AI is rapidly advancing in business communications, but lagging behind in strategy | Business communications magazine

The goals are also more mature. If in 2024 the main thing was to create content (47%), followed by generating insights (40%) and increasing productivity (39%), today 80% of communication areas use AI to provide analysis and insights, 67% to write articles and 64% to write news for digital channels. The challenges have also evolved. Issues relevant to 2024, such as uncertainties regarding copyright (64% of mentions last year) and ethical enforcement (49%), as well as legal uncertainties (49%), fell this year, with rates of 8%, 5% and 3% respectively. Another challenge left aside is the fear of losing one’s job, mentioned by only 1% of the 117 people surveyed in 2025, compared to 49% last year.

However, as Aberje consultant Carlos Ramello assesses, the use of technology is still mainly focused on operational aspects, with little more analytical or strategic use. According to him, the focus, even on information generation, remains on the preparation of articles, news, material for digital channels or video, without deeper correlation with the company’s objectives, such as measuring results and strategic analysis. “AI can contribute, for example, to supporting the measurement of internal communication results, carried out by only 52% of companies,” he assesses.

On the other hand, one of the growing trends is the use of agents, advanced language models that, in addition to providing responses like virtual assistants, perform autonomous tasks. Agents are already employed in 31% of communication areas, with 12% in the planning or pilot phase and 38% intending to adopt them within two years.

Sompo Seguros is one of the companies that has progressed in this area, with the internal development of agents to optimize briefing processes, content and image production, with advantages such as greater agility in production, personalization of messages and the integration of data and research that helps contextualize textual stories such as articles or press releases.

One example is the Briefing Agent, which uses transcription data or meeting minutes generated by Microsoft’s Teams and Copilot, as well as company documents stored in the cloud and any other relevant information, to format the document’s proposals. Producing a press release goes further. A research agent, integrated into Copilot, collects market data to corroborate the topic at hand. The information is inserted in the command line (prompt) to populate the press release, as well as others such as recordings of interviews with spokespersons on the subject or data published on the portal of the National Confederation of Insurance Companies (CNSeg). From a model determined as standard, the agent creates a preliminary version of the material to distribute to the press.

So surveys that could take a whole day are completed in minutes. “For each agent created, it took time for the team to ask the right questions that would guide each one. Learning comes from both the machine and the communicator,” explains Aline Télis, marketing manager at Sompo. AI is also used in the production of personalized images and articles. The next step is to integrate AI with tools like news clipping monitoring to cross-reference data and generate insights to support news articles and segmented campaigns.

Cortex has created a combination of agents to take care of everything from defining communications goals to executing strategies to achieve them. One of them collects information about the company on its website and across the Internet, such as its corporate mission and its main competitors. Another captures the brand’s mode of exposure over a given period to construct a diagnosis in the media. From there, another defines the risks and opportunities linked to the image, and it is up to a fourth agent to define what must be communicated.

“The final agent defines objectives and goals for the period, such as ‘perform ten actions in relevant vehicles to improve the ESG perception of the brand’,” explains Claudio Bruno, director of innovation at Cortex Brand, Cortex’s marketing and communications solution. He points out that specialized solutions can alleviate the challenge of creating sophisticated prompts, necessary to improve results with the use of “general” AI, such as the generative AI tools Copilot (Microsoft), Gemini (Google) and ChatGPT (Open-

AI), the most adopted by the fields of communication. “According to the survey data, only 3% of respondents believe that their teams are fully prepared to deal with agents and 6% are well prepared. The majority (73%) consider that the teams are still in development,” specifies Bruno.

Besides agents, another trend is AI support to define different audiences and tailor messages based on each one. Today, only one in ten companies has this capacity. Sodexo Brasil is making progress on this front. The company’s director of communications, brand and institutional relations, Adriane Biz, explains that AI tools help accelerate and optimize planning, supporting the research and processing of internal and external data to identify market trends, stakeholder insights and possible communication gaps. In production, AI collaborates to generate sketches and scripts, in addition to suggesting tone adjustments and adapting language to the target audience and keywords for search optimization (SEO), among others.

Neogrid also uses AI to segment messages for different audiences based on dense information, such as end-consumer surveys conducted in partnership with Opinion Box. “Instead of sending 40-page studies to the target customer, we send the part that interests them and invite them to download the material,” explains Cecilia Ferrarezzi, marketing director of Neogrid.

The same strategy is used to generate cuts for social networks or refine text, among others. AI supports the production and editing of videos and presentations at events and, on another front, the NIA in-house AI assistant automates the sending of information to subscribers in information panels with data on product prices, consumer basket and retail out-of-stock (supply chain). To help you, Neogrid provides employees with the Unico Skill digital technology course platform.

At Bain & Company, Vivianne Pelegrini, senior director of brand reputation, notes that AI has transformed the way we produce content, measure results and understand audience behavior. “Today, 60% of searches on conventional search engines take place in non-click environments and messages must be understood by humans and AI systems,” Pelegrini points out, citing the consultancy’s “Goodbye Clicks, Hello AI” study.

The company uses AI in communications to automate operational tasks, from drafts to translation to videos. ChatGPT Enterprise, Copilot and the internal SAGE platform, with studies and benchmarks from Bain, help you produce more strategic, data-driven documents faster.

Embracon and Sinch use AI to strengthen internal communication. The first developed the virtual assistant “Tá na Mão” to centralize documents, policies and procedures so that employees can quickly find answers. “Teams use the tool to write content, such as emails, structure briefings, generate images for campaigns, as well as captions and texts for social networks, create presentations, summarize meetings and presentations,” lists Embracon marketing manager Helder Oliveira Santos. The assistant also helps the customer service team resolve queries in real-time, which has reduced average service time by 30%.

At Sinch, in turn, the “Hello Sinchers” project was designed for the Latin American sales team. The company, a provider of communications platforms for mobile messaging, email, voice and video, created the initiative to enable everyone to access the same knowledge base, distribute product and process documents to facilitate alignment in the region and maximize employee time. AI is primarily used to generate podcasts, which offer everything from summaries of internal documents and meeting minutes to publication announcements. “This allows the team to update asynchronously while on the go,” says Sylvio Leal Barbosa, the company’s marketing manager for Latin America.

BHP Brasil is representative of the group of companies with an initial maturity in technology. “We use Copilot as our main tool. The communications teams have received training on the subject and AI has been integrated in an emerging way,” explains Fernanda Lavarello, director of corporate affairs and communications at BHP. The company has developed a virtual reality tool to detail the extent of recovery efforts along 700 kilometers of the Doce River basin, following the collapse of the Samarco Dam in Mariana (MG).