Revitalizing Change Communication with GenAI

GenAI is enhancing the role of communication leads in transformation programs. When intelligently integrated into change efforts, GenAI is not an intrusion but a catalyst that can supercharge the change process. Imagine a world where AI-powered tools automate routine change communication tasks and strategic ones, providing valuable insights from vast amounts of data. Envision change communication minus the process rigidity: A truly agile change experience that feels personalized to each employee.

This is not a utopian dream; thanks to recent GenAI innovations, it is a reality within reach. The question now is: Are enterprises ready to embrace this evolutionary shift?

Why Change Communicators Struggle

All communication professionals today (including those devoted to change communication) are searching for new productivity enhancements amid time-intensive manual content creation, editing, and target audience segmentation. These tasks consume significant time and energy, leaving communications leads with little bandwidth for strategic thinking. This hinders their ability to creatively and effectively manage change.

Even when the content is flawless, the overall change process can hamper its effectiveness. The traditional approach to change management involves one-way communications, where information is disseminated to employees without actively driving engagement. Without proper engagement, employees may resist the changes being implemented, ultimately hindering the success of the initiatives.

By automating specific processes and providing valuable insights, GenAI can augment the role of change communication professionals and elevate their impact within organizations. In particular, GenAI can already play a significant role in accelerating communications development, fostering inclusivity and accessibility, and ensuring consistency in messaging and design.

A recent study conducted at Wipro revealed that change practitioners spend 31% of their time on communication development. This persistent manual workload underscores the potential impact that emerging GenAI technologies can have on the efficiency and effectiveness of change practitioners, freeing up valuable time for more high-value activities including advisory.

Communications Development

With GenAI's automation and assistance, developing communication materials can be significantly expedited. Tasks such as content creation, editing, and target audience segmentation can be streamlined. This allows communication professionals to save time and focus on more strategic activities, such as exploring user personas, meeting individually with key stakeholders, and evangelizing the change across company forums.

Wipro’s AscendAI framework recently demonstrated GenAI's power to accelerate communications for a prominent FTS 250 company in the UK. Working with the client, the Wipro Talent & Change team delivered a “case for change”. Traditionally, a seasoned consultant invests 25 hours in this endeavour. Enter AI: a digital alchemist that condenses the same process into a mere 2 hours. This 92% time savings for a single change communications task underscores the potential for human expertise to harmonize with AI’s computational capabilities.   

However, it is worth noting that not all GenAI foundation models perform equally well in communications development. In comparing GenAI models across numerous attributes (understanding of prompts, rationale clarity, word count compliance, response structure, tone suitability, scenario interpretation, etc.), Wipro’s Talent & Change team has encountered numerous differences across models. In our experience, some models overemphasized the shortcomings of current practices, while others delivered overly long responses or lacked coherence. This emphasizes the need for human oversight even if the model provides a strong starting point. Careful testing, or collaboration with change partners experienced with GenAI, can enable organizations to identify the optimal model for their use cases, and outcomes can be further enhanced through prompt engineering. Clear and specific prompts will guide GenAI models toward generating accurate, engaging, and persuasive content.

Inclusivity and Accessibility

In addition to simply developing content, GenAI-powered tools can help ensure communication materials are accessible to a broader audience. By incorporating features like language translation, voice assistants, and text-to-speech capabilities, communication professionals can effectively reach diverse audiences with change-related messages and promote inclusivity.

Fostering inclusivity and accessibility is a strategic imperative. AI-powered language translation tools, for example, can dissolve the linguistic barriers that all global enterprises face, enabling instantaneous, democratized change communication. In conjunction with GenAI, natural language processing (NLP) algorithms can also scrutinize written communication for bias, advocating for language that embraces everyone and avoiding language that might strike the wrong note with particular communities. Capabilities like GenAI-enabled captioning, for example, will improve the speed and accuracy of captioning even in highly technical contexts, allowing employees with hearing differences to be more fully included in the conversation. By integrating these AI-infused inclusive technologies, businesses are opening the doors to diversity.

Consistency in Messaging and Design

With the assistance of GenAI, communication professionals can ensure that their messages are aligned and visually appealing across different platforms. GenAI-powered tools can provide templates, style guides, and real-time feedback to help maintain a cohesive brand image for the change effort.

Maintaining consistent tone, voice, and messaging across marketing efforts reinforces brand identity and facilitates customer connection and recall. As these GenAI sentinels advance, they will become indispensable in safeguarding the integrity and continuity of change communications.

The GenAI Future of Change Communications

GenAI's impact will go far beyond content development and execution (see figure below). It will also play a role in areas like stakeholder analysis, persona mapping, and measuring effectiveness.

GenAI will handle routine tasks such as scheduling, content creation, and data analysis as a powerful digital assistant for change communicators. It will illuminate audience inclinations, empowering data-centric strategy formulation and personalized messaging at an unprecedented scale.

Even so, human judgment and authenticity will remain irreplaceable, and experienced change communicators must continue to ensure that all messages retain a human touch. In this dance of human and machine, change communicators will be empowered to tell stories that foster transformational change.

About the Author

Phani Solomou
Senior Partner

Phani is Wipro’s AI Consulting leader for Europe. She has over 25 years of advisory experience on business transformation working with clients across sectors. She is a member of Wipro’s Responsible AI Taskforce. In addition to collaborating with clients, Phani is driving a number of internal initiatives to reimagine consulting for Wipro, upskilling 8,000 colleagues to deliver value for themselves and clients.

Carmen Jones
Principal Consultant – Talent & Change 

Carmen, an AI and Transformation professional, brings 9 years of experience in change management and end-user adoption. She has successfully led end-to-end consulting engagements for numerous enterprise clients across Energy, Defense, and Retail.

Sreedhar Menon
Principal Consultant – Talent & Change 

Sreedhar is an experienced professional who brings expertise in digital change enablement, process design, strategic communications, user adoption, and culture change within a digital transformation program. His hands-on, in-depth knowledge extends to business intelligence, analytics, and data visualization.