OpenAI’s APAC comms head on leveraging ChatGPT as a strategic partner

OpenAI has grown from a small research lab into one of the most scrutinised tech companies in the world. In just two and a half years, the company amassed 700 million weekly active users.

With that rapid rise comes a unique set of communications challenges: balancing reactive media inquiries with proactive storytelling, maintaining transparency in a climate of intense scrutiny, and adapting strategies to keep pace with technology advancing at breakneck speed.

"I think it's very easy to forget that ChatGPT was only launched just over two and a half years ago. Since then, we have had to evolve from being what was basically a pretty sleepy research lab that put out amazing research, academic studies. We did some cool experiments that got some press attention,” said Wilcynzki during a fireside session at MARKETING-INTERACTIVE’s PR Asia conference in Singapore.

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“It's amazing, but it also obviously comes with a great deal of challenge, and in many ways, we're constantly playing catch up and trying to grow as a company and evolve to catch up with that reality. And that's kind of my job and my team's job.”

Balancing reactive and proactive communications

Wilczynski is the first communications employee outside of the US. Currently, the team only has 15 employees across the globe.

At the same time, OpenAI appears to be expanding its own marketing infrastructure. Most recently, media reports said that OpenAI is in search of a growth paid marketing platform engineer to develop internal tools for ad platform integration, campaign management, and real-time attribution.

The position is reportedly part of the tech company’s newly formed “ChatGPT Growth team”, signaling the tech company’s plans for an in-house marketing platform within ChatGPT. Checks by MARKETING-INTERACTIVE revealed that the listing is not available on OpenAI’s website.

With the amount of interest and scrutiny the company gets, Wilczynski faced a steep learning curve.

"People think of OpenAI as huge tech company. In many ways, on the inside, we are still a scrappy startup. There’s this reality perception gap, and that makes the role incredibly challenging,” he shared.

Wilczynski added:

Internally, we talk about balancing being reactive to hundreds of daily media inquiries with being proactive in sharing the stories and narratives we want.

For marketers and communications folks, the pressures may feel familiar. Like OpenAI, brands face heightened expectations of transparency, trust, and accountability — all while navigating disruptive shifts in technology and consumer behaviour.

This is where trust comes in. According to Wilcynzki, “trust” is perhaps an overused word in the communications industry, but it remains incredibly important. In fact, trust is even more important now for companies and AI.

This is especially since people’s relationship with AI tools – be it ChatGPT or not – have developed into sharing more personal information. Often times, this comes in the form of asking for advice on their personal life and health as well as using AI tools in the workplace where sensitive commercial data are revealed.

Wilczynski then encourages users to use AI tools as a partner, and not a shortcut or quick fix.

"There’s a difference between using this as put a prompt and then copying and pasting the responses in a blog or a LinkedIn post. What I've tried to encourage the team is to really think of this as a partner and like an assistant, whether that's for your editing, your strategic thought. Do not just copy and paste the output, but go back and forth.”

He highlighted that the advantage of AI tools with improved memory is that it can now learn user preferences. “I’ve spent a lot of time teaching ChatGPT to write in the way I like. It doesn’t get it perfect every time, but we’re now at a point where I have to do less back-and-forth,” he said, adding that:

I think just thinking of it more as a partner, rather than something you ask something to do and copy and paste the output.

Using ChatGPT in OpenAI

When asked how he uses ChatGPT himself, Wilcynzki said he uses it a super assistant where it summarise his emails at the beginning of the day, writes and edits, and acts a useful tool for thinking about strategy and brainstorming.

“I'll increasingly pose a problem that we're dealing with and ask it to just help me think about how I should be thinking about this? What are the questions I should be asking myself, and increasingly using it as that strategic partner,” he explained.

In fact, on media monitoring and research, AI helps Wilczynski anticipate questions and angles.

"Whenever I have a spokesperson meeting a reporter or a policymaker, I will ask our deep research tool not just to come up with a little bio and some old articles, but to also look into those articles and find out what this person is interested in and come up with what angles might they take," he said.

Closer to home, Asian news network CNA has also transformed its newsroom with AI. In an interview with OpenAI, CNA editor-in-chief Walter Fernandez said editors, journalists, and audience teams receive specialised training and participate in hackathons to solve real newsroom challenges. Today, more than 20 custom GPTs are in daily use, added Fernandez.

During Singapore’s General Elections, the newsroom deployed ChatGPT in its coverage, leveraging OpenAI’s advanced reasoning models to analyse election campaigns, particularly manipulative social media activity.

Finally, Wilczynski emphasises curiosity and adaptability for both teams and individuals to best maximise AI tools and new technology. "We have a small, scrappy team, and we're going to continue to have that even as we grow. The people that we bring on are people who can be both super scrappy and super strategic, sometimes shifting between that in the same day,” said Wylcynzski, adding that he leads the team and still writes press releases and briefing documents.

"Just be super intellectually curious about the technology, be interested in it. I'm not super techy. I don't understand all of this. I get to play this amazing role internally, where I get to ask really dumb questions to smart people, and I have a mandate to do that. Ultimately we're here to educate people on how to do the same."

With AI moving at lightning speed, marketers can take a page from OpenAI’s playbook: combine technology with human insight, stay agile, and view AI as a collaborative partner rather than a replacement.

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