5-6 April 2027
Manila
Most communicators are still poking at AI on the side — a prompt here, a draft there, no real system behind any of it. Almost none can point to consistent, measurable results. This course exists to close that gap, fast.
For the first time, this certified course is coming to the Philippines: two intensive days in Manila on April 5–6, 2027. A room, a whiteboard, and an instructor who's trained global corporations, governments, and militaries on exactly this. You'll build real workflows, configure your own AI assistant, and produce work you've actually made yourself, not just watched a demo of. By the time you walk out, how you work with AI will look nothing like it did when you walked in.
Just 40 seats. That means real time with your instructor, direct feedback on your own work, and a room worth remembering — not a lecture hall you disappear into.
This isn't a certificate you file away and forget. It's a credential from the McMaster University Master of Communications Management Executive Education program — proof, in writing, that you can put AI to work at an executive level. You'll earn it in the room, in front of the instructor and peers who watched you build it.
Learn directly from one of the most credentialed voices in communications AI.
Alex Sévigny, PhD, APR Associate Professor, Communications Management, McMaster University
Alex Sévigny is a tenured associate professor of communications management at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, where he teaches in the globally recognised Master of Communications Management program. He is also the CPRS Chief National Accreditation Examiner, overseeing the APR program at a national level. Alex has worked as a lecturer, consultant, and trainer with global corporations, government agencies, not-for-profits, military organisations, and healthcare institutions. Known for his engaging and highly practical teaching style, he helps professionals build confidence and real-world skills they can apply immediately in their work.
Bringing your team? Smart move — AI adoption sticks when a whole department learns it together, in the same room, on the same page.
This room will be full of your peers — senior communications, PR, corporate affairs, and marketing leaders who are done experimenting and ready to execute:
If you're ready to stop testing AI tools and start using them in a structured, strategic way, this course is built for you.
Brochure download
Part 1: Understanding the AI Landscape for Communicators
Kick off the day with a clear-eyed map of where AI actually stands today — not the hype, the reality. You'll walk through the tools and use cases already changing how communications teams work, from content generation to research and analysis, and separate what's proven from what's still experimental. You'll leave the session with a shared vocabulary for talking about AI in your organization and a shortlist of two or three opportunities you can act on immediately in your own role.
Part 2: Auditing and Redesigning Your Workflow
Every communications function has bottlenecks — the research that takes too long, the drafts that go through too many rounds, the reporting that eats a Friday afternoon. In this session, you'll map your own workflow step by step and pinpoint exactly where AI can remove friction without sacrificing quality or oversight. Working individually and in small groups, you'll leave with a redesigned workflow you can bring back to your team, built around speed, quality, and control rather than AI for its own sake.
Part 3: Responsible AI in Practice
Speed means nothing if it comes at the cost of trust. This session covers the practical guardrails experienced communicators use to keep AI-assisted work accurate, on-brand, and defensible — from fact-checking protocols to disclosure practices to knowing when a human needs to be the final check. You'll work through real scenarios where AI got it wrong and build a lightweight checklist you can apply to your own outputs starting the next day.
Part 4: AI for Writing and Storytelling
This is where the day gets hands-on. You'll use AI to brainstorm angles, structure narratives, and produce first drafts across formats — press releases, executive messaging, social copy, and more — then practice the editing techniques that keep your voice and judgment firmly in the driver's seat. The goal isn't AI-written content; it's AI-accelerated drafts that still sound like you.
Part 5: Building a Brand Knowledge System
AI is only as good as what you feed it. In this session, you'll learn how to structure brand guidelines, tone-of-voice rules, key messages, and past content into a system AI can reliably draw on — so outputs stop drifting off-message and start sounding consistently like your organization. You'll leave with a working framework you can populate with your own brand's information and start using right away.
Part 6: Advanced Content Creation with AI
Move beyond text into the formats increasingly driving engagement: video, audio, and visual content. This session covers what's realistically achievable with today's AI video and audio generation tools, where they still need a human hand, and how to fold them into your existing content calendar to scale output without scaling headcount.
Part 7: Hands-On Content Creation
Put the day's tools to work. In the room, you'll produce your own AI-generated assets — a short video, a branded visual, a piece of synthetic-voice audio — using the workflows and brand knowledge system built earlier in the day, with your instructor and peers on hand to troubleshoot in real time.
Part 8: Key Takeaways and Application
Close the day by turning everything you've learned into a concrete plan. You'll consolidate your key takeaways, identify the two or three changes you'll make to your workflow first, and leave with a short action list you can start applying the moment you're back at your desk.
Part 1: Tools to Systems
Day two begins by shifting the lens from individual AI tools to AI systems. You'll trace how AI has evolved from single-purpose assistants into connected workflows that can carry a task from prompt to output with far less manual handling, and where communications teams sit in that shift. By the end of this session, you'll have a working mental model for the difference between "using an AI tool" and "running an AI system" — and why that distinction matters for planning your team's next twelve months.
Part 2: High-Value Use Cases
Not every task is a good fit for an AI agent, and this session cuts through the noise to focus on where they deliver real value: repetitive research, first-pass reporting, campaign monitoring, content triage. Through examples drawn from live communications functions, you'll build a filter for evaluating your own use cases — what's worth automating, what still needs a person, and what looks impressive but isn't actually worth the effort.
Part 3: Building AI Assistants
This is where the day turns hands-on. You'll learn how to build a domain-specific GPT — a custom AI assistant trained on your organization's tone, terminology, and priorities — so that everyday queries and drafts come back sounding like your brand from the first response, not the fifth revision.
Part 4: Hands-On Configuration
Working directly on your laptop with support from your instructor and the room, you'll build and configure your own AI assistant from scratch, ready to put to work the moment the course ends. This session is entirely practical: by the time you leave, you'll have a live, working assistant, not just a plan for one.
Part 5: Agentic Workflows
Take the next step beyond a single assistant: connecting multiple tools together into a workflow that can move a task through several stages with a human checking in at the right moments. You'll learn the principles of agentic workflow design — what to automate, where to build in oversight, and how to keep a human genuinely in control rather than just nominally supervising.
Part 6: Real Scenario Applications
Put the day's concepts to the test in a simulated campaign planning exercise. Working through a realistic scenario — from initial brief to measurement plan — you'll apply the workflows and assistants built earlier in the day and see, in practice, where they save time and where they still need a human judgment call.
Part 7: Responsible AI & Governance
As agents take on more of the workflow, the stakes of getting governance right go up. This session covers what a practical AI governance framework looks like for a communications team — clear guidelines, standard operating procedures, and risk management practices you can adapt and bring back to your own organization, rather than a generic policy template.
Part 8: Performance Measurement
Learn how to use AI itself to track the performance of your AI-assisted work — tying outputs back to measurable outcomes so you can demonstrate impact, not just activity, to leadership. You'll leave with a simple measurement framework you can apply to your next campaign.
Part 9: Workflow Integration
Bring everything together into a single view of how AI fits across your full communications workflow, from planning through execution to reporting. This session is about integration, not addition — making sure the tools, assistants, and workflows from the two days work together rather than as disconnected experiments.
Part 10: Action Planning
Close the course by turning two days of learning into a concrete plan. You'll leave with a specific, written set of next steps, ready to implement the moment you're back in the office — along with your Certificate of Attendance from McMaster University.
This program can also be delivered as a tailored in-house training for your organization. We adapt the content to your industry, objectives, and level of maturity, focusing on real challenges your teams face and the decisions they need to make. In-house formats allow your people to align on a shared approach, work through relevant scenarios, and build skills they can apply immediately.
If you’re exploring an in-house option, tell us a bit about your team, priorities, and timing, and we’ll recommend the right format.
Contact us about in-house training
AI in Public Relations
