5. Automation in communication management

The new technologies create new environments, both human and artificial, of communication, some discovered and others not yet known, and establish new forms of user interaction with machines where they play different roles, to the receiver and transmitter classics of information; and, contextualized knowledge is built on the interaction that subject and machine establish (Cabero Almenara, 1994, p. 14).

The possibilities of communication and connection between people with technological advances have multiplied at an unimaginable speed. “The interconnected world that gives us the internet, artificial intelligence, robotics [and other sciences] will soon modify the routine of our lives, if it is not already doing it” (Salazar, 2018, p. 304). This is due to the high level of internet penetration, which is already part of our lifestyle (Perlado, 2013, p. 430), although there are more and more experiments that alter the communication field of organizations.

With the appearance of these technologies, the management and institutional organization models (Fernández-Torres, Gutiérrez-Fernández, & Palomo-Zurdo, 2019, p. 15) break down, especially transforming the classic communication models and leading them to digital conversion inasmuch as:

Communication is not a linear process: it cannot be reduced to the cause-effect or stimulus-response relationship, because the human being always constructs meaning –interprets– from his world. Hence, communication can never be completely faithful because it occurs between humans, not between machines, and less we think that it is about making man as a machine so that he always responds the same to the same stimulus (Restrepo, 1995, p. 92).

Communication processes help create and/or develop more participatory forms of interrelation and organizations feel more committed and rely on communication to generate permanent transformation (Restrepo, 1995, p. 92).

Considering the strong impulse of technologies and the high value of communication in organizations, automation in communication management has not emerged like other fields. According to Ponsa and Ramon (2005, p. 11), the strongest industries related to automation are manufacturing and process industry, the first is closely linked to the presence of machines for the large-scale production process and quality and in the second one the automation of advanced control algorithms is applied, thus focusing on the support with rooms with distributed control systems. Both care for quality and cost processes. Therefore, “automation should be understood as a tool to improve management ...” (Rodríguez Gutiérrez, 1999, p. 75) and it is considered that communication is included within this management of organizations.

Another sector that has achieved a leap in automation is that of banking institutions, which have faced technology as a challenge and have taken with interest the competitiveness of their financial model (Akkizidis & Stagars, 2015), including artificial intelligence technology in several fields of its communicational strategy as operational. However, small financial institutions such as cooperatives are not yet prepared for this change and even so, it is the user experience that determines this evolution, which allows them to be transformed from a product model to a business model of clients. (Fernández-Torres et al., 2019, p. 16).

One of the most aligned to communication, which has a strong growth is journalism, where the media is the key factor. According to an investigation by Carreira & Squirran (2017, p. 75) the use of algorithms to produce news automatically, is