The problem

The past 18 months have shown the communications community across the world that empathy is a key component in reaching audiences and building trust. As trade shows and client meetings became virtual, communications efforts shifted online, providing us with new challenges and enticing new opportunities around data and digital communications.

With a well-regarded AI lab in Munich and a track record of enabling our customers to undertake significant digital transformations, Siemens realized that applying these technologies to equip our own corporate communications department was a must. And that it should be done in a scalable, intelligent way that helps us develop stronger long-term collaboration across teams, businesses, and borders.  

The solution: ContentAI

With ContentAI, we analyze topics people are talking about and researching online, identify the most relevant topics for Siemens, and join the conversation in a meaningful way.

“The pandemic forced us to tap into AI, natural language processing, and intelligent data analytics to transform our communication strategies. By combining the massive scale and power of AI with human expertise we developed a data-driven communications tool that allow us to connect with customers and audiences on their own terms – and even anticipate future conversations and customer needs, “said Mark Seall, Head of Analytics & Artificial Intelligence at Siemens.

ContentAI is a suite of tools that currently contains 3 modules, with more in development:

• Smart Content Tool: automates work behind content creation, generating content briefs, content research, and target audience positioning so that our colleagues can focus on creating compelling, optimized content.
• Topic Strategy: a comprehensive overview of the external conversations happening around specific topics, how to engage with audiences in the most contextually relevant ways, leveraging AI-powered keyword and topic-based research, positioning, competitive analysis, whitespace analysis, and recommended content focus based on search/social demand.
• Executive Positioning: create profiles for C-level leaders, validate peer sets, and identify which thought leadership topics present the greatest opportunity for growth, differentiation, and traction.

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Goals

Ultimately, we wanted to create a tool that would help our communications colleagues develop data-driven strategies that are inherently user-focused. Customer impact is one of the primary pillars in the Siemens narrative, and we saw this as a perfect opportunity to connect the dots to our work on a daily basis.

We also realized the incredible opportunity to naturally build collaboration features into this tool from the very beginning – that is, create intuitive and delightful ways for communications colleagues working across teams, business units, and countries to quickly and easily connect and share collective intelligence with each other. In a company of nearly 300,000 employees worldwide, this is all too often an afterthought, but it’s a valuable opportunity to develop a robust, unified communications strategy and culture.

Evaluation and Value-Added Performance

Our pilot targeted those closest to the content research and production process: our communications frontline workers, so to speak. While this approach allowed us to gather important intel on their needs, we realized we needed to appeal to leadership to support widespread and long-term support and implementation of ContentAI and a data-driven approach to communications, and we expanded our target groups accordingly.

Over the past year, ContentAI has achieved the following:

• 3 tools scoped, produced, and launched as part of the ContentAI suite.
• 3 reports.
• 10 consultancies in progress, spanning high-level corporate strategy topics to comprehensive product positioning projects.
• 130 activated users, representing communications colleagues from all three Siemens businesses, corporate functions, key regions, and MBM teams.