How Lockheed Martin Comms is working smarter with GenAI

Our Lockheed Martin Communications team is taking stock of progress in one of our key growth areas for this year: leveraging AI tools to work smarter, so we can focus more of our energy on being strategic partners to the business.

Our approach is all-hands-on-deck; everyone shares a responsibility to safely and ethically experiment with generative AI and integrate tools into their workflows. In fact, it’s part of each team member’s goals this year. We’re guided by an internal Communications GenAI team that draws expertise from across the enterprise, and they’re helping us deploy resources, get creative and learn from each other.

We’re giving this effort 100%.

We hit our first milestone on our GenAI journey when we achieved 100% compliance on training for our team. Now, everyone has the foundational skills and know-how to use GenAI – without compromising privacy or security. We’re continuing to learn through external training and best practices-sharing at industry conferences.

In addition to required training, we’ve put together an AI Communications Playbook that includes Do’s and Don’ts, guidance on commonly used tools, and a section on “AI in Action” with prompt examples and use cases.

Finally, we are learning from each other as we discover new and beneficial ways to use AI tools. Our team is crowdsourcing content for shared resources such as a Prompt Library, including templates and use cases, contributed by communicators around the business. We’re also tracking use through some of our comms tech platforms, like Airtable. We’re constantly pulsing our team on barriers they’re facing or ideas for ways we can better support them. Our GenAI team publishes a monthly(ish) newsletter highlighting best practices from across Lockheed Martin Communications and external sources.

Use case: Streamlining storyboarding

Our newsletter recently highlighted a project from one of our business area Comms teams that got a jump-start thanks to GenAI. They wanted to create a video to spotlight defense technologies that are invisible to the human eye. Visualizing the invisible would be a challenge for any communicator. But ours used a visual AI tool to produce storyboards to illustrate their concept – before looping in the creatives.

The video is still in production, but it’s so far tracking 30% under budget. And pre-production hours are down by more than 180%. Importantly, our team is sharing a step-by-step how-to guide with our communicators around the world so they can replicate this success. See how it looks.

Here's the AI-generated video storyboard:

And here's our creative team's version:

We're experimenting to learn.

Each month, we host an AI Art Contest where our communicators are encouraged to experiment with visual generation tools like Leonardo.AI, Gemini, and others. Not only is this a fun way to see how our team members are creatively pushing these tools; it’s helping us learn how to prompt them effectively and understand how we can augment our workflows with visual AI – without compromising the authenticity, quality, or accuracy of our final deliverables.

We keep humans in the loop.

AI is never on autopilot with our Communications team. Much of our focus with AI is on helping our communicators get to the first draft faster. That way, they can focus their creative energy on the things only humans can do best – things like thought leadership, critical thinking and driving creative key messaging. With a human in the loop, we’re ensuring that our content is original, clear, and aligned to our goals.

Navigating a changing landscape is always a challenge – but our early investment in leaning into GenAI is paying off. It means our team is not only keeping up with the dynamic environment, but able to offer the business even better insights, more strategic counsel and managing our time and resources more effectively.

How is your Communications team strategically using GenAI?