The Elephant in the Office: Why We Need to Talk About AI and How We Use It

We’ve all seen it. Some of us have done it. A colleague angles their laptop away when you walk past or quickly clicks out of a browser tab. They’re not shopping online. Your colleague is using AI to polish an email, summarize a 40-page report or brainstorm a headline. When someone says “great work,” they say “thanks” and move on. 

Sound familiar?  

AI tools have effectively become some part of the workday for pretty much everyone. It’s a bit of an oddity really that something so ubiquitous can still feel somewhat taboo to talk about. Some people are concerned about the perception of cutting corners. Others fear their boss will replace them with a robot. The result is that rather than talking about it, a lot of us just use it silently.  

The truth: secrecy, not AI, is the real issue When employees use AI in the shadows, we sacrifice knowledge-sharing, transparency and guardrails. At a communications firm in particular, our work often carries our clients’ reputations. A fabricated statistic in a press release or a piece of confidential information getting into the wrong place is more than embarrassing — it can be damaging.  

The first step to using AI responsibly? Talking openly about AI and how it should be used as a tool.  

Some Ground Rules for Using AI the Right Way: 

To ensure ethical use of generative AI tools, consider the following: 

• Read your company’s handbook policies. Even if your company does not have a specific policy for using AI, you can approach these tools in a way that upholds broader company values outlined in your handbook. 

• Protect anything you don’t have the right to share. Client information, internal strategy, and anything otherwise under embargo should never be fed into a tool that your organization hasn’t approved. If you wouldn’t send it to a stranger, don’t paste it into a chatbot. 

• You’re still the creator. AI can produce the draft, but you’re the one who signs off. Read it all through, verify all the facts and make sure it sounds like you (or your client). 

• Understand the tools you’re using. This is especially important if you are using generative AI for image creation or manipulation. If you’re not confident the work is not based in someone’s intellectual property, hit the brakes. 

• Verify, verify, verify. AI can be very confident and also completely wrong. Names, dates, quotes, and numbers all have to be checked against a real source, by a human, before anything is released. 

• Be upfront with your team. If AI helped you get to a first draft in a much shorter timeline, then say so. It’s good for everyone to know what worked and what didn’t. It can help improve workflows moving forward. 

• Help shape your firm’s policy. By sharing what you’ve learned, you can help your company think more critically about how to use generative AI tools. 

Those tips sound reasonable, but what does that look like in practice? At Ceisler Media, we work with our partners at Athena Global Advisors to research and test generative AI tools we think can help our work and our clients’ – all rooted in our company values and aligned with each client’s AI policies.  

The goal is not to use AI tools because they’re trendy, but to stay on top of industry changes and challenges that our clients face and apply our time-tested approach to new technologies.