Why public affairs professionals are turning to Artificial Intelligence

PoliMonitor recently celebrated T-Day. It marked the day - a year ago - when we launched our new AI Parliamentary Transcription service. We’ve launched a number of new versions since then and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. In fact, someone described it as “phenomenal”. Who knew public affairs professionals would love AI and embrace it so warmly?

Despite the Westminster Parliament spending many hundreds of thousands of pounds creating human transcribed records of debates in Parliament - Hansard - few public affairs professionals use them as they can take hours, if not days or weeks to be published. They need to know instantly when they or their issues are mentioned in this fast moving, 24/7 political environment to best manage reputations and policies. So instead, when Parliament broadcasts, we transcribe instantly. 

The truth is human transcripts aren’t a practical solution anymore. There are now over a dozen broadcasts debates and committee sessions each day, meaning hundreds of hours a month. No one can sensibly take on that task, let alone notify hundreds of clients or potentially millions of citizens when issues are mentioned. Using AI transcription, we can live up to that promise. When a term is mentioned in any chamber or committee we can send an alert in less than a minute.

In the coming weeks we’re aiming to launch a new version of what we call (tongue firmly in cheek here) RoboHansard. We hope this will take the quality of our transcripts to the next level. We believe AI is the future of public affairs and public affairs professionals seem to agree with us.