There appears to be a Messianic preaching that AI will take over lobbyists’ jobs.
I’m always sceptical of anyone who claims to have the silver bullet to bring about (political/policy) salvation. In particular, when the evangelical fervour is based on watching one episode of West Wing.
Below are the tools I use.
They replace tasks that I don’t like to do. They all save a lot of time, and more importantly, they save head space.
I have about 4 hours a day of deep work in me. I’d rather spend it on something cognitively interesting than a task that takes up head space.
General Tools
Visualisation: Visme
Week Review: Chat GPT
Meetings: Otter.ai
Communication/Feedback: Loom
SOPs/Workflows: Loom
Knowledge Management: Google Notebook LLM. Airtable/Teams are options.
Debate Monitoring/Transcript: Prismos
Writing: Grammarly
Drafting: ChatGPT, although I prefer drafting on paper.
On drafting, I am cautious. ChatGPT tends to give back text that comes across as a PPE Oxford graduate. Confident, bullish, and, on the important parts, wrong.
Issue Specific Knowledge Management Tools
EU: EU Issue Tracker
EU Monitoring: https://lanzcape.com/
Chemicals: Foresight
The key value you bring as a lobbyist is 4 things:
- A deep and instinctive understanding of the process and what’s driving the issue.
- The ability to communicate with decision-makers and your clients and help your client to step in at the right time, with the right message, to the right person.
- Craft a persuasive case that will move the policy and political needle.
- As the key moments to influence any decision are not usually public, have an extensive network who will feel comfortable telling you the political reality, as distinct from what people or AI hallucinate about.
I’m not sure that’s going to be taken over by AI soon.
And for lobbyists tempted to use AI to create a veneer of knowledge, this may well fall apart as soon as they encounter those with a deep understanding of the issue or procedure.
Dear Aaron,
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on the use of AI in public affairs. I recently joined a Danish startup called ‘Spaak’ (in tribute to one of EU’s founding fathers Paul-Henri Spaak) that develops an AI solution for public affairs professionals. After having worked as a lobbyist myself for the last ten years, I have decided to jump on the AI train because I strongly believe it will have many positive impacts in our industry. AI will help optimise and automate most of the low value, time-consuming, redundant tasks like performing monitoring reports, stakeholder mapping, policy briefings, analysing thousands of amendments, screening position papers of relevant stakeholders, following Commission press conferences or Committee meetings, etc. AI will allow PA professionals spend more time on higher value tasks like intelligence gathering, strategy development, stakeholder engagement, etc. My conversations about AI with people working in PA have been overall positive, they are actually quite excited about it. I don’t think many people in Brussels believe that AI will take over the job of lobbyists. We all know our work heavily relies on human-based relationships and inter-personal communications. Lobbyists should be on the safe side, they should be spared from potential cost reduction programmes due to AI deployment compared to other professions. They will however need to reinvent their daily routine, invest more in high value activities, and adapt to new technologies. I am very much looking forward to the discussion tomorrow evening.
Best regards,
Cyrille