“Artificial Intelligence is an important new platform that will add great value to our company in many ways, both for our products and how we operate.”
Those are the words of iHeartMedia CEO Bob Pittman and COO/CFO Rich Bressler, who used them to open a Team E-mail sent to company employees that addresses the potential AI tools such as ChatGPT can bring to the workplace.
In short, iHeartMedia put the kibosh on such solutions, minus permission. And, the company’s two top leaders alluded to their own AI tools in the coming months.
In the memo, distributed internally by iHeartMedia, the company leaders note that while AI, including the increasingly popular ChatGPT platforms and other ‘conversational’ AIs, “can be enormously helpful and truly transformative,” iHeart wants to be smart about how AI implements these tools “to protect ourselves, our partners, our company’s information and our user data.”
Thus, to ensure security around AI and to ensure that iHeartMedia does not harm its own brands or those of its customers — or inadvertently disclose sensitive data — it issued the following directive:no engagement, development or specific project work which involves ChatGPT or other AI technology is permitted without explicit direction from your team lead.
“All projects will require an assessment of the business impact and value of the project, a plan for monitoring and evaluating and a prior documented approval from Legal and IT,” Bressler and Pittman said, adding, “As tempting as it is, please don’t use AI tools like ChatGPT on company devices or in relation to company work, or put any company documents into them, in order to protect iHeart’s intellectual property, partners, data and confidential information.”
While cybersecurity and high-profile breaches at such peers at Audacy Inc. could be a concern, Bressler and Pittman cite the following example: For example, if you’re uploading iHeart information to an AI platform (like ChatGPT), it will effectively train that AI so that anyone — even our competitors — can use it, including all our competitive, proprietary infor
For iHeartMedia, the company confirmed that it will be rolling out its own iHeart-specific AI solutions, tools “which will allow us to get all the benefits of AI while at the same time be able to protect our information and our intellectual property,” Bressler and Pittman said. “These enterprise-wide AI solutions will be geared specifically for the needs of our company, as opposed to a general market.”
Pittman and Bressler add that iHeartMedia is already using AI in certain areas of the company “with great results,” and that they are excited about expanding that “to make everyone’s work faster and more interesting, and allow us all to make the best use of our time by freeing us from our more mundane and rote tasks.”
With that, Pittman and Bressler offered iHeartMedia employees to submit their product suggestions and observations as AI is built into the company.
Internal employees were given an e-mail address to submit these suggestions.
Bressler and Pittman closed the internal memo by stating, “In the past ten years, our company has been transformed through using technology in new and exciting ways, and we expect AI to have that same kind of impact on our business and our work environment.”
