PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

Ar­ti­fi­cial In­tel­li­gence, as well as the im­por­tance of cor­po­rate so­cial re­spon­si­bil­i­ty ini­tia­tives, have been hailed as cru­cial tools for lo­cal busi­ness­es.

These strate­gies were put in fo­cus at Me­dia In­site's “The Pow­er of Per­cep­tion: Me­dia In­tel­li­gence for En­hanced En­gage­ment” con­fer­ence held at the Hy­att Re­gency in Port-of-Spain yes­ter­day.

In her fea­ture pre­sen­ta­tion, Me­dia In­site CEO, Al­li­son De­mas, high­light­ed NGC's ef­fec­tive use of its CSR ini­tia­tives in its so­cial me­dia pres­ence. She not­ed that apart from a re­port de­tail­ing a loss in­curred by TTNGL in the news­pa­per, whol­ly state-owned Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny of T&T (NGC) had al­most en­tire­ly pos­i­tive re­ports and en­gage­ment for much of the year.

"NGC CSR ini­tia­tives and as we can see the Bo­cas Lit Fest ac­count for 85 per cent of all NGC's CSR ini­tia­tives. So pre­dom­i­nant­ly Bo­cas Lit Fest, the chal­lenge of course when you are ti­tle spon­sor is to make sure the me­dia gives you that at­tribute.

"They had a fair share of dig­i­tal and so­cial me­dia as well as tra­di­tion­al me­dia and look at the whoop­ing per­cent­age of pos­i­tive 99.3 per cent," said De­mas, not­ing that on­ly 30 per cent of all of NGC's men­tions in terms of own me­dia were de­vot­ed to their CSR ini­tia­tives.

"This just goes to show re­al­ly the pow­er of un­der­stand­ing your busi­ness, de­vel­op­ing ex­cel­lent re­la­tion­ships with the me­dia, the im­por­tance of CSR and giv­ing back to the com­mu­ni­ty," said De­mas.

The head of the me­dia con­sul­tan­cy com­pa­ny al­so used da­ta for the pe­ri­od June 1, 2023 to May 31, to 2024 to re­veal that CNC3 was the most dis­cussed tele­vi­sion sta­tion in T&T, not­ing that apart from TTT's an­nounce­ment of Ri­car­do Drue's death it had reg­u­lar­ly topped so­cial me­dia en­gage­ments in the coun­try.

The use of AI in the de­vel­op­ment of strate­gies was al­so dis­cussed dur­ing a pan­el at the event. De­mas told the Guardian that it was time for peo­ple to em­brace AI tools as they have been here for some time and had im­proved da­ta col­lec­tion and analy­sis.

"AI is such a great fa­cil­i­ta­tor and en­abler when it comes to mar­ket­ing and com­mu­ni­ca­tions. It makes life so much eas­i­er. I know there is a lot of fear in terms of AI, but I think we need to fo­cus on how we can use it to make our lives so much eas­i­er. AI is noth­ing new and it has been here for a while. It just would have ex­plod­ed with the on­set of Chat GPT and it is a re­al­ly use­ful tool," she said.

Trinidad and To­ba­go Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce Pres­i­dent Ki­ran Ma­haraj al­so be­lieves that AI could be bet­ter adopt­ed.

"I think that one of the im­por­tant items raised here is ob­vi­ous­ly the use of ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence be­cause we re­al­ly need to rec­og­nize it as a tool. We need to rec­og­nize the op­por­tu­ni­ties that it presents as well as the threats and what as­pects of it we should im­ple­ment.

"As a re­gion, there is cur­rent­ly a push by UN­ESCO to de­vel­op an AI roadmap pol­i­cy and I think every­body, every com­pa­ny, every CSO, every NGO, every gov­ern­ment en­ti­ty, every­body should be look­ing at that roadmap," she said, warn­ing that with­out learn­ing the pros and cons, sev­er­al busi­ness­es could be ad­verse­ly af­fect­ed.