AI as a “Tool for Thought” serving not only tasks but also people
Every year, the Relevance Report by the USC Center for Public Relations identifies emerging issues and trends that will impact society, business, and communication in the following year. Among these is artificial intelligence, whose role in the transformation of communications and effect on the PR industry, which will use it to innovate storytelling, efficiency and data-driven information, is emphasised with foresight in their 2024 report.
The 2025 Relevance Report highlights the ongoing wave of activity around the use and testing of AI within agencies and organisations and reports the contributions of PR industry leaders, academics, and USC graduate students, as well as research conducted with WE Communications (“Energized by AI”) according to which PR professionals who frequently use artificial intelligence feel more valued in their roles, with a 93% increase in job satisfaction.
Microsoft has also contributed to this year’s report in various ways, including a study by the Tools for Thought (T4T) Team entitled “AI as a Tool for Thought”, which, unlike most research conducted on artificial intelligence, does not focus on its role in solving specific tasks for people, generating content or automating processes, but rather on the effects this approach can have on human cognition, that is, the way people think, learn, build, and grow their skills.
The goal of Tools for Thought is to help researchers and creators of AI-based systems to focus on people, imagining artificial intelligence as a tool that can help them not only produce more but also “think better”; a tool that supports individual and collective intentionality, valuing critical thinking skills and developing cultures of creativity and experimentation.
According to Microsoft researchers, AI should help not only in executing a task, but also to better understand the task itself, to think more critically about content – thanks also to a more comprehensive view of the entire workflow –, to get better answers originating from better questions, to predict and explore the unknown rather than sticking to known processes. And this should happen not only in the public relations sector, but in any field and in any user experience.
The Tools for Thought research starts from the assumption that cognition can be supported by the thinking tools with which it is called to interact, examines how this process occurs, and investigates the possible threats for its performance represented by artificial intelligence systems, but also the possible advantages. To do this, the team based its premises on several theories of cognition:
- Metacognition
- Reflective and critical thinking
- Divergent and convergent thinking
- Learning, recall, and understanding
- Planning
- Individual and distributed thinking
- Decision-making processes
Among the hypotheses that the researchers would like to develop is the possibility of imagining interfaces capable of promoting critical thinking, memory, understanding with respect to the activity being carried out when working with generative AI; of exploiting generative AI to encourage self-reflection and self-awareness of collaboration; of designing tools based on artificial intelligence capable of increasing human cognition and contributing to building skills and abilities in users, etc.
To address all these issues, Microsoft uses an interdisciplinary team, which includes experts in social sciences, computer science, engineering, and design.