EGI Employee Stories: How Gen AI is improving energy industry storytelling with Barbara Woolsey

What were your first impressions about introducing Gen AI into workplaces – and what are your impressions today??

I came to E.ON with a decade of experience working as a journalist. The media industry has faced some turbulent years lately, to say the least, and AI has only increased worries about job displacement in newsrooms. There is still lots of talk about AI’s potential to write and voice pieces – but what I’ve learned is, at the end of the day, content will always need a human touch.?

Let’s face it, impactful storytelling needs nuance, intention and understanding otherwise it won’t connect with people on a deeper level.?

E.ON Group Innovation’s open-minded, forward-thinking work culture has allowed me to access and test different Gen AI tools and really get to know them. Some of these tools I use daily, and can say, they help me tell better stories, and to be a happier storyteller.??

Is that so? How has Gen AI improved your relationship to content work??

Chatbots for research: Making energy storytelling easier to understand?

Let’s face it – energy isn’t the sexiest topic. There is a big disconnect between awareness about how energy/energy usage works and public knowledge – which is wild, because energy is something that we all consume.?

Gen AI has helped me greatly to understand complex topics around energy and explain understandably for a wider audience. Trust me, researching these topics can be time-intensive (and our engineers, though brilliant, break things down with such passion, sometimes one ends up even more confused!).?

Learning to use prompts can be a valuable way of understanding technical topics, industry jargon, climate and energy policy in different regions, and so much more – streamlining the research process for those of us in communications.?

AI writing assistants: Improving storytellers’ mental health?

Creative block is a real thing – any writer will tell you, crafting stories can be mentally draining, unpredictable work. Sometimes, putting together a paragraph takes you five minutes, other time it takes you hours.?

While Gen AI can write articles, they are usually obviously AI-generated and unpublishable in such a form. But I’ve found that writing assistants can help me structure articles, order my research and fine-tune story angles – a.k.a. creating mental shortcuts, leading to a less exhausting creative process and a cutdown in my coffee intake!?

Translation tools: Making energy stories more accessible?

As a journalist, I used to spend hours and hours translating articles between German and English from scratch. Translation tools have made this process much more efficient. They spit out a rough translation – which again always needs to be well-edited by a human – but can save considerable time.?

This enables our team to provide German and English as a standard on eon.com/innovation – helping us reach more eyeballs, expanding information about energy and energy-saving solutions which can be accessed by people to empower change.?

Transcription tools: A godsend for storytelling?

These are my absolute favourite. Energy storytelling takes a lot of talking to people – product designers, academics, startup entrepreneurs, et cetera. I cannot tell you how many hours and days I’ve spent listening to audio recordings of interviews and writing them out. It’s a tedious, time-intensive process that takes even longer when I need to do it in my second language, German (and even longer still when there’s a Bavarian or Austrian accent involved!).?

But this is a struggle no longer; I can simply record an interview and Gen AI creates a transcription. Again, the transcriptions are never 100% correct and always need to be checked, though.?

Has Gen AI also helped in any way that surprised you??

By creating efficiency in content work, Gen AI has surprisingly helped my creative process.?

If there’s anything I learned as a journalist, it’s that the best stories come up when you least expect them, often in informal conversations. By streamlining time at the desk, I now have more capacity to be present on innovation floors and engage in discussions with colleagues.?

I also appreciate that Gen AI will soon create more possibilities for visual content, allowing for more diversity and representation in storytelling. Some of the most important stories about energy take place in remote communities, on work sites, and across very different backgrounds lifestyles – hopefully, Gen AI will make these stories more possible to tell.?