AI and persuasive professional communication: an exploratory study of interactional metadiscourse in ChatGPT-composed CEO’s letters to shareholders

ChatGPT has become a worldwide phenomenon since its release in November 2022 with many speculating its potential to transform how texts are composed in different discourse domains. Business and professional communication is one domain that ChatGPT and other AI driven language processing tools can be used to assist with the construction of different texts. Persuasion is a key objective of many genres of business communication, and metadiscourse—language which refers to the subject matter—has been shown to be an essential element of persuasive discourse. The present study aims to explore the use of metadiscourse in persuasive texts constructed by ChatGPT. The income statements of a selection of S&P 500 companies were fed into ChatGPT and instruction given to compose persuasive CEO’s letters to shareholders. Specifically, interactional metadiscourse (Hyland, 2005) is examined in the generated texts, which is a category of resources that encodes explicitly writer-reader interaction and a writer’s evaluation of the propositional content. The findings show that interactional metadiscourse is an integral component of the discourse generated by ChatGPT which is consistent with prior studies of these resources in the CEO’s letter to shareholders. ChatGPT’s potential as a valuable tool is highlighted. It can help business professionals to enhance their interaction with stakeholders by using appropriate metadiscourse markers, and it can provide a template which can be modified and adapted according to the writer’s purpose, audience and genre expectations. ChatGPT could be particularly useful for L2 writers of English who may struggle with the linguistic and rhetorical aspects of persuasive communication in a second language. However, ChatGPT may have limitations in capturing context-specific nuances and it may not be able to account for the ethical and social implications of persuasive communication leading to the generation of texts which are misleading or biased.