EGI Employee Stories: Using Gen AI as a marketing tool with Gian-Franco Strau?

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

Honestly, I was relatively sceptical. I was aware of Gen AI mainly as something superficial, a social media trend – deepfakes of politicians, cats on surfboards or cyborg people. What value could that add to my work? I come to our communications team from a photography background, therefore I have a lot of concerns about the ethical impact of such technology for people working in the creative industry. I’m used to relying on experience and gut feeling – which I would never trust AI to do.

But my impression has changed 180 degrees. There are misconceptions about Gen AI as a creativity killer, but in my experience, it’s making my job as a marketer a lot more interesting and opening new creative possibilities.

Tell us more about that! How are you using Gen AI on a daily basis?

Storytelling for the energy transition is tricky. Everyone uses energy but people don’t always have an awareness about how it works because it’s so technical – that’s a challenge for us marketing professionals.

That also means there are often challenges in sourcing the right photography for our storytelling. Let’s face it, I’ve had to search for a lot of images of the same thing – power lines, e-cars charging, substation workers – and often, it’s hard to find diverse images.

Instead of looking for another boring picture of an e-car charging for content on bidirectional loading, I decided to try generating some using AI. The first prompts were promising and before I knew it, I had 40 pictures of charging e-cars in front of futuristic houses. Not only is it great fun, it presents opportunities to make the energy transition more engaging and make people more energy-conscious. This is really critical to a successful energy transition!

How can Gen AI image generators relevant to accelerating the energy transition?

The job of communications is to make technologies understandable. Trust me, explaining how our solutions and energy grids work to the general public is not easy – even for someone who’s been dealing with these topics for years!

This is where AI helps immensely. We are now creating detailed visual guides of processes and products using prompts – at an incredibly quick speed. I think if you can explain solutions for a sustainable future and make them more tangible for the variety of stakeholders we work with (from media to professionals, other companies – everyone!), it's easier to work on them together – because understanding leads the way to change.

Any other interesting ways you’re using Gen AI as a comms specialist?

We live in an age of information overload, where information is created and outdated at an incredible speed. It is important to be able to keep up. AI is also helping us streamline and create content faster, often without huge briefing processes. Of course, we will always need agencies, designers and photographers, but their roles and how we work with them will change over time. The impact is that we can use resources more efficiently, and have more budget to try different marketing strategies, types of content, and hire more specialised talent to make energy storytelling more vibrant, creative and outside the box. The hope is that with more and better storytelling about the energy transition, we can spread the word even further!