For Jack Breen, when using AI tools, his best advice is to just give it a go, as once you understand the possibilities it becomes easy to apply it to your work.
UNSW’s Social Media team create a lot of content. In fact, about 1500 posts per year of written, image and video content. While it’s important for social media content to be new, fresh and engaging, every piece of content needs to be reviewed and approved to ensure the rigour expected of a university.
That review process is the responsibility of Jack Breen, Social Media Manager.
“Through my experience over the last eight years at UNSW, I’ve learnt a lot about the potential hot button issues or things that can go wrong if you make mistakes or don’t consult properly,” said Jack. “Getting your facts right in social media is super important for a knowledge-based institution like ours.”
As the function of social media has matured, Jack and his team have focused on developing written guidelines, processes and checklists but there are still many steps involved in reviewing social posts. This is where Jack saw the potential of AI tools and decided to join the pilot group with the University.
“One of the things that stood out for me was that AI is most useful for things that are repeatable, that you do all the time,” said Jack.
“There are so many tick boxes I go through mentally when reviewing pieces of content. I was keen to explore how AI could help with this task.”
An AI intern in your office
One of the key learnings Jack took from the AI pilot was the need to carve out time from his schedule to experiment with AI tools to learn how they work and what the potential benefits and pitfalls are.
“I’m the type of person who learns through doing. I need to create something and play around,” said Jack.
“If you can’t think of a way at first to use AI for your work, create something small that could help you in your personal life. It could be meal planning for the week or a packing checklist for a holiday.
“From experimenting like this, you will start thinking of ideas of how to apply AI to your work. It could be a report you provide to your manager or a task you do every day, something repeatable.”
Jack’s suggestion is to think of AI tools like Custom GPTs, as similar to having an intern or graduate help in your team – someone early in their career who needs support and guidance to do their work.
“Custom AI tools require you to clearly outline the steps of what you want done and then you ask it to verify and check against a set of guidelines or processes. If you make it too complex it risks getting confused.
“You’re best to focus on one specific task. In our case, it was to review text for text and imaged-based social media posts and exclude video content.”
A checklist for social media posts
Using ChatGPT, Jack built a Custom GPT tool to review social media content for his team. He found ChatGPT intuitive to create the tool and easy to use.
“I focused on a specific task and simply described what I wanted to make in a conversational style and uploaded relevant style guides,” said Jack. “The tool gave me the output and then I started testing it. Because I was already familiar with using ChatGPT in my personal life, I found the process very user-friendly.
“Similar to the intern metaphor, you can’t expect them to just know what you’re thinking. It needs to be explained in clear steps. I had to think about the specific criteria I use when reviewing social posts. By building and briefing the tool, it actually added more rigour to our work and documentation.”
Jack spent the first year testing and refining the tool, making iterative improvements over time. He had to be sure there was no unintended output or that something might be misinterpreted by other users of the tool. From there he gave access to his team and then opened it up to the University community.
The real benefit of this tool for the Social Media team is that it acts as a checklist of all the things they want to review their social posts for before they’re published. It includes simple checks for spelling and grammar, but it goes further by checking accuracy, context and risk.
“It checks things such as, are we using the right academics, are their titles correct, are we using the correct pronouns, is it accessible, are the links working, are there any sensitive issues, are we mentioning all our collaborators?
“It’s a lot of information social media creators need to be thinking about, so a tool like this is a helpful reminder of things to consider. You still need to use your judgement before posting, but it’s a useful support tool to help you improve the rigour of quality checking your content,” said Jack.
Making an impact
After sharing the AI tool with his team and opening it up to the broader University community, Jack has received some really positive feedback.
His team are using it to self-check and improve their content before it’s sent to Jack for review. This has created efficiencies in the way they work.
Faculty External Engagement teams have also been using it to help support their social media content review processes.
“There’s definitely less back and forth with reviewing content which frees up my team, giving them more time to get creative with the content they’re producing,” said Jack.
One of the best pieces of feedback Jack has received is the amount of times his AI tool is being used. The tool is currently sitting as the number one most used Custom GPT available to the University community.
“I’m so proud to see the tool has been used more than 500 times,” said Jack. “I’m sensing the feedback is positive by the fact it’s being used.
“For teams wanting to design similar tools, I could provide them with the back-end instructions so they can learn from it and customise it to meet their own requirements. It’s very flexible.”
Using AI for continuous improvement
Jack continues to experiment with AI and thinks about ways he can apply it to his work. One of the simpler ways he uses it is as a briefing assistant.
“On a Monday when I can have a backlog of things to catch up on, the tool checks my email and calendar and provides a summary of the important things I need to focus on based on the criteria I’ve given it,” said Jack.
His team also produce reports that need to be structured in a particular way. Jack has built a tool where he can input the data and it produces the report in the format and style he requires.
Jack’s latest focus is how he can streamline other processes for his team.
“We do two fortnightly sprint meetings in our team that require a lot of planning and reporting. I’m trying to work out how we can manage those more efficiently and streamline the outputs. It’s a work in progress.”
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