2024 corporate highlights: M to R

Concept art depicting artificial intelligence generated by Blue Willow.

McGallen & Bolden

"As a consulting and communication firm, we consult for multinational and emerging clients on business strategy, human capital, public relations, crisis communication, marketing, and branding. As a tech pioneer since the 1990s, we have always kept abreast of technology, from the Internet to cybersecurity, e-commerce, DevOps, and then AI. With digitalisation and AI permeating every layer of management and operations, we have to be the vanguard for our practice as well as our clients," said Dr Seamus Phan, CTO and principal, business consulting and PR firm McGallen & Bolden.

February: Developed AI-based chatbots for clients. 

"Another area we have seen a need in is the lack of human capital for customer service and presales," commented Dr Phan.

"This frees up critical and limited human capital, allowing many of our clients to focus on leadership and operational tasks. Our next phase would be agentic AI to help clients carry out tasks that would free up human capital even more. 

"In terms of creative content development, we have also leveraged AI for the entire spectrum of content creation, from the basic textual ideation to music and video development. These enablers allow us to ideate, create, develop, and deploy quickly, providing equitable value to clients that may have required far larger and more costly practices before."

October: Created cloud-based, wiki-style online documentation for clients.

"We have been developing knowledge bases that are cloud-based rather than intranet-based for crisis management and crisis communication, which began since March 2020 with a framework, then a primer programme since July 2023, with the basis from ISO 22361 and aviation principles of crew resource management (CRM) and threat and error management (TEM) that pilots are trained on. 

"We have already seen the rise of the need for crisis management and crisis communication in 2024, with global tensions, economic fallouts, and industry tremors. The traditional crisis management and/or communication 'playbook' that was static has to be 'live' and mutable to suit ongoing crisis developments," Dr Phan explained. 

The cloud-based documentation can be edited and then distributed to any device by stakeholders, including mobile, he said.

"I am very optimistic that 2025 will be even more exhilarating for our clients and our team to leap forward more quickly and efficiently to achieve business and communication outreach goals," Dr Phan concluded.

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