Artificial Intelligence in Business Communication: A Snapshot

Abstract

Despite artificial intelligence's far-reaching influence in the financial reporting and other business domains, there is a surprising dearth of accessible descriptions about the assumptions underlying the software's development along with an absence of empirical evidence assessing the viability and usefulness of this communication tool. With these observations in mind, the purposes of this study are to explain how automated text summarization applications work from an overarching, semitechnical, modestly theoretical perspective and, using ROUGE-1 (Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation-1) evaluation metrics, assess how effective the summarization software is when summarizing complex business reports. The results of this study show that the extraction-based summarization system produced moderately satisfactory results in terms of extracting relevant instances of the text from the business reports. Much work still needs to be accomplished in the area of precision and recall in extraction-based systems before the software can match a human's ability to capture the gist of a body of text.

Notes From the Editors: 60 Years Young and a Work in Progress

“…IJBC publishes a variety of communication scholarship which leads meaningful conversations about nonverbal behaviors such as silence and listening (Bisel et al, 2012; Cardon & Marshall, 2014; Lloyd et al, 2017). And IJBC has responded to technological developments by introducing numerous studies which explore emergent channels such as virtual networks, social media, instant messaging, eye tracking, and artificial intelligence (Cardon et al, 2019; Casado-Aranda et al, 2023; Darics, 2020; Naidoo & Dulek, 2017, 2018; Smith et al, 2018). Going further—and with advent of remote work— IJBC similarly publishes research on proxemics or the influence of physical space (Andrews, 2017; Kupritz & Hillsman, 2011).…”

Taking a Rhetorical Perspective on Emerging Communication Practice: Pedagogy as Theory-Building Scholarship

“…Another 21 articles (23.1%) focused on the knowledge sources used in business communication practice. Three tackled artificial intelligence resources (Getchell et al, 2022; Naidoo & Dulek, 2022; Salomonson et al, 2013), three assessed the communication of emotions (Casado-Molina et al, 2022; Pickering, 2018; Xu & Wu, 2020), three focused on tasks of information gathering and storage (Craig & Allen, 2013; Gómez & Ballard, 2013; Young, 2018), five on the visualization of data (Jones et al, 2020; Kernbach et al, 2015; Laidroo, 2019; Melis & Aresu, 2022; Toth, 2013), and four on the business uses of personal stories (Yang, 2013) and narrative more generally (Aggerholm, 2014; Laskin, 2018; Rawlins, 2014). Three articles directly address the norms of rational thinking expected in the business environment (Geertshuis et al, 2015; Mandhana, 2022; Simonsson & Heide, 2018).…”

Using Manual and Automatic Summarization: What Should Students Consider in Writing a Summary?

“…This volume of text is an invaluable source of knowledge and information that, to be beneficial, must be effectively summarized (Allahyari et.al., 2017). Automated text summarization systems attempt to generate a condensed version of the source or reference text while preserving its essential meaning (Naidoo & Dulek, 2022). Nowadays, there are commercial tools that allow the automatic generation of text summaries (García-Hernández et.al., 2009).…”