BCG Report: AI Offers Comms Time And Cost Savings-And Higher Value Work

(MENAFN- PRovoke) Artificial intelligence has the potential to impact corporate affairs and corporate communications more than almost any other discipline, according to a new report from Boston Consulting Group.

The report,“The GenAI Transformation of the Communications Function ,” finds that between 60% to 83% of the time spent on corporate communications tasks cam be saved using generative AI and agentic AI (which has the ability to initiate and complete multi-step tasks without constant human intervention), more than any other function except customer service.

According to the report, 26% to 36% of worker time can be saved by using AI tp assist with current tasks, while a further 34% to 47% can be saved by reshaping processes with AI. The impact on functions such as marketing, human resources, finance, legal and IT is significantly lower.

Among the key findings:

• Comms can reclaim 26-36% of its time today with GenAI.
• With process transformation, the upside climbs to 47%
• Comms shows material cost reduction opportunity rising to nearly 30% in potential gains

According to BCG chief communications officer Russell Dubner, the consuling firm analyzed 4 billion full-time-equivalent hours across various corporate functions to understand where GenAI will drive the most value.

"Comms belongs at the top of the GenAI agenda," he says. "Few other functions combine this level of upside with the unique profile needed to capture it. This is a function that's already leaned in faster than most. The test is carrying that momentum through to systematic change and results.

"Leaders driving task-level change deeper into sub-functions, where the work really happens, will set the pace."

For most companies, however, the biggest payoff is still in the future: while many CCOs (and their agencies) are experimenting with Gen AI, relatively few are deploying agentic AI tools yet, and the report suggests that the most substantial gains will come over the next three to five years.

“Most organizations are running a series of experiments with some demonstrable success,” Dubner says. But he adds,“I don't see companies breaking the problem down by subfunction and making systematic changes supported by clear, measurable workflow changes.

“I don't believe it is fear of change but more [the lack of] an approach that methodically maps and delivers change that scales. Given that most of the technology is about augmentation, the entrenched processes are not a huge hurdle. This is simply new for most companies and so they don't know if they should be all in; they should.”

The communications discipline“has one of the most AI-ready task mixes of any function. More than 80% of its work clusters in AI assistance, collaboration, and supervision tasks-a transformation sweet spot where human judgment and machine output reinforce each other's strengths.”

The function's“dual capacity for augmentation and supervised autonomy gives comms an edge in turning GenAI potential into enterprise value.”

So in addition to ranking second in terms of productivity gains, communications a top three function for bottom-line savings, behind customer service and HR. That suggests significant return on investment for AI in corporate affairs, contradicting a recent study from MIT which suggested that 95% of organizations studied get zero return on their AI investment.

AI's cost reduction potential is based on productivity gains“calibrated to task augmentation and automatability profile,” says the report, with the highest impact where tasks are“repetitive, data-driven, or content-intensive.”

The biggest savings will come in the operational, planning and analytics function (potentially a 39% benefit); external and media communications (31%); and ESG, sustainability and community communication (30%), with a less dramatic impact on public affairs and government relations (22%) and strategic and executive communications (16%).

According to the report.“The payoff goes well beyond productivity, enabling teams to deliver higher quality and greater personalization.”

And Dubner adds,“At its core, GenAI isn't about replacing communicators-it's an accelerator that frees teams to do higher-value work: building relationships, shaping strategy, and driving influence at scale.”

For that reason, he says, CCOs should embrace the changes that AI can deliver.“Unless your company is in a hunt for cost take out, my strong view is that this is an opportunity to expand capacity and deliver both higher volume and higher-value work.”

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