. But we're at a place where we think that there will be a trust crisis. And so that is a place where we really need to think proactively to be able to deal with AI responsibly.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah. Seeing some wonderful things happening in that space to kind of combat the trust crisis, because it's certainly happening. I mean, I was speaking with my guest one of my last shows, talked about bots and the proliferation of just misinformation, disinformation. If that's jacked up by AI, and it is being jacked up by AI, this is no question exacerbating any existing trust crisis, which has been with us at least for a decade and getting worse. So corporations, you know, individuals out there are coming up with ways to say, to kind of, I don't know, validate the human content or just say, this is be transparent, this is AI generated.

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Daniel Nestle: My friend gay Flashman is talking about doing, is doing something where you can use a, they have a specific tool that allows you to go through, well, if you're a creator, you're going through the content that you create and you're identifying which parts are AI, which parts are our human, which parts our mix. And then it gives you a kind of report that you can share with your client, you can share with your internal client, your external client. Say, we can transparently 100% say that this is 75% AI, 25% human, but it's completely above boards and it's been reviewed and everything. So we need to do more and more with validation. I think that's going to create even a whole new set of roles and tasks within our profession, I think, but having a policy in place and a philosophy.

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Daniel Nestle: One thing I was working on recently was building an AI council across an organization to make sure that you have representatives across the teams who understand AI and its implications. And that would be a really interesting governance precursor. Probably not really the governance body yet, but a precursor to a potential governance body. And I'm sure organizations are really moving in that direction. In any case, I'm sure that PwC is a little ahead of the game with that.

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Megan DiSciullo: Yeah, but I think those are the types of frameworks that companies need to start to think about, and communicators can play a key role in it. I loved your point about the transparency around what's AI and what's not. And just even hearing that people trust humans, they want to know that someone's checked. And so, but by giving that transparency, you're actually also building trust in the technology alongside the human. And it goes back to the point around human led and tech power, that combination is going to be helpful and really valuable in the long term. But the two need to co intersect together, not by themselves or separately. I think that's the challenge and opportunity for communicators as they think about how to build trust in the technology when their companies and organizations are going to deploy it.

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Daniel Nestle: Brilliant. I think at this stage in my show, I normally say, Megan, what's coming? What is next? What do you think communicators need to focus on? And you were just talking about that, about building trust. Let me give you another minute or two if you want to. Is there something specific or anything that you think is coming down the pike, whether it's a particular type of AI, whether it's a strategic directive or something, what is happening that you think communicators really need to be on top of?

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Megan DiSciullo: Yeah, I think that post pandemic communicators have played an outsized role of building and shaping culture, and I think that will continue to be a really critical role in our organizations. It used to be that it was all about the media hits and the external brand and the buzz that you're building. And I have seen more and more lead communicator roles, or CCO roles, really focus on internal culture building, change management, brand protection as part of the remit. It's always been there, but it, I think, has moved from a secondary priority to a primary priority. And as companies are starting to rethink how they communicate to their employees, whether to use internal external, how to communicate to them about really tough issues while being trusted, that internal audience is so critical and those skills are going to be so critical to the profession.

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Megan DiSciullo: So that's a place where I will continue to hopefully see the profession invest in resourcing upskilling in partnership with the organizations like HR that play a big role in shaping those cultures.

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Daniel Nestle: I think that's so important. And a lot of people, certainly of an age who've been in the field for a couple of decades, have seen the separation of external and internal, have seen HR be the lead in terms of culture building and see where that goes. The way that you've integrated in PwC and what you've just talked about, making sure that communicators are positioned properly to build the culture and to be more change managers and brand protectors. I think AI is an enabler with that, of course, because a lot of the fundamental tasks that people associate with typical traditional comms, as we've discussed, can be essentially handed over, at least at the first level, to these brilliant, co creative, co intelligent platforms, and then brought back to the human to make sure that it's all good to go.

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Daniel Nestle: But it saves a lot of time, much more productive. Those use cases, almost no brainers. It's just a question of will the people who are suddenly gifted with these tools, and I think it's a gift, realize the opportunity to move up the value chain, focus in on the core activities of building culture and brand protection. And of course, crisis always happens. So that's one thing. Will they take advantage of that? And the people who do are positioned for the future, the people who do not feel are missing the boat.

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Megan DiSciullo: I will give you a quote that someone told me, AI won't take your job, but someone who knows AI will. And so that's the challenge and opportunity for us as a communications profession to continue to be curious and be a learner of not only our businesses, but of the world around us, and to adopt with it. I started faxing press releases. I am so far from a fax machine and loving it. But I'm now learning the next skill. And in ten years, I'm going to learn something that we haven't even started to think about. And that is the beauty of this profession, is that it doesn't matter, your age, your tenure, your experience, that you have to constantly be curious and constantly be a learner.

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Megan DiSciullo: And if you do that, then adaption is fun and it'll continue to pay off as part of your career.

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Daniel Nestle: You've described what's inside my head. Be curious. Be a learner. Connect dots, which is enabled by being curious and being a learner. It's been lovely to speak with you, Megan, and I'm so glad were able to catch up. We're really at the end of it now. You can find Megan Desiullo on LinkedIn. And don't worry, it'll be linked in the show notes. But LinkedIn is a good place to go. Anyplace else people should look for you, Megan, that's a great place.

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Megan DiSciullo: LinkedIn, lovely.

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Daniel Nestle: That's the best place. LinkedIn is the best. Ok. And on that note, I want to thank you so much for being here. I mean, there's so much more we can talk about. I'm sure we will talk about it sometime. Everybody, please check out Megan's profile on LinkedIn and follow her. Follow the work that she's doing. You know, go to some panels and webinars that she's on. You will get smarter. You will learn more. And, you know, especially if you're in communications, get to know Megan. That's my final word.

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Megan DiSciullo: And loved all the work that you're doing on this podcast and more.

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Daniel Nestle: Appreciate it. Thanks again for coming on.

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Megan DiSciullo: Awesome.

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Daniel Nestle: Thanks for taking the time to listen in on today's conversation. If you enjoyed it, please be sure to subscribe through the podcast player of your choice. Share with your friends and colleagues and leave me a review. Five stars would be preferred, but it's up to you. Do you have ideas for future guests or you want to be on the show? Let me know at dan@trendingcommunicator.com thanks again for listening to the trending communicator.