The communication profession stands at a pivotal moment. Artificial intelligence is transforming how we create and distribute content. Trust in institutions continues to erode while employees demand authenticity and transparency. The hybrid workplace has permanently altered how we reach our audiences. And the pace of change shows no signs of slowing.

In this environment, what does it mean to be a communication professional? More specifically, what will it mean in 2026 and the years that follow?

The December Circle of Fellows panel tackled these questions head-on, bringing together four IABC Fellows to share their perspectives on where our profession is headed and what opportunities await those prepared to seize them.

The conversation explored several interconnected themes, including the evolving role of the communication professional as a trusted adviso,; the new capabilities and mindsets that will distinguish the communication leaders who thrive from those who struggle to keep pace, the skills the next generation of communicators should be developing now;  and how we can maintain professional standards and ethical practice when the tools and channels keep shifting beneath our feet.

About the panel:

Zora Artis, GAICD, SCMP, ACC, FAMI, CPM, is CEO of Artis Advisory and co-founder of The Alignment People. She helps leaders and teams tackle tough challenges, find clarity, and take action, particularly when the stakes are high and the path isn’t obvious. Her superpower is being comfortable with the uncomfortable: aligning people, solving problems, and navigating change so leaders can focus on what matters most and teams can do their best work.
With more than three decades of experience across consulting, executive leadership, and strategic communication, Zora has guided major brands, government, for-purpose and for-profit organisations in aligning purpose, culture, strategy, and performance. A leading thinker, researcher, and expert in strategic and team alignment, leadership, brand, and communication, she is co-authoring a global study on Strategic Alignment & Leadership. She is a Research Fellow with the Team Flow Institute.
Zora has served as Chair of the IABC Asia Pacific region, as a Director on the IABC International Executive Board, and on multiple committees and task forces. She holds multiple IABC Gold Quill Awards and Chairs the IABC SIG Change Management. Based in Melbourne, she works globally.

Bonnie Caver, SCMP, is the Founder and CEO of Reputation Lighthouse, a global change management and reputation consultancy with offices in Denver, Colorado, and Austin, Texas. The firm, which is 20 years old, focuses on leading companies to create, accelerate, and protect their corporate value. She has achieved the highest professional certification for a communication professional, the Strategic Communication Management Professional (SCMP), a distinction at the ANSI/ISO level. She is also a certified strategic change management professional (Kellogg School of Management), a certified crisis manager (Institute of Crisis Management). She holds an advanced certification for reputation through the Reputation Institute (now the RepTrak Company). She is a past chair of the global executive board for the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC). She currently serves on the board of directors for the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management, where she leads the North American Regional Council and is the New Technology Responsibility/AI Director. Caver is the Vice Chair for the Global Communication Certification Council (GCCC) and leads the IABC Change Management Special Interest Group, which has more than 1,300 members. In addition, she is heavily involved in the global conversation around ethical and responsible AI implementation and led the Global Alliance’s efforts in creating Ethical and Responsible AI Guidelines for the global profession.

Adrian Cropley is the founder and director of the Centre for Strategic Communication Excellence, a global training and development organization. For over thirty years, Adrian has worked with clients worldwide, including Fortune 500 companies, on major change communication initiatives, internal communication reviews and strategies, professional development programs, and executive leadership and coaching. He is a non-executive director on several boards and advises some of the top CEOs and executives globally.

Adrian is a past global chair of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC), where he implemented the IABC Career Road Map, kick-started a global ISO certification for the profession, and developed the IABC Academy. Adrian pioneered the Melcrum Internal Communication Black Belt program in Asia Pacific and is a sought-after facilitator, speaker, and thought leader. He has been a keynote speaker and workshop leader on strategic and change communication at international conferences in Canada, the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, Malaysia, Singapore, China, India, Hong Kong, Thailand, New Zealand, and Australia. He has received numerous awards, including IABC Gold Quill Awards for communication excellence, and his Agency received Boutique Agency of the Year 6 years running.

Adrian is the Chair of the Industry Advisory Committee for the RMIT School of Media and Communication and a Fellow of the IABC and RSA. In 2017, he was awarded the Medal of Order of Australia for his contribution to the field of communication.

Mary Hills, ABC, IABC Fellow, Six Sigma, FCSCE serves as MBA Faculty in Benedictine University’s Goodwin College of Business. Her work in marketing, finance and organizational communication and management brings an interdisciplinary perspective to her students. Mary’s professional career includes serving large corporations such as First Wisconsin National Bank – Milwaukee, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Whiteco Advertising, NiSource, Northern Trust, Unilever and Zebra Technologies. She supported starts-ups through Purdue Technology Center and Research Park of NWI. As a member of senior management, her work includes research, risk analysis and strategic planning for product launches, market expansion, and change and crisis management. In 2009, she co-founded HeimannHills Marketing Group, Chicago and Phoenix, serving as business principal until 2021. Most recently, Mary’s work involves AI’s impact on the role of the communication professional. Her work has been recognized nationally and internationally.

Raw Transcript:

Circle of Fellows Episode 123: The Future of Communications in 2026 and Beyond

Shel Holtz: Hi everybody, and welcome to episode 123 of Circle of Fellows. I’m Shel Holtz, the Senior Director of Communications at Webcor, a commercial general contractor and builder headquartered here in the Bay Area. We have a great panel today to talk about a really fascinating topic: the future of communications in 2026 and beyond.

I want to emphasize that this is not one of those “lists of trends for next year” that you see flooding social media. I think that has gotten worse since AI made it easier for people to come up with these trends rather than thinking it through for themselves. We will explore where we think communication is headed based on everything going on in the world, including AI.

I’m going to ask the panel to introduce themselves, but before that, I want to take a moment to note the passing of one of our community of IABC Fellows. This happened on April 15th, but we all just learned about it yesterday. The Fellow who passed is Les Potter. Les was hugely influential to more than one generation of communicators. There are likely hundreds, if not thousands, of communicators out there practicing sound strategic communication because of what they learned from Les.

He was a great friend of mine; we spent time together socially, and he will be sorely missed. He was a past chair of IABC, and his passing is a tremendous loss to the community. After leaving the corporate world, he became a beloved professor of communication at Towson University in Maryland. I just wanted to share that for people who may not have heard. I hope he is resting in peace.

With that, let’s find out who is on the panel today. Adrian, starting with you.

Adrian Cropley: It’s great to be with everyone. Thank you, Shel. I am Adrian Cropley in Melbourne, Australia. It is hot today. I am an IABC Fellow and the co-founder of the Centre for Strategic Communication Excellence.

Shel Holtz: Great to have you with us, Adrian. Bonnie, you’re up next.

Bonnie Caver: Hi, I’m Bonnie Caver. I’m in Austin, Texas, and I run a company called Reputation Lighthouse, where we do brand and reputation change management for mid-sized companies.

Shel Holtz: Thanks for joining us, Bonnie. Mary?

Mary Hills: Mary Hills in lovely Scottsdale, Arizona. Our temperature is perfect, as it always is in Scottsdale. I am graduate faculty for Benedictine University, teaching out of their business school, and also on the faculty at the Centre for Strategic Communication Excellence. I am glad to dive into the topic.

Shel Holtz: I have to ask, is the weather going to be perfect in Scottsdale in August?

Mary Hills: It’ll be a little wet and a little hot.

Shel Holtz: Okay. And Zora.

Zora Artis: Hello, everyone. I’m coming to you from Melbourne, Australia, not too far from Adrian. I’m the CEO of Artis Advisory and co-founder of The Alignment People. I work with leaders and executives on tackling tough problems, finding clarity, and taking action. I’m really excited to be here today closing off the year.

Shel Holtz: Thanks, Zora. I also want to shout out Anna Wyllie, our executive producer behind the scenes. In the document she sent to prepare for this, she suggested a potential opening question: What is your one headline for the future of the communication profession in 2026? Let’s go in reverse order, starting with Zora.

Zora Artis: I think as we head into 2026, communication leadership is entering a much more pressured time. This isn’t just because of AI, but because the pace of change is relentless and outstripping people’s ability to make sense of everything. We need to help them move fast and bring them along with us, which is quite daunting, but it puts us in a position where we’re indispensable.

Mary Hills: I would say that so much of the future is not new; it involves things that are maturing and evolving. I don’t think there will be any grand flashes. We have made progress, and we are just going to keep going.

Bonnie Caver: Transformative. We must, as communication professionals, transform ourselves, and we must lead transformation within our organizations and with our stakeholders.

Adrian Cropley: I was scared Bonnie was going to be before me on this one because we think the same here. It’s absolutely about change and transition. But let me add that it will be an exciting time if communication professionals seize the opportunity to grow their value in organizations because the moment is now.

Shel Holtz: I will add mine: I think we are going to have to be laser-focused on building trust. Trust is eroding, and AI is contributing to this. I don’t know if you heard that The Washington Post created AI-generated podcasts that were loaded with factual inaccuracies. If that’s coming from The Washington Post, we’re in trouble. I don’t know who is going to want to be aligned with or engaged with an organization they don’t trust.

Let’s dive into it. What are the leaders of organizations looking for from communicators, and how prepared are we to deliver on those things?

Bonnie Caver: I’ve done quite a bit of research on what leaders are focused on. Profitable growth is on their mind, alongside transformation with AI technology, transforming talent, and the future of work. They also have to protect and govern. As communication professionals, we have to plug in there. We are part of growth, but we must also help lead transformation and address risk, trust, and sustainability. Stakeholders are going to have very different expectations of us going forward.

Adrian Cropley: Shel, you talked about the state of trust, and I think this is critical. Leaders have this opportunity to lead their organizations and employees to buy into what the organization stands for. The reality today, with the amount of misinformation and mal-information on steroids due to AI, is that people gravitate toward what is comfortable.

The role for a communication professional is to give leaders the information, insight, and advice they need. We have to be the “sense maker” more than ever before. There is also a morality role coming into play. When Bonnie and I were working on the Venice Pledge for the Global Alliance, a theme popped up that it is more than ethics; it is about how we engage our world. It’s about home and security.

Zora Artis: I’ve been talking to a lot of leaders this year, and while there is a lot of talk, things are happening in real-time. Strategic horizons have shrunk. We’re constantly trying to outmaneuver the competition to grow and win. Comms professionals need to look at how to make sense of that complexity. We need to look at the system overall—actions taken, decisions made, money invested—and ask: Is this going to reinforce trust or erode it?

There is often a gap between what leaders say and how they behave versus what employees and stakeholders see. Communication professionals have a role in making sense of that and bringing it back to leaders to help them make better decisions.

Mary Hills: I may have a few data points worth considering. Communication professionals must finally become interdisciplinary. They can’t stay in the silo of comms; they have to understand the business, economics, and the value and risk model of the organization.

In communication, we balance the vision and mission of the organization. We represent both the short term and the long term. We have to find that harmonious balance. We also need to apply a rigorous professionalism, including emotional intelligence and behavioral economics, to foster discussion within organizations. Use the PESTLE analysis and attach ethics right to it.

Shel Holtz: Shel, you’re working in-house now. What are you hearing from your organization regarding their expectations?

Shel Holtz: I think they are expecting me to tell them. We are not a massive organization, and most of the leadership team has a construction or engineering background. They expect me to help them figure this out. Even if they don’t articulate it, that is the expectation. Based on Adrian’s thoughts, the first thing that leaped to mind was that we had better get a lot better at listening.

Adrian Cropley: Absolutely. We don’t have the excuse not to listen or measure anymore. This is where I think AI has really helped us. We need to be better at listening and helping our leaders listen to get the insight that informs true connection. Listening has become critical.

Zora Artis: I wrote a piece about this last month. It became obvious that true listening was missing in organizations, as well as the capability among leaders to listen to understand rather than to respond.

I know a Chief Comms Officer in professional services who spends time listening on platforms like Fishbowl, where people talk outside the business. She gathers that information and takes it back to the executive team to explain why it matters. We’re often seeing people skip the listening. If we don’t listen, we can’t counter misinformation or AI bots controlling the narrative because we don’t actually know what our stakeholders believe.

Bonnie Caver: We have challenges today with fake surveys. If you think you’re going to survey your customer base to make critical decisions, but AI bots are participating, it changes your playing field. True listening—picking up the phone and talking to your customers and stakeholders—is more important than ever.

Mary Hills: The one caution I would throw out is that the stakeholder network is tired of irrelevant questions. If we are going to have a conversation, we better have our background research done. They are tired of giving feedback. We need to look at discursive leadership skills: open-ended discussions rather than closed-ended five-question surveys.

Bonnie Caver: The reason people are tired of us asking questions is that communication is not coming back to them regarding how we are acting upon it. We never close the loop.

Shel Holtz: Exactly. There is no such thing as survey fatigue, but there is certainly “bullshit fatigue.” If they see the survey leads to change, they will take surveys all day long.

We have a question from our live audience. Bill Spaniel asks: Regarding the emotional factor of communication and the need for listening, how can communication schools build those requirements into their curriculum?

Mary Hills: We have been doing that for a good eight to nine years. It requires active experience of learning in the classroom. It’s exhausting because you are “on” for three hours, but it reinforces that it’s not just about hearing what was said, but agreeing on the next action item.

Adrian Cropley: We’ve built relationship-building skills and emotional intelligence into the Centre for Strategic Communication Excellence programs. You have to be able to build relationships with stakeholders, not just rely on data. You get data on where people navigate, but you must overlay it with the right context—that is the true listening stuff.

Shel Holtz: Years ago, I read a book called Excellence in Public Relations and Communication Management, and I learned the term “boundary spanning.” It’s almost like surveillance—lurking in the conversations stakeholders are having to glean intelligence. Listening isn’t just asking questions; sometimes it’s just listening.

Adrian Cropley: There is a social awareness aspect, too. If you can’t even connect with people as humans—like saying thank you in a shop—how are you supposed to get context? We need to go back to some of those old skills.

Zora Artis: It’s also about being observant. Observing the people in the room and observing what is left unsaid.

Shel Holtz: Listening strikes me as one of those uncomfortable truths we need to face if we are going to stay relevant. What other uncomfortable truths are there?

Zora Artis: We confuse activity with impact. We are good at producing stuff, but not always good at understanding if it changes behavior or decisions. We need to be relevant rather than busy.

Mary Hills: The Communication Value Circle came out around 2016. It helps us understand how to provide value and assess risk. We have to understand the value and risk model every organization is on. Marketing has a value circle, too. We need to understand where we bring present value and how we protect future value.

Adrian Cropley: Often, the perceived value from leaders drives the behavior of the communication professional—churning out content or tidying up PowerPoints. That value has disappeared because AI can do those things now. We have to educate organizations on what real value for communication is: providing insight and context.

Zora Artis: It comes back to the business side. I remember learning Net Present Value and risk calculations. Comms often skirts around the edges of finance. We need to talk about revenue, productivity, trust capital, and risk exposure in language that matters to the business.

Bonnie Caver: Reputation is huge right now. CEOs say it’s important, but they don’t know how to do it. We haven’t positioned ourselves as being in the business of building and protecting reputation; we often treat it as a byproduct of crisis management. It’s not reputation management anymore; it’s reputation design.

And let’s not forget, AI is now a stakeholder. AI controls the narrative and answers questions about your organization.

Shel Holtz: What else are communicators not focused on that they should be?

Adrian Cropley: Understanding and interacting with AI. I am surprised how many people have not dipped their feet into the water. If we aren’t exploring AI to make our roles more efficient and gain insight, we are missing a huge opportunity. We recently published a playbook for AI into 2026, and a key play is using AI to carve out time to do the higher-value work.

Mary Hills: We treat AI as an agent. You are the owner of what AI brings back to you. It is merely the agent acting for you to get information. We must manage what it gives us back.

Bonnie Caver: We shouldn’t look at AI just to solve problems, but for efficiencies. I was on a panel with an organization that saved almost a thousand hours using AI. They used that efficiency to free themselves up to do transformative things.

Zora Artis: AI creates incredible speed. The problem is alignment. People are moving at speed with decisions, but they aren’t creating clarity around what stays the same and what shifts. Communication professionals need to enable the alignment needed across the organization so they can work at pace sustainably.

Shel Holtz: We have talked about the need to be transformative. However, there are things like professional standards and ethical behavior we don’t want to transform. But now, the people doing the communicating are often not journalists or professionals—they are pastors, barbers, or WhatsApp moderators. How do we maintain professional standards when we have lost the traditional gatekeepers?

Adrian Cropley: We aren’t short of standards; we just don’t publish them well enough. The Global Standard for the Communication Profession is critical. We have to build those standards out to everyone communicating. The work Bonnie did with the Venice Pledge regarding AI usage is a great example. We need to work with governments and agencies to enforce requirements.

Mary Hills: The professional associations are the keepers of the standard. Academia builds the body of knowledge, but associations like IABC bring it to the marketplace through certification.

Zora Artis: I don’t think we ever had control; that’s an illusion. We had influence. We need to double down on the “Do, Say, Be” alignment—making sure that what we do, what we say, and the lived experience are true.

Shel Holtz: We are almost out of time. Let’s do a closing round. In one sentence, what is your boldest prediction for communication by 2030?

Adrian Cropley: Absolutely radical change. We are going to find out we are changing completely.

Bonnie Caver: We’re going to become advocates for ourselves, or we’re going to disappear.

Mary Hills: The natural inclination for communicators to bring human-centric abilities to the forefront will protect our space. We have to be the ones keeping our heads when everyone else is losing theirs.

Zora Artis: Communication should be the essential organizational infrastructure that creates shared understanding to keep strategy, trust, and performance from falling apart.

Shel Holtz: My thanks to all of you for a sparkling conversation. The next Circle of Fellows is scheduled for noon Eastern Time on Thursday, January 22nd. The subject is the impact of mentoring. Thank you all for your participation.

Panel: Thank you. Happy holidays.

The post Circle of Fellows #123: The Future of Communication — 2026 and Beyond appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

In this short midweek episode, Shel and Neville dissect the communication fallout from the $13.5 billion Omnicom-IPG merger and the controversial pre-holiday layoff of 4,000 employees. Among the themes they discuss: the stark contrast between the polished corporate narrative aimed at investors and the raw, real-time reality shared by staff on LinkedIn and Reddit, illustrating how organizations have lost control of the narrative. Against the backdrop of a corporate surge in hiring “storytellers,” Neville and Shel discuss the irony of failing to empower the workforce — the brand’s most authentic narrators — and analyze the long-term reputational damage caused by tone-deaf leadership during a crisis.

Links from this episode:

• Another NOT SO HOT TAKE: Omnicom is a communications company. They didn’t forget how to communicate. They chose who to communicate to.
• Omnicom layoffs—how a communications company created its own crisis
• The Omnicom-IPG merger was confirmed this week.  4,000 jobs will be cut by Christmas.  The announcement came the week after Thanksgiving.  I’ve been here before.
• Inside Omnicom’s Town Hall: Adamski confronts criticism, outlines new power structure after IPG acquisition
• Companies Are Desperately Seeking ‘Storytellers’

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, December 29.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email [email protected].

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz Hi everybody and welcome to episode number 492 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.

Neville Hobson And I’m Neville Hobson. In this episode, we’re going to talk about something that’s been playing out very publicly over the past few weeks in our own industry, i.e. communication. It’s about Omnicom, its merger with IPG, and the layoffs that followed. Following confirmation of the $13.5 billion merger, the company announced that around 4,000 roles would be cut, with many of those job losses happening before Christmas.

On the face of it, this is not unusual. Mergers of this scale inevitably create overlap, and redundancies are part of that reality. What makes this different was not simply the decision, but how the story unfolded and where.

On one level, there was the official corporate narrative. Omnicom’s public messaging focused on growth, integration, and future capability. It was language clearly written with investors, analysts, and the financial press in mind—not to mention clients. Polished, strategic, and familiar to anyone who has worked around holding companies. At the same time, a very different narrative was emerging elsewhere, particularly on LinkedIn and Reddit, driven by people inside the organization—people who had lost their jobs and people watching colleagues lose theirs.

That contrast became the focus of an Ad Age opinion piece by Elizabeth Rosenberg, a communications advisor who had handled large-scale change and layoffs herself. In the piece—which, by the way, Ad Age unlocked so it’s openly available—and later in her own LinkedIn posts, Rosenberg described watching two stories unfold in real time. One told to shareholders and external stakeholders, the other taking shape in comment threads written by the people most directly affected. Her point was not that Omnicom failed to communicate, but that it chose who to communicate to.

That observation resonated widely inside the industry. Rosenberg’s LinkedIn post made clear that she was less interested in being provocative than in naming something that many people were already seeing and feeling. She also noted the response she received privately—messages describing her comments as brave—and questioned what it says about our profession if plain speaking about human impact is now treated as courage.

As that conversation gathered momentum, another LinkedIn post took the discussion in a slightly different direction. Stephanie Brown, a marketing career coach, wrote about the timing of the layoffs. Her post was grounded in personal experience; she describes being laid off herself in December 2013 and what it meant to lose a job during a period associated with family, financial pressure, and emotional strain.

She acknowledged that layoffs are part of corporate life but argued that timing is a choice and that announcing thousands of job losses immediately after Thanksgiving, with cuts landing for Christmas, intensified the impact. That post triggered a large and emotionally charged response—thousands of reactions, hundreds of comments. Some people echoed Brown’s argument that holiday season layoffs carry an additional human cost. Others pushed back, arguing that earlier notice can be preferable to delayed disclosure even if the timing is painful.

What stood out was not consensus, but the depth of feeling and the willingness of people to share lived experience publicly. Across both posts and in the comment threads beneath them, a broader picture began to emerge. Former Omnicom and IPG employees described how they received the news. Industry veterans expressed sadness rather than surprise. Practitioners questioned what this says about internal credibility, culture, and leadership. Others pointed out that holding company economics have long prioritized shareholders and that this moment simply made that reality visible.

What’s notable here is that LinkedIn wasn’t just a reaction channel. It became the place where the story itself evolved. The press release was no longer the primary narrative. The commentary, the responses, and the shared experiences became part of how the situation was understood. So that’s the landscape we’re stepping into today: A major communication holding company announcing significant layoffs via a formal, investor-focused message, and a parallel, highly visible conversation driven by employees, former employees, and industry peers about audience, timing, and impact.

Rather than rushing to judgment, I think this is worth exploring carefully, especially for people whose job is communication, reputation, and trust. So, Shel, what would you say to all of this?

Shel Holtz I would say, first of all, that for an organization that purports to be a communication organization, their failure to recognize that they employ thousands of communicators who know how to use publicly accessible channels is a massive failure in communication planning. It should have been anticipated. But the story is dripping with irony, Neville. In light of an article the Wall Street Journal published last week, the article pointed to an entirely different approach that companies are taking than the one Omnicom defaulted to.

While Omnicom is watching its narrative get dismantled by its own employees on Reddit, the Wall Street Journal just reported that the hottest job in corporate America is—are you ready for this?—”storyteller.” Listings for jobs with storyteller in the title have doubled on LinkedIn in the past year. Executives used the word “storytelling” 469 times on earnings calls through mid-December.

Companies like Microsoft, Vanta, and USAA aren’t just hiring communicators anymore; they’re hunting for directors of storytelling and heads of narrative. Now, on one level, you can see why they’re doing this. The Journal points out that print newspaper circulation has dropped 70% since 2005. The army of journalists we used to rely on to tell our stories has evaporated. If companies want their news covered, they realize they have to become the media themselves. That’s what Tom Foremski said so many years ago: Every company is a media company.

But what this really means is that their traditional gatekeepers are gone. Listening to what’s happening with Omnicom, you have to wonder if these companies actually understand what storytelling means in 2025. We’re seeing a collision of two worlds here. In one world, you have the C-suite still believing they can control the narrative by hiring better writers. They think if they can just recruit a customer storytelling manager—that’s what Google is doing—or a former journalist to run corporate editorial—that’s what Chime is doing—they can fill the void. They think they can craft a sanitized, strategic message for investors and that will be the story of record.

Then you have the real world, Neville; it’s the one you just described. While Omnicom was probably busy polishing its official investor-focused story, the actual story was being written in real time on Reddit and LinkedIn by the people living through the chaos. These employees didn’t need a head of storytelling. They didn’t need a corporate newsroom. They had the truth. They had a platform.

This is exactly the loss of control we’ve been warning about for how many years. The Journal quotes a communication CEO who says leaders are finally realizing that brands that are winning right now are the ones that are most authentic and human. Yeah, he’s absolutely right. But here’s the problem: You can’t hire authenticity. If your new director of storytelling is busy writing a glossy piece about innovation while your employees are on social forums describing a culture of fear and disposal, you’ve lost the plot. The story isn’t what you publish on your corporate blog. The story is what your people say it is.

The Journal notes that a USAA storyteller might work some real experiences into an executive speech. Yeah, that’s fine. It’s also table stakes. If Omnicom or any of these companies rushing to hire storytellers want to tell a better story, they don’t just need to hire better writers. They need to give their employees a better story to tell. That’s the idea behind employee advocacy, after all, isn’t it? Because if the story you pay someone to write conflicts with the story your employees are living, the employees are going to win every single time. And as we’re seeing with Omnicom, they’re going to do it on their own channels and they’re going to do it without anybody’s approval.

Neville Hobson Yeah, one of the ironies that came across in the story, according to both of the women I quoted from the LinkedIn posts, is that Omnicom and IPG have spent decades advising clients on authentic communication, yet failed to apply that themselves. Rosenberg highlights comments from laid-off staff describing abrupt, impersonal Zoom calls, minimal explanation of rationale or future direction, and leadership absence at critical moments. These voices carried more weight than any press release because employees are the brand’s most credible storytellers.

Switch over to the Town Hall in early December, which Omnicom hosted—the first global company-wide Town Hall since the merger. It was actually completed at the end of November. The behavior of the CEO led me to think just reading this—is he tone-deaf or does he just not care?

One quote in Storyboard 18 says: “Opening the session, Florian Adamski, the CEO of Omnicom Media, reportedly addressed intense industry speculation surrounding the merger and restructuring. He criticized the tone of press and social media commentary, describing detractors as ‘haters’ and stressed that decisions have been taken after considerable deliberation, urging staff to stay patient as transitions rolled out.“

It goes on elsewhere to repeat that call from the leadership of Omnicom to be patient, everyone, it’s all going to be fine. But without any communication explaining how—or worse, even addressing the detail of what people have been saying about this. Is that tone-deaf or what?

Shel Holtz It is seriously tone-deaf. I remember years ago—this was at a Ragan conference in Chicago—a CEO was speaking. I think he was the CEO of Avon. He made the point that he thinks the minute a CEO is installed in that role and sits in the chair, there is a “stupid ray” aimed at them that affects their brains and makes them forget who employees are.

He made a point at least once a month of visiting frontline employees. It could be at a manufacturing facility where they were filling bottles, but he talked to them to remind himself that these are real people, that they have real lives, and that they are smarter than you tend to give them credit for when you don’t interact with them. You’re the CEO, you’re part of the executive team, and you think those are the “little people” down there doing all the work, not smart enough to absorb bad news.

In speaking to them, he found that they were scout masters, they helped their spouses run businesses, they were the president of the local Kiwanis club. They are smart, they can handle bad news, and they can understand things like business plans and corporate strategy. I think in this case, the Omnicom CEO obviously has not moved himself out of the path of that “stupid ray,” because his assessment of employees and the role they could play in this was seriously misguided.

Neville Hobson Yeah, your mention of that phrase “the little people” reminded me of that hotel owner in New York who went to jail for not paying taxes because she said “only the little people pay taxes.“

Shel Holtz That was Leona Helmsley.

Neville Hobson That’s it. So, one thing I also thought when I was thinking about this story: The optics are bad, but this isn’t about the optics. It’s about trust.

To me, this happened. 4,000 people are losing their jobs right before Christmas. It’s going to be extremely painful to many of them. They feel angry. The deeper risk is the long-term erosion of trust in Omnicom. Employees disengage or leave faster than those who are still there. Leadership messages lose credibility. Organizational resilience weakens, and clients notice the inconsistency between advice given and the behavior shown. This gap is damaging.

The other thing to mention—and it really confirms the point you made earlier—is that in a world where every employee has a public platform like this, organizations do not control the narrative. That will be obvious to you and me, but this sets it quite clearly. The story that endures is how people remember being treated when change was unavoidable.

You can’t actually predict what effects that is going to have on Omnicom. It may well be that in this age of polarization and utter cynicism, no one will care about this when they get hired and go work for Omnicom. But this is a firm that I wouldn’t like to work for based on this.

I started my working career in advertising at J. Walter Thompson back in the late 70s. Omnicom has a storied history in its current form, with the legacy brands they keep talking about in the press releases that are all being retired. Doyle Dane Bernbach, BBDO—some of these firms were around when I was at JWT all those years ago. It reminds me that nothing is permanent. The gloss in advertising is often just a veneer. I think they will not gain any credit for this, and the CEO’s reaction, just according to that town hall write-up, was pretty appalling.

Shel Holtz It’s just terrible. As we know, because we report on it every year, employees are still the most trusted source from a company according to the Edelman Trust Barometer. When you have this many employees out talking about what happened to them, telling their stories authentically, that’s what people are going to remember. They’re not going to remember the financial forecast that Omnicom has put forward.

Somebody needs to counsel this guy. I read somewhere that even for the layoff notification he was supposed to participate in, they said he couldn’t because he was having “technical difficulties.” I mean, come on, really? You’re not even going to get that personal message of regret from the leader of the organization?

We’re in a period right now where people are struggling to find jobs in communication. If Omnicom opens some jobs, people will take those jobs because it’s hard to find one right now. But if that pendulum swings and it becomes a seller’s market rather than a buyer’s market again, I can’t imagine a lot of communicators who are going to want to work there. They may find themselves hiring a more mediocre workforce because the best of the best are going to say, “No, I’m really good, the world knows I’m good, I can work anywhere, and I’m not going to go work for those jerks.“

Neville Hobson I think it’s a good point. Another thing to mention is that I was surprised to see the comments on Reddit. There are hundreds, if not thousands, and in a way I wasn’t expecting. I expected a lot of ranting, a lot of ugliness, and maybe trolling. I didn’t see much of that. I saw what I would describe as sheer sadness by many people, and calm acceptance of the awfulness of it all by those who’ve been fired. The two LinkedIn posts I discussed are very much worth looking at, along with the comments.

Layoffs are inevitable, and indeed in the case of this acquisition, they were inevitable. But the communication failure was not inevitable if they had handled it differently. Employees now shape the public narrative in real time. Trust, once lost, quickly becomes an external issue, which is what we’re seeing playing out still. Communication principles apply most when it’s hardest to use them, like this situation, and I think they failed the test totally.

Shel Holtz Yeah, I’ll tell you what, we just recently completed an acquisition here where I work, and in our little two-person communication team in our small billion-and-a-half-dollar company, the communication was far superior to what we see coming out of this behemoth of a communication organization. It’s pathetic.

This is what Zuckerberg always said when he got caught doing something bad: “We’ll have to do better.” He never does, and I doubt that Omnicom will either based on this behavior, but they need to do better. And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

 

The post FIR #492: The Authenticity Divide in Omnicom Layoff Communication appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

In this episode, Chip and Gini discuss the importance of strategic planning for 2026. As they near the end of 2025, they emphasize the need for agencies to set themselves apart and adapt to the evolving landscape, particularly through the effective use of AI.

Despite ongoing economic challenges, they highlight the potential for AI to enhance both efficiency and strategic thinking. Chip and Gini also stress the importance of refining the ideal client profile and taking calculated risks. They share their personal experiences with using AI to assist in planning and decision-making processes, pointing out both the benefits and limitations of current AI technology. [read the transcript]

The post ALP 291: Embracing innovation to survive and thrive in 2026 appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Josh Bernoff has just completed the largest survey yet of writers and AI – nearly 1,500 respondents across journalism, communication, publishing, and fiction.

We interviewed Josh for this podcast in early December 2025. What emerges from both the data and our conversation is not a single, simple story, but a deep divide.

Writers who actively use AI increasingly see it as a powerful productivity tool. They research faster, brainstorm more effectively, build outlines more quickly, and free themselves up to focus on the work only humans can do well – judgement, originality, voice, and storytelling. The most advanced users report not only higher output, but improvements in quality and, in many cases, higher income.

Non-users experience something very different.

For many non-users, AI feels unethical, environmentally harmful, creatively hollow, and a direct threat to their livelihoods. The emotional language used by some respondents in Josh’s survey reflects just how personal and existential these fears have become.

And yet, across both camps, there is striking agreement on key risks. Writers on all sides are concerned about hallucinations and factual errors, copyright and training data, and the growing volume of bland, generic “AI slop” that now floods digital channels.

In our conversation, Josh argues that the real story is not one of wholesale replacement, but of re-sorting. AI is not eliminating writers outright. It is separating those who adapt from those who resist – and in the process reshaping what it now means to be a trusted communicator, editor, and storyteller.

Key Highlights

• Why hands-on AI users report higher productivity and quality, while non-users feel an existential threat
• How AI is now embedded in research, brainstorming, outlining, and verification – not just text generation
• Why PR and communications teams are adopting faster than journalists
• What the rise of “AI slop” means for trust, originality, and attention
• Why the future of writing is not replacement – but re-sorting

About our Conversation Partner

Josh Bernoff is an expert on business books and how they can propel thinkers to prominence. Books he has written or collaborated on have generated over $20 million for their authors.

More than 50 authors have endorsed Josh’s Build a Better Business Book: How to Plan, Write, and Promote a Book That Matters, a comprehensive guide for business authors. His other books include Writing Without Bullshit: Boost Your Career by Saying What You Mean and the Business Week bestseller Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. He has contributed to 50 nonfiction book projects.

Josh’s mathematical and statistical background includes three years of study in the Ph.D. program in mathematics at MIT. As a Senior Vice President at Forrester Research, he created Technographics, a consumer survey methodology, which is still in use more than 20 years later. Josh has advised, consulted on, and written about more than 20 large-scale consumer surveys.

Josh writes and posts daily at Bernoff.com, a blog that has attracted more than 4 million views. He lives in Portland, Maine, with his wife, an artist.

Follow Josh on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshbernoff/

Relevant Links

• https://bernoff.com/
• https://bernoff.com/blog/ai-writer-survey-results-analyzing-royalties-neuroscientific-sneakers-newsletter-5-november-2025
• https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/copyright/article/99019-new-report-examines-writers-attitudes-toward-ai.html
• https://gothamghostwriters.com/AI-writer

Audio Transcript

Shel Holtz

Hi everybody, and welcome to a For Immediate Release interview. I’m Shel Holtz.

Neville Hobson

And I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz

And we are here today with Josh Bernoff. I’ve known Josh since the early SNCR days. Josh is a prolific author, professional writer, mostly of business material. But Josh, I’m gonna ask you to share some background on yourself.

Josh Bernoff

Okay, thanks. What people need to know about me, I spent four years in the startup business and 20 years as an analyst at Forrester Research. Since that time, which was in 2015, I have been focused almost exclusively on the needs of authors, professional business authors. So I work with them as a coach, writer, ghostwriter, an editor, and basically anything they need to do to get business books published.

The other thing that’s sort of relevant in this case is that while I was at Forrester, I originated their survey methodology, which is called Technographics. And I have a statistics background, a math background, so fielding surveys and analysing them and writing reports about them is a very comfortable and familiar place for me to be. So when the opportunity arose to write about a survey of authors in AI, said, all right, I’m in, let’s do this.

Shel Holtz

And you’ve also published your own books. I’ve read your most recent one, How to Write a Better Business Book.

Josh Bernoff

Mm-hmm, yes. So, this is like, the host has to prod you to promote your own stuff. Yes. Yes. So by my two most recent books, I wrote a book called Writing Without Bullshit, which is basically a, a manifesto for, people in corporations to write better. and I wrote build a better business book that you talked about, which is a complete manual for everything you need to do to think about conceive. write, get published and promote a business book. Yeah, so they’re both both available online where your audience can find them.

Shel Holtz

Wherever books are sold. So we’re here today, Josh, to talk about that survey of writers that you conducted, asking them about their use of AI. What motivated you to undertake this survey in the first place?

Josh Bernoff

Well, I’ll just go back a tiny little bit. About two years ago, Dan Gerstein, who is the CEO of Gotham Ghost Readers and a really fantastically interesting guy, reached out to me because he knew my background of doing statistics and said, let’s do a survey of the ROI of business books, get business authors to talk about what they went through to create their business books and whether they made a profit from all the things that followed on that.

So at the conclusion of that project, which people can certainly still get access to that information, at authorroi.com, at the conclusion of that project, it was clear that we could do a really good job together. So when he came to me and said, let’s do a survey about authors and AI. It’s a topic I’ve been researching a lot, talking to many authors about how they use it. And I said, all right, yeah, let’s actually get a definitive result here. And we were really pleased that the survey basically went viral.

We got almost 1,500 responses, way more than we did for the business author survey, because there’s a lot more writers than authors in the world. And because we got such a large response, it was possible to slice that so I can answer questions like how do technical writers feel about AI or is this different between men and women or older or younger people. And so that enabled us to do a really robust survey which people can download if they want. It’s at gothamghostwriters.com/AI-writer, available free for anyone who wants to see it.

Shel Holtz

And we’ll have that link in the show notes as well.

Josh Bernoff

Okay, great.

Neville Hobson

It’s a massive piece of work you did, Josh. I, I kind of went through the PDF quite closely because it’s a topic that interests me quite a bit. And I was really quite intrigued by many of the findings that it surfaced. But I have a fundamental question right at the very beginning, because I’m a writer myself. But I encountered this phrase throughout, “professional writer.” I’m not a professional writer, but I’m a writer.

And I know a lot of communicators who would say, yeah, I’m a professional writer. I don’t think it fits the definition you’re working to. So can you actually succinctly say what is a professional writer as opposed to any other kind of writer that communicators might say they are? What’s the difference?

Josh Bernoff

Yeah, that’s there’s less there than meets the eye and I will describe why.

So, we fielded this survey, and we basically said if you are a writer, you can answer this survey, and we got help from all sorts of people who are willing to share it within their communities. So over 2000 people responded. But of course, you have to disqualify people if they’re not really a writer and the way we define that is, we said, you spend at least 10 hours a week on writing and editing? And somebody who didn’t, I’m like, okay, you’re not really a writer if you don’t spend at least 10 hours a week on it.

And we also looked at how people made their living. So let’s just say you’re a product manager. You’re probably doing a lot of writing, but you wouldn’t describe yourself as a professional writer. So part of what we did was to have people answer questions about what kind of writer are you?

And we had the main categories and we captured almost everybody in them, know, marketing writers, nonfiction authors, ghost writers, you know, PR writers and so on. And although we had not intended to do so, we got almost 300 responses from fiction authors. And we were like, okay, what are we going to do here? Because these people are very different from the people who are writing in a business context or non-fiction authors, but I don’t want to invalidate their experience.

So we basically divided up the survey and we said, most of the responses are from people who are writing things that are intended to be true. And a small group is written from people who are intentionally lying because they’re fiction writers. So then we had an ongoing discussion about what do we call the people who write things that are intended to be true. And Dan Gerstein and I eventually agreed to call them professional writers, which is not a dig on the professional fiction authors, but it’s just a catchall for people who are making their living as a writer and writing nonfiction.

Shel Holtz

Josh, you described in the survey report a deep attitudinal divide where users see productivity and non-users see what you called a sociopathic plagiarism machine.

Josh Bernoff

Thanks. Now, now, wait a minute. I didn’t call it that. One of the people who took the survey called it that. Yes, that was a direct quote. I mean, I just want to comment here that in the survey business, we call responses to open-ended questions verbatims, right? So these are the actual text responses. And because we surveyed writers, these are the best verbatims I’ve ever seen. This is extremely literate.

Shel Holtz

OK, that was, that was a response. Got it. Well, yeah.

Josh Bernoff A collection of people expressing their opinion and the sociopathic plagiarism machine came from one of those folks. Yes.

Shel Holtz

I did like that a lot. But for somebody like me, a communications director managing a team, how do you bridge that gap when half the team might be ethically opposed to the tools that the other half is enthusiastically using every day?

Josh Bernoff

You just tell the other people to go to hell. No, I’m kidding! Now this is, it’s true. So one of the most notable findings of the survey was that people who do not use AI are likely to have negative attitudes about it. So it’s not just like, you know, well, I don’t happen to drink alcohol, but it’s fine with me. No, these people are.

Josh Bernoff

This is bad for the environment. It’s an evil product. There were a lot of interesting verbatims in the survey from people like that. 61% of the professional writers said that they use AI. So this is a minority of people who are not using it, and an even smaller group who are opposed to it. But they are fervently opposed to it. The people who do use it are generally getting really useful things done. A majority say that it’s making them more productive. And the people who are most advanced are doing all sorts of things with it.

By the way, this is really important to note. The thing that everyone’s sort of morally up in arms about, which is people generating text that’s intended to be read using AI, is actually quite rare. Most of the, that was only 7% that did that and only 1% that did that daily. So most people are doing research or they’re, they’re, you know, using it as a thesaurus or, or, using it to analyse material that they find and, and are citing as own background or something like that. it, to come directly at your question though, it is important to acknowledge this divide in any writing organisation.

And I think that the people who are using AI need to understand that there are some serious objections and they need to address that. The people who are not using it, I think, need to understand that perhaps they should be trying this out just so that they’re not operating from a position of ignorance about what the thing can do.

And I think most importantly, the big companies that are creating AI tools need to be a lot more serious about compensating the folks who create the writing that it’s trained on because it is putting the sociopathic plagiarism machine aside, it’s pretty bothersome when you find out that the thing has absorbed your book and is giving people advice based on that and you got no compensation for that.

Shel Holtz

I just want to follow up on this question real quickly. Were you able to quantify among the people who don’t use it and object to it the reasons? I mean, you listed a couple, but I’m wondering if there’s any data around the percentage that are concerned about the environment, the percentage that, I mean, the one that I keep reading in LinkedIn posts is it has no human experience or empathy, which I don’t understand why that’s a requirement for say earnings releases or welcome to our new sales VP, but nevertheless.

Josh Bernoff

Yeah, I going to say that describes a bunch of human writers too. They don’t seem to have any empathy. So we looked at one of the questions that we asked is how concerned are you about the following? And then we had a list of concerns. And it’s interesting that they divide pretty neatly into things that everyone is concerned about and things that the non-users are far more concerned about. So for example, the top thing that people were concerned about was, and I quote, AI-generated text can include factual errors or hallucinations. So even the people who use it are like, okay, we’ve got to be careful with this thing because sometimes it comes up with false information.

For example, if you ask it for my bio, it will tell you that I have a bachelor’s degree in classics from Harvard University and an MBA from the Harvard Business School, and I’ve never attended Harvard. So it’s like, no, no, no, no, no, no, that’s not right!

On the other hand, there are some other things where there’s a very strong difference of opinion. So for example, question, AI generated text is eroding the perception of value and expertise that experienced writers bring to a project. 92% of the non-users of AI agreed with that, but only 53% of the heaviest users of AI agreed with that. So if you use AI a lot, it’s like, well, actually, this isn’t as big of a problem as people think.

The environmental question, I think that non-users, 85% of them were concerned about its use of resources, but only 52% of the heavy users were concerned about that. And I want to point out something which I think is probably the most interesting division here. If you ask writers, should AI-generated text be labelled as such, they all mostly agree that it should. But if you ask them, should text generated with the aid of AI be labelled as such, the people who use AI often think, well, you don’t need to know that I used it to do research, because it’s not visible in the output. Whereas the non-users are like, no, you used AI, you have to label it. So that’s a good example of a place where the difference of opinion is going to have to somehow get settled over time.

Neville Hobson

That’s probably one of those things I would say take a while to do that, given what you see. and I talked about this recently on verification. Some people, and I know some people who are very, very heavy users of AI who don’t check stuff that is output with the aid of their AI companion. That’s crazy, frankly, because as Shel noted in our conversation, the latest episode of FIR podcast, your reputation is the one that’s going to suffer when it’s when you get found out that you’ve done this and haven’t disclosed it.

But it also manifests itself in something, you know, the great em-dash debate that went on for most of this year. Right. But I wrote a post about a couple of weeks ago about this and about ChatGPT’s plan saying you can tell it not to use em-dashes.

And my experience is I’ve done that and it still goes ahead and does it. It apologizes each time, it still goes ahead and does it, you know. But you know what? That post produced a credible reaction from people. 40,000 views in a couple of days. That’s for me, that’s a lot, frankly. And I did an analysis, which I published just a few days ago, that showed the opinions people have about it are widely divisive.

Some see it as, I’m not going to give up my whole heritage of writing just because of this stupid argument to others who say you’ve got to stop it because it doesn’t matter if it got it from us in the first place, it signals that you’re using AI, therefore your writing is no good. That kind of discussion was going on. So I’d see this is continuing. It’s crazy. looking at the data highlights, there’s some really fascinating stuff in there, Josh, that caught my eye.

The headline starting with the right to see AI is both a tool and a threat. And yes, that’s quite clear from what you’ve been saying, but also this hallucinations concern 91% of writers. And I think that’s true across, you no matter how experienced you are, it concerns me, which is why I’m strongly motivated to check everything, even though sometimes you think, God, do it, don’t don’t question, just do it.

I reviewed something recently that had 60 plus URLs mentioned in it. And so I checked them all, and 15 of them just didn’t exist or 404s or server errors. And yet the client had issued it already and without checking that kind of thing. Stuff like that. So you’ve got a job to educate them.

So I guess this is all peripheral to the question I wanted to ask you, which is that correlation that comes across in the data highlights between AI usage and positive attitudes towards it and as opposed to the negative attitudes, but the users are very highly positive.

How should we interpret this divide? I guess is the question you may have touched on this already, actually, I think you may have actually, is it just a skills gap? Is it a cultural gap? Or what is it? Because the attitudes that are different, I guess, like much these days seems to me to be quite polarised, strong opinions, pro and con. How do we interpret this?

Josh Bernoff

All right, so I want to go back to a few of the things that you said here. I have some advice in my book, Build a Better Business book, and it’s generally good advice about checking facts that you find, finding false information on the internet has always been a problem for people who are citing sources.

There used to be a guy called the numbers guy in the, Carl Bialik in the Wall Street Journal, who would actually write a column every month about some made up statistic that got into print. All that we’ve done is to make it much more efficient. But people do need to check. And it’s interesting. You learn when you use these tools that it’s subtle. If you click and say, OK, that is a real source, that’s fine.

But often, it will tell you that that source says X or Y and then you go and you read it and you’re like, no, it doesn’t actually say that. So yes, you are now citing a source that when you go look at it says the opposite of what you thought it said. Real professional writers know that that is an important part of their job and it just happens to be easy to behave incompetently and irresponsibly now.

But believe me, I deal with professional publishers all the time and there are all these clauses now in their contracts which basically say you have to disclose when you’re using AI and if there’s false information in here then you’re responsible for it and we might not publish it. I will say this, so let’s just put this in a different context. So think about Photoshop.

Okay, when Photoshop started to become popular, people were like, wait a minute, we can’t believe what we see in pictures. Maybe the person doesn’t have skin that’s all that smooth. Maybe that background is fake. But in context where you’re supposed to be doing factual stuff, like a photo that’s in a magazine, there’s safeguards against this and the users have learned what is legit and what isn’t. And I think also that the readers have learned that, okay, we have to be a little skeptical about what we see. This AI has made it possible to do that with text way more easily, but it’s still the case that you, as a reader, you need to be skeptical and as a user, you need to be sophisticated about what you can and can’t do and what is and is not legit.

I do these writing workshops with corporations. I’m doing one next week with a very large media company. And I’m trying to help them to understand, start with clear writing principles and use AI to support them as opposed to use it to substitute for your judgment, generate crap, and then do a disservice to the poor people who are reading it.

Shel Holtz

I am always amused when I see people expressing such angst over AI generated images taking money from artists. And I didn’t hear the same level of anxiety when CGI became the means of making animated movies. What happened to the people who inked the cells? They’re out of a job. No, Pixar got nothing but praise.

Josh Bernoff

Yeah, I know. Right. Right. They should. Yes, yes Yes, right and it’s like no no, they should have actually gotten 26,000 dinosaurs in that scene and I’m like You you were entertained admit it and you know that they’re not real and that’s it…

Shel Holtz

Yeah. Josh, your data shows that thought leadership writers and PR and comms professionals are the heaviest users of AI. Thought leadership writers, 84% of them and 73% of PR and comms professionals are using AI in their writing. Journalists are somewhere around half of that at 44%.

Did you glean any insights as to why the people who are pitching the media are using this more than the people being pitched?

Josh Bernoff

I have some theories about that. What I’m about to tell you is not supported by the data, although I could go in and start digging around. There’s infinite insight in here if I do that. So I think journalists are a little paranoid about it. And the fact that, yes, 44% of the journalists said that they used it, but only 18% said that they used it every day, which is at the very bottom of all the professional writers.

So I think they are not only concerned about their livelihood, but also that they don’t wanna make a mistake. They don’t wanna get anything into print that’s false. Whereas if you look at the thought leadership writers and the PR and comms professionals, it’s a simple question of volume. These people are under pressure to produce a very large amount of information.

And I can tell you as a professional writer that that there are certain tasks that you really would rather not spend time on if an AI can do it. So if you’re gathering up a bunch of background information and perplexity does a better job on contextual searches than Google, which it absolutely does, then you’re probably going to use it.

Now, there is the risk that these people are basically generating large quantities of crap and then sharing it. But I think that that rapidly becomes unproductive. If you’re basically spamming people with AI slop, then they will immediately become sort of immune to that, and then you lose trust and at that point you’ve destroyed your own livelihood.

Neville Hobson

Yeah, absolutely. I want to ask you about one of the other finds you had in here about ChatGPT is the clear leader amongst all writers. 76% using it weekly. I use ChatGPT more than any other tool. I’m very happy with it. It does what I want. But in light of how fast things move in this industry, how things change. How do you see that shifting or does it not actually matter at the end of the day which tool you use as long as it delivers what you want from it?

Josh Bernoff

Well, what you have here is people spending hundreds of millions of dollars to become the default choice, the sort of dominant company here. And if you look at past battles of this kind to be like, who is the top browser or what’s the top mobile operating system, this is a land grab.

If you sit out and wait and see what happens, you could very easily end up on the sidelines, which is why there’s so much money flooding into this. ChatGPT definitely has an early lead, but there was an article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, I believe, about the fact that they’re very concerned about Google. And the reason is on a sort of features and capability basis, Google is Google better?

It depends on what day it is, they keep making advances. But it does integrate with people’s basic use of Google in other ways, and for example, use of Google in email. And wait a minute, have we never heard this story before? Where a company that has a dominant position in one area attempts to leverage it in another area? Gee, that’s like the whole story of the tech industry for the last 30 years!

Josh Bernoff

The same is true, my daughter works in a company that uses Microsoft products, which is very common. And so everybody in that company is using Microsoft Copilot because they got it for free. There’s this, if you ask me who is going to have the top market share in 18 months, I have no clue, but I don’t think that ChatGPT is necessarily in a position to say, ours is clearly better than everybody else and so everyone will use what we have.

I will point out that the, I’m trying to remember if I have the number on this, but the average person who is using these tools in a sophisticated way is typically using at least three or four different tools. So just like you might use Perplexity for one web search and Google for another, you might decide to use Microsoft Copilot in some situations and use Google Gemini in another situation.

Neville Hobson

It’s interesting that because I started using Copilot recently through a change of how I’m doing something for one particular area of work I’m interested in. And it blew me away because I’m using Copilot, it’s using ChatGPT5. So and I see, I sense the output I get from the input I give it is in a similar style to what ChatGPT would write.

So I’m impressed with that and I haven’t gained any further significance to it. Maybe it’s coincidental, but I quite like that. So that’s actually getting me more accustomed to Microsoft’s product. So these little things, maybe this is how it’s all going to work in the end.

Josh Bernoff

Yeah, yeah, I will point out that professional writers that I talked to are very enamoured of Claude as far as the creation of text. And definitely if you’re doing a web search, Perplexity has got some pretty superior features for that. I find myself often using telling ChatGPT, don’t show me anything unless you can provide a link, because I’m not going to trust you until you do that. And I’m going to check that link and see what it really says.

So that’s, you know, the, the, the development of specialised tools for specialised purposes is absolutely going to continue here.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, I’ve been using Gemini almost exclusively since 3.0 dropped. I find it’s just exponentially better, but I’m sure that when ChatGPT releases their next model, I’ll be back to that. In the meantime, I did see Chris Penn commenting, I think it was just yesterday on that Wall Street Journal article pointing out that it’s baked into Google Docs and Google Sheets and all the Google products, whereas OpenAI doesn’t have any products to bake it into.

And that’s a clear advantage to Google. But Josh, you revealed in the research that 82% of non-users worry that AI is contributing to bland and boring writing. What I found interesting was that 63% of advanced users felt the same way, that it’s creating this AI slop.

So as a counsellor to writers, how would you counsel people, our audience is organisational communicators. So I’ll say, would you counsel organisational communicators? When cutting through the noise is vital, you need to get your audience. I deal mostly with employee communication, and we need employees to pay attention to this message, despite the fact that there are so many competing things out there, just clamouring for their attention. How do you avoid the trap of this bland and boring writing when you’re so desperate to cut through that clutter and capture that attention?

Josh Bernoff

Yes, well, large language models create bad writing far more efficiently than any tool we’ve ever had before. So, and of course, I’m talking to both corporate writers and professional authors all the time about this. And so basically, the general advice is that the more you can use this for things behind the scenes, the better off you are and the more you use it to actually generate text that people read, the worse off you are.

I’m gonna give you a very clear example. So I am currently collaborating with a co-writer on a book about startups for a brilliant, brilliant author who really knows everything about startups, has an enormous background on it. And he has insisted that I use AI for all sorts of tasks. In fact, he’s like, you know, why are you wasting your time when you could just send this thing off and tell it to do the research? And we’ve done some spectacular things like I had a list of startups and I told it to go out on the internet and get me a simple statement about who they are, what financing stage they’re in, what category they’re in.

And it goes off and it does that. That would have taken me days. But because this guy is intelligent, there’s a reason he’s hired me and not replaced me with AI because once it’s time to actually create something that’s gonna be read by people, we have to rewrite that from beginning to end. That’s, as a professional writer, that is my, how I make a living. And what I write is the complete opposite of bland and boring. And he doesn’t want bland and boring. He wants punchy and surprising and… insightful.

So I, you know, you can both say use AI for all of this other stuff and don’t you dare publish anything that it creates. and I feel like that is generally the right advice that everybody is going to end up where I have ended up, which is, even in a corporate environment, it can support you, but you’re not using it to generate texts that people are going to actually read.

Neville Hobson

It’s a really good point you’ve made there I think because one of the elements one of the findings in the survey report, AI powered writers are sure they’re more productive and I definitely sit in that category. I’m absolutely convinced I’m probably in that what is it 92% or whatever it is of the advanced users who think so how do I prove it?

Well it’s not so much the output it’s the quality. It kind of tunes your mind into some of the reports that you read or what others are saying elsewhere that use AI tools to support you in doing the stuff that is what AI is better at than humans. Unstructured structured data, whatever it is, finding patterns, all that stuff that we can all read about. And you do the intellectual stuff, the stuff humans are really good at.

Josh Bernoff

Absolutely.

Neville Hobson

And they sound great phrases and sentences. And I’ve said to lots of people, I don’t see too many people doing that. So they’re obviously not in the advanced stage, let’s say. I find it hard to believe, frankly. Really I do. In conversations I’ve had during this year on those who diss this, who say this is like some of your respondents have said, you know, it’s the, what is it, psychotic plagiarism machine or whatever it was, the stuff…

Josh Bernoff

Sociopathic, but yes.

Shel Holtz

Both things can be true.

Neville Hobson

…sorry, sociopathic, but it’s where they can, but it amazes me, it truly does. And I think if we’ve got this situation where clearly there is evidence that if you use this in an effective way, it will help you be productive.

It will augment your own intelligence, to use a favourite phrase of mine. So AI is augmenting intelligence, not artificial. And yet that still encounters brick walls and pushbacks on a scale that’s ridiculous. Worse in an organization when that’s at a leadership level, I would say.

So how do we kind of make this less of a threat as it’s seen by others, or is this part of the issue that those naysayers just see all this as a massive threat?

Josh Bernoff

Well, boy, that’s a deep question. So first of all, I always start with the data here, because I want to distinguish between my opinions and the data. And the data says that the more you use AI, the more likely you are to say that it is making you more productive. And as you said, 92% of the advanced users said that it made them more productive. And interestingly, 59% of the advanced users said that it actually made the quality of their writing better.

So it’s not just producing more, but producing better stuff. And one more statistics here. We actually asked them how much more productive. The average across all the writers who use it is 37 % more productive, but like any tool, you need to get adept at it and learn what it’s good at and what you can use it for. And this technology has advanced way, way ahead of the, the learning about how to use it.

So there has to be a, basically a movement in every company and all writing organizations to teach people the best way to take advantage of it and what not to do. And in fact, one of the things that I recommended and that I tell some of the corporate clients I work with is find the people who are really good at this and then have them train the other people.

Because there’s nothing better than somebody saying, okay, here, let me show you what I can do with this.

I’ll just give you an example. So this report itself, obviously people are saying, well, did you use AI to write the report? I started out trying to use AI to analyse the data and I found that it was not dependable. I’m like, okay, I’m gonna have to calculate these statistics the old-fashioned way with spreadsheets and data tools. Every single word of the report was written by a human, me, at least most people still think I’m a human.

But we had, you know, thousands of verbatims to go through. And the person to whom I delegated the task of finding the most interesting verbatim used AI to go in and find verbatims that were interesting, had certain, there were some positive ones, negative ones, you know, had some diversity in terms of who they were from. So we weren’t quoting all technical writers. And that’s a perfect use to go into a huge corpus of text and pull out some of the interesting things out of there because that would have taken days.

I can’t help mentioning here because in preparation for doing this report, I interviewed some of the most advanced writers that I knew, including Shel. And one of my favourite examples is a very intelligent woman who, Shel, I know you know, is completing her doctoral degree right now. And she told me that the review of existing research is an enormous element of this, and that using AI to help summarise and compare the existing research would save her three years in the completion of her doctoral degree.

You cannot walk away from that level of productivity. And she’s full of enormously creative ideas. So this is not a bad writer. This is an excellent writer, but what she’s doing is she’s saying, I had this brilliant idea. Hey, is there anything in the literature that’s similar to this? wait a minute. These people came up with the same thing. So I can’t claim the authorship. it went across all the research and nobody else is saying that. great. This is an original thing I can include. That’s a smart way to use it.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, just this past week, I interviewed our new safety director, just came on board. I used Otter AI to do the interview. I like that because I’m able to focus on the interview subject rather than scribble notes. And what I did was uploaded the transcript of the interview that I downloaded from Otter into Gemini. And I said because the interview led to a lot of digressions and a lot of personal back and forth that interrupted the substance of what we were trying to get to.

So I just said, clean up this transcript, get rid of everything that doesn’t have to do with his coming on board at our company as the new safety director, his background and all of that, and then categorise it. But don’t change any of his words, right? I want the transcript to be exact. And it did exactly what I asked it to do.

For me to take that transcript… well, first of all, for me to take all those notes and then put it in some sort of usable form before I even start writing the article would have taken a considerable amount of time. And yet it didn’t mess at all with what he was telling me in response to my questions. And I was able to use that to produce an article that I wrote.

One of my favourite uses though, as a writer, is when there’s a turn of phrase that I want to use and I can’t quite draw it out. I know what it is. It’s right there. So I’ll share what I’m writing about. And this is what I’m trying to say. And there’s a turn of phrase I’m thinking of. What is it? And it’ll say, well, it might be one of these. And almost always from the list it gives me, that’s the one I was thinking of.

Josh Bernoff

This is a way better thesaurus than anything else I’ve ever used. And at the age that we’re at, sometimes you can’t, you know there’s a word and you can’t bring it to mind. I’m like, yeah, that was a word I was looking for.

Shel Holtz

Yeah. Josh, you found that 40% of freelancers and agencies say that AI has eaten into their income. If you were advising, say, a boutique PR agency today on how to survive in 2026, what’s the one pivot that you would advise them that they need to make based on this data?

Josh Bernoff

I think you need to focus on talent that has two skills. One is, clear and interesting writing skills are even more valuable than they used to be. So, you know, if you say, well, who are the best writers in our organisation, do everything you can to hang on to those people, because you’re going to need that to continue to stand apart from the AI slop.

And then the other side of that is to become as efficient as possible with AI for the rote tasks. So you also want people who are really skilled at using these tools to conduct research tasks. I interviewed a woman at the gathering of the ghosts, which is the event where this research was first presented. She matches up ghost writers to to author clients. And she gets like a background, briefing on every single person that she goes and pitches. And it’s really good at that.

So when she gets on the phone with these people, they’re like, wow. She’s really smart. She, she did a whole lot of homework here. And this is the kind of person I want to work with. Okay. It has nothing to do with her writing ability. It has to do with her ability to take advantage of these tools and, yeah, I think that we’re going to be able to get more done with fewer people. which is a, tail is all this time, really. That’s just, that’s just the direction that things go with automation.

But I, I have, I can’t resist pointing out here on the flip side. I think, a bunch of people, including publishers are now delegating work to AI and laying people off and it’s doing a bad job. I ghost wrote a book recently where the copy editing came back and I was like, this is inadequate. This is a terrible job. This was obviously done by a machine and done badly by a machine.

And my client and I decided that in order to avoid errors, we would hire our own professional copy editor because the publisher had skimped in exactly the wrong place. And the professional copy editor did a fantastic job. It cost a bunch of money, but we were much happier with that.

Neville Hobson

To continue this theme slightly, think I had the question, which I think Shel answered part of it, but the page in the report with the headline, nearly half of writers have seen AI kill a friend’s job. And I found that interesting because there’s constant talk in some of the mainstream media, some of the professional journals too, is AI going to replace jobs? One report comes out and before you know it, the headline saying yes, it is. The other report comes out saying no, it’s not.

But these are intriguing, I found, that they’re actual real world examples you’ve got from people who answered the questions you asked them in the survey. Where it says only 10% of corporate workers have had AI driven layoffs at their organization, but 43% of writing professionals know someone who has lost their job to AI. So is this a trend that’ll continue this way, do you think? how would you interpret this overall picture that you’ve shown? This particular page, page 20 in the report.

Josh Bernoff

Okay. Okay. Yes. So it was interesting. We expected to hear a lot more direct response of, yes, they’ve done layoffs of my work as a result of this. And the fact that only 10 % of the people who worked in corporations, which includes media companies, said that they had seen this was an indication to me that at least at the time we did this survey in August and September, that that was not a huge trend.

The fact that a lot of people know somebody who lost their job, you know, if one person loses their job and they have 12 friends, then we’re gonna get 12 positives on that. But that having been said, I’m not convinced that even if we did this survey now, which is what, like four months later, that we would get the same results.

It’s clear to me that there’s a lot of layoffs happening that a significant amount of it is AI stimulated. A certain amount of that is coders, for example. They need fewer coders to do the same programming now. My daughter got a computer science degree a few years ago because it was like everyone knew that that was how you got a job and you know, it’s not so easy right now.

I think that we’re going to see two things. First of all, we’re going to see this trend of people being laid off because AI includes productivity across the entire employment spectrum. It’s a huge trend that’s likely to happen. But I also think that you’re going to find companies backtracking and saying, oh my God, we thought we could have all this productivity, but it turns out that we need more humans here than I realised and we need to go back and bring them back.

I feel that it is driven by a certain amount by investment mania to cut back expenses and that in the end, as in so many cases, when you replace people with automation, you end up with a poor quality result.

Shel Holtz

I want to talk about fiction authors for a minute. And I find it intriguing that they are so universally anti-AI. Neville and I are both friends with JD Lasica. I don’t know if you know JD. He’s got a product out there called Authors AI. It’s a model that he and his partners have trained. It’s not using ChatGPT or Gemini or any of the large frontier models.

But what you do is you feed your novel to it, presumably in a first draft, and it analyses the novel against all of the criteria that has been trained on about what makes a good novel and gives you a report about, you need to do a better job of character development here, the story arc is weak here, things like that. So, I mean, there are uses for fiction writers beyond actually writing for you, but you did note that they almost universally detest it. Only 42% use it and they are…

Josh Bernoff

No, no, no, no. Let’s be clear here. It was the non-users among the fiction authors who almost universally detested.

Shel Holtz

Okay, I misread that. Emphatically angry was the language that jumped out at me. I’m wondering for those of us in business writing, is there a lesson we should take away from fiction writers about the preservation of the soul of a narrative?

Josh Bernoff

No, no, it’s interesting to me. So I’ve been conducting surveys now for probably 20 years. And one of the main things that you learn is that it’s never black and white. There’s never a hundred percent of the people that agree with anything. There’s never 0% of the people that agree with anything until this survey, when I found that fictional authors that do not use AI are as close as you can get to unanimous about it being a horrible, evil thing.

So yes, I was like, 100% of the people agreed with this? I’ve never seen that in my entire career of analysing surveys. But to give you a little bit more thoughtful answer than no, soulless fiction is boring and nobody wants to read it. And that happens to also be true of soulless nonfiction writing.

So let’s just take this report. If I used AI to generate the text in this report, you wouldn’t be talking to me because I found the most interesting things in the most interesting language to describe it. And the same applies if you’re writing about, you know, should we adopt a new project management methodology?

That’s a story, you know? We have this problem. This solution was suggested to us. We compared this to that. It looks like this is going to save money, but here are the things that I’m really worried about. This is an emotional story. And really, all nonfiction writing needs to have a story element to it. until AI becomes a little bit less soulless, which may never happen, you still need humans to tell those stories.

Neville Hobson

Yeah, I agree with that. So before we get to that question of what question should we have asked you, I’m looking at page 28, what these findings mean for the writing profession. And it’s really well done this, Josh, you succinctly condensed it all. But to avoid me trying to interpret what you said, can you tell us a summary of what these findings do mean for the writing profession?

Josh Bernoff

Well, thank you.

You know, it’s interesting Neville, there was always a section like that at the end of my reports at Forrester Research, because that’s what they were paid for. And in this case, I said, no, I’m just going to do the data. And my partner here, the people at Gotham Ghostwriters, Dan was like, why don’t you write something about what this means for the industry? I’m like, I can do that. Good idea! Okay.

So I wrote this and I think that in corporate environments, it is important now to understand what this is good for and to take the people who’ve become advanced at it and use them to help train other folks. And it’s especially challenging, I think, in media organisations because on the one hand, they are under enormous pressure, profit pressure.

You know, think about a newspaper or magazine or publisher. It’s very difficult for them to be profitable, highly competitive environment. If they can cut costs, they’re gonna try and find a way to do it. On the other hand, it is exactly their content that’s getting hoovered up and ripped off.

So they need to have a balance here, think on a political basis, they need to lobby and basically do everything possible to preserve the value of their content and not have it be used for training purposes without any compensation. But I also think they have to be very prudent in what kinds of things that they take AI to do and what they don’t. Just like the people at that publisher who use the AI copy editing that did a terrible job. If they economise in the wrong places, it’s gonna be a very bad scene.

I can’t help but drop this in here. I learned recently about a romance bookstore, a bookstore that sells romances, a physical bookstore. And they’re using AI to analyse trends, figure out which books to stock and how to organise them and what to put into their marketing. And I just thought that was fascinating because the content is as human and emotional as you can be, and yet they figured out a way to use AI to be successful.

Shel Holtz

That’s really interesting. So let’s ask you that question now, Josh. I mean, we could spend another hour here, but what question didn’t we ask that you were hoping we would?

Josh Bernoff

I think that the most interesting finding here, and there were so many fascinating findings, so that’s saying something, was in the questions that we asked about what tasks do you do with AI? And what really amazed me was the huge variety of tasks. So I wasn’t surprised that research was, but I’m looking over to the side here just to make sure I get the information exactly accurate.

I wasn’t surprised that replacement for web search and finding words or phrases of thesaurus was something that people wanted, but I was surprised by how many people use AI as a brainstorming companion. That they’re actually asking questions about Can I write it this way or that way? What suggestions do you have? And getting great ideas back on that. To summarise articles is very popular, but you know, generate outlines, find flaws and inconsistencies. As a devil’s advocate, deep research reports. mean, this is, the people who get good at this, they keep coming up with new ways to use it.

So I think that if you look at what’s happening in the future, all this debate about AI-generated slop getting published is much less interesting to me than the capability that this has to make writers more powerful, smarter, more interesting, come up with more ideas, and to basically be an infinitely patient assistant that can get you to be the best writer you can possibly be.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, that devil’s advocate is one of the very first things I used it for when ChatGPT was first introduced. I would say I’m planning on communicating this this way. The goal, the objective is to get employees to think, believe, do X. What pushback am I going to get from this approach? And nine times out of 10, it would come up with a very valid list of reasons that this isn’t going to work. It would lead me to re-strategise.

Josh Bernoff

Well, Shel, as you know, you can contact me anytime if you need someone to tell you that you’re wrong! But I’m not available at three in the morning, and ChatGPT is so from that perspective, it’s probably better. Plus my rates are much higher than theirs.

Shel Holtz

Josh, how can our listeners find you?

Josh Bernoff

Well, the most interesting thing is to subscribe to my blog at bernoff.com. I actually write a blog post about books, writing, publishing, and authoring every weekday. People say, why do you do that? The only good answer I have is it’s a mental illness, but you may as well take advantage of it. And we shared the URL for this research report and certainly anyone who’s interested in writing a business book, just do a search on build a better business book and you can get access to that.

And certainly if someone is so desperate that they really want a human to help them, I am available for that.

Shel Holtz Thanks so much, Josh. We really appreciate your time.

Josh Bernoff Okay, was really great to talk to you.

Neville Hobson Yeah, a pleasure, likewise, thank you.

The post AI and the Writing Profession with Josh Bernoff appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Big Four consulting firm Deloitte submitted two costly reports to two governments on opposite sides of the globe, each containing fake resources generated by AI. Deloitte isn’t alone. A study published on the website of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) not only included AI-hallucinated citations but also purported to reach the exact opposite conclusion from the real scientists’ research. In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel reiterate the importance of a competent human in the loop to verify every fact produced in any output that leverages generative AI.

Links from this episode:

• Deloitte was caught using AI in $290,000 report to help the Australian government crack down on welfare after a researcher flagged hallucinations
• Deloitte allegedly cited AI-generated research in a million-dollar report for a Canadian provincial government
• Deloitte breaks silence on N.L. healthcare report
• Deloitte Detected Using Fake AI Citations in $1 Million Report
• Deloitte makes ‘AI mistake’ again, this time in report for Canadian government; here’s what went wrong
• CDC Report on Vaccines and Autism Caught Citing Hallucinated Study That Does Not Exist

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, December 29.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email [email protected].

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Neville Hobson: Hi everybody and welcome to For Immediate Release. This is episode 491. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz: And I’m Shel Holtz, and I want to return to a theme we addressed some time ago: the need for organizations, and in particular communication functions, to add professional fact verification to their workflows—even if it means hiring somebody specifically to fill that role. We’ve spent the better part of three years extolling the transformative power of generative AI. We know it can streamline workflows, spark creativity, and summarize mountains of data.

But if recent events have taught us anything, it’s that this technology has a dangerous alter ego. For all that AI can do that we value, it is also a very confident liar. When communications professionals, consultants, and government officials hand over the reins to AI without checking its work, the result is embarrassing, sure, but it’s also a direct hit to credibility and, increasingly, the bottom line.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the recent stumbles by one of the world’s most prestigious consulting firms. The Big Four accounting firms are often held up as the gold standard for diligence. Yet just a few days ago, news broke that Deloitte Canada delivered a report to the government of Newfoundland and Labrador that was riddled with errors that are characteristic of generative AI. This report, a massive 526-page document advising on the province’s healthcare system, came with a price tag of nearly $1.6 million. It was meant to guide critical decisions on virtual care and nurse retention during a staffing crisis.

But when an investigation by The Independent, a progressive news outlet in the province, dug into the footnotes, the veneer of expertise crumbled. The report contained false citations pulled from made-up academic papers. It cited real research on papers they hadn’t worked on. It even listed fictional papers co-authored by researchers who said they had never actually worked together. One adjunct professor, Gail Tomlin Murphy, found herself cited in a paper that doesn’t exist. Her assessment was blunt: “It sounds like if you’re coming up with things like this, they may be pretty heavily using AI to generate work.”Deloitte’s response was to claim that AI wasn’t used to write the report, but was—and this is a quote—”selectively used to support a small number of research citations.” In other words, they let AI do the fact-checking and the AI failed.

Amazingly, Deloitte was caught doing something just like this earlier in a government audit for the Australian government. Only months before the Canadian revelation, Deloitte Australia had to issue a humiliating correction to a report on welfare compliance. That report cited court cases that didn’t exist and contained quotes from a federal court judge that had never been spoken. In that instance, Deloitte admitted to using the Azure OpenAI tool to help draft the report. The firm agreed to refund the Australian government nearly $290,000 Australian dollars.

This isn’t an isolated incident of a junior copywriter using ChatGPT to phone in a blog post. This is a pattern involving a major consultancy submitting government audits in two different hemispheres. The lesson is pretty stark: The logo on your letterhead isn’t going to protect you if the content is fiction. In fact, this could have long-term repercussions for the Deloitte brand.

But it doesn’t stop at consulting firms. Here in the US, we’ve seen similar failures in the public sector. There’s one from the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) commission. They released a report with non-existent study citations to a presentation on the CDC website—that’s the Centers for Disease Control—citing a fake autism study that contradicted the real scientists’ actual findings.

The common thread here is a fundamental misunderstanding of the tool. For years, the mantra in our industry was a parroting of the old Ronald Reagan line: “Trust but verify.” When it comes to AI though, we just need to drop that “trust” part. It’s just verify. We have to remember that large language models are designed to predict the next plausible word, not to retrieve facts. When Deloitte’s AI invented a research paper or a court case, it wasn’t malfunctioning. It was doing exactly what it was trained to do: tell a convincing story.

And that brings us to the concept of the human in the loop. This phrase gets thrown around a lot in policy documents as a safety net, but these cases prove that having a human involved isn’t enough. You need a competent human in the loop. Deloitte’s Canadian report undoubtedly went through internal reviews. The Australian report surely passed across several desks. The failure here wasn’t just technological, it was a failure of human diligence. If you’re using AI to write content that relies on facts, data, or citations, you can’t simply be an editor. You must be a fact-checker.

Deloitte didn’t just lose money on refunds or potential reputational hits; they lost the presumption of competence. For those of us in PR and corporate communications, we’re the guardians of our organization’s truth. If we allow AI-generated confabulations to slip into our press releases, earnings statements, annual reports, or white papers, we erode the very foundation of our profession. Communicators need to update their AI policies. Make it explicit that no AI-generated fact, quote, or citation can be published without primary source verification. And you need to make sure that you have the human resources to achieve that. The cost of skipping that step, trust me, is a lot higher than a subscription to ChatGPT.

Neville Hobson: It’s quite a story, isn’t it really? I think you kind of get exasperated when we talk about something like this, because we’ve talked about this quite a bit. Most recently, in our interview with Josh Bernoff—which will be coming in the next day or so—where this very topic came up in discussion: fact-checking versus not doing the verification.

I suppose you could cut through all the preamble about the technology and all this stuff, and the issue isn’t that; it’s the humans involved. Now, we don’t know more than the Fortune article, I’ve seen the one in Entrepreneur magazine, and the link that you shared. Nowhere does it disclose detail about exactly what it was other than the citation. So we don’t know, was it prompted badly or what? Either way, someone didn’t check something. I don’t know how much you need to really hammer home the point that if you don’t verify what the AI assistant has responded to or the output to your input, then you’re just asking for this kind of trouble.

I did something just this morning, funnily enough, when I was doing some research. The question I asked came back with three comments linking to the sources. A bit like Josh—because Josh mentioned this in our interview—every instruction to your AI goes: “Do not come back with anything unless you’ve got a source.” And so I checked the sources, one of which just did not exist. The document concerned on the website of a reputable media company wasn’t there. Now, it could be that someone had moved it, or it did exist but it was in another location. But the trouble is, when these things happen, you tend to fall on the side of, “Look, they didn’t do this properly.”

So I’m not sure what I can add to the story, Shel, frankly. Your remarks towards the end about your reputation is the one that’s going to get hit. You look stupid. You really do. And your credibility suffers.

I found in Entrepreneur they quoted a Deloitte spokesperson saying, “Deloitte Canada firmly stands behind the recommendations put forward in our report.” Excuse me? Where’s your little humility there? Because you’ve been caught out doing something here. And they’re saying, “We’re revising it to make a small number of citation corrections which do not impact the report finding.” What arrogance they are displaying there. Not anything about an apology—or fine, let’s say they don’t need an apology—but a more credible explainer that at least gives them the sense that they empathize here, rather than this arrogant, “Well, we stand by it.” It’s just a little citation? It’s actually a big deal that you quote as something that either doesn’t exist or is a fake document. Exactly. So I don’t know what I can say to add anything more. But if they keep doing this, they’re going to lose business big time, I would say.

Shel Holtz: It didn’t exist. Yeah, I understand their desire to stand by the report. I have no doubt that they had valid information and made valid recommendations, but that’s hardly the point. The inaccuracies call all of the report into question, even if at the end of the day they can demonstrate that they used appropriate protocols and methodologies to develop their recommendations based on accurate information.

You still have this lingering question: “Well, you got this wrong, what else did you get wrong? What else did you turn over to AI that you’re not telling us about because you didn’t get caught?” Even if they didn’t do any of that, those questions are there from the people who are the ones who paid for this report. If I were representing a government that needed this kind of work, first of all, I would be hesitant to reach out to Deloitte. I would be looking at one of their competitors.

If I had a long-standing relationship with Deloitte, and even if I had a high degree of trust with Deloitte, I would still add a rider to a contract that says either you will not use AI in the creation of this report, or if you do, you will verify each citation and you will refund us X dollars—the cost of this report—for each inaccurate, invalid verification that you submit. I’d want to cover my ass if I were a client based on having done this not once, but twice.

Neville Hobson: Right. I wonder what would have happened if the spokesman at Deloitte Canada had said something like, “You’re absolutely right. We’re sorry. We screwed up big time there. We made a mistake. Here’s what happened. We’ve identified where the fault lay, it’s ours, and we’re sorry. And we’re going to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

Shel Holtz: “Here’s how we’re going to make sure it doesn’t happen again.” Yeah, I mean, this is like any crisis. You want to tell people what you’re going to do to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, exactly. So they say—and you mentioned—”AI was not used to write the report, it was selectively used to support a small number of research citations.” What does that mean, for God’s sake? That’s kind of corporate bullshit talk, frankly. So they use the AI to check the research citations? Well, they didn’t, did they? “Selectively used to support a small number of research citations…” I don’t know what that even means.

So I don’t think they’ve done themselves any favors with the way they’ve denied this and the way their reporting has spread out into a variety of other media, all basically saying the same thing: They did this work for this client and it was bad. Didn’t do a good job at all.

Shel Holtz: Yeah. So, I’m, as you know, finishing up work on a book on internal communications. It was originally 28 blog posts and I started this back in, I think, 2015. So a lot of the case studies have gotten old. So I did some research on new case studies and I used AI to find the case studies. And then I said, “Okay, now I need you to give me the links to sources that I can cite in the end notes of each chapter that verify this information.”

In a number of cases, it took me to 404s on legitimate websites—Inc, Fortune, Forbes, and the like. But the story wasn’t there and a search for it didn’t produce it. And I would have to go back and say, “Okay, that link didn’t work. Show me some that are verified.” And sometimes it took two, three, four shots before I got to one where I look and say, “It’s a credible source, it’s a national or global business publication or the Financial Times or what have you, the article is here and the article validates what was in the case study,” and that’s the one I would use. But it takes time, and I think any organization that doesn’t have somebody doing that runs the risk of the credibility hit that Deloitte’s facing.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I mean, this story is probably not going to be front-page headlines everywhere at all. But it hasn’t kind of died yet. Maybe there’s going to be more in professional journals later on about this. But I wonder what they’re planning next on this because the criticisms aren’t going away, it seems to me.

Shel Holtz: No, and as the report noted, it’s not just the Deloittes of the world. It’s Robert F. Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services justifying their advisory board’s decisions to rewrite the rules on vaccinations based on citations that not only don’t exist, but that contradict the actual research that the scientists produced.

Neville Hobson: Well, there is a difference there though. That’s run by crazy people. I mean, Deloitte’s not run by crazy people.

Shel Holtz: Not as far as I know. That’s true. And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #491: Deloitte’s AI Verification Failures appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

In this episode, Chip and Gini discuss the complexities of hiring in growing agencies. They highlight the challenges of finding skilled, reliable employees who align with agency values.

Sharing personal experiences, Gini explains the pitfalls of hasty hiring and the benefits of thorough vetting and cultural fit. They stress the importance of a structured hiring process, including clear job roles, career paths, and appropriate compensation. They also underscore the value of meaningful interviews, proper candidate evaluations, and treating the hiring process as the start of a long-term relationship.

Lastly, Chip and Gini emphasize learning from past mistakes to improve hiring effectiveness and employee retention. [read the transcript]

The post ALP 290: Balancing skills and personality when hiring a new team member appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

The communication profession stands at a pivotal moment. Artificial intelligence is transforming how we create and distribute content. Trust in institutions continues to erode while employees demand authenticity and transparency. The hybrid workplace has permanently altered how we reach our audiences. And the pace of change shows no signs of slowing.

In this environment, what does it mean to be a communication professional? More specifically, what will it mean in 2026 and the years that follow?

The December Circle of Fellows panel will tackle these questions head-on, bringing together four IABC Fellows to share their perspectives on where our profession is headed and what opportunities await those prepared to seize them.

The conversation will explore several interconnected themes. We’ll examine the evolving role of the communication professional as a trusted advisor; the new capabilities and mindsets that will distinguish the communication leaders who thrive from those who struggle to keep pace; the practical challenge of coaching executives to communicate with empathy and impact;  the skills the next generation of communicators should be developing now;  and how we can maintain professional standards and ethical practice when the tools and channels keep shifting beneath our feet.

The session is scheduled for 5 p.m. ET on Thursday, December 18. You’ll be able to participate in the conversation with questions, comments, experiences, and observations. If you’re unable to join the live discussion, you can catch the video replay or listen to the audio podcast afterward.

About the panel:

Zora Artis, GAICD, SCMP, ACC, FAMI, CPM, is CEO of Artis Advisory and co-founder of The Alignment People. She helps leaders and teams tackle tough challenges, find clarity, and take action, particularly when the stakes are high and the path isn’t obvious. Her superpower is being comfortable with the uncomfortable: aligning people, solving problems, and navigating change so leaders can focus on what matters most and teams can do their best work.
With more than three decades of experience across consulting, executive leadership, and strategic communication, Zora has guided major brands, government, for-purpose and for-profit organisations in aligning purpose, culture, strategy, and performance. A leading thinker, researcher, and expert in strategic and team alignment, leadership, brand, and communication, she is co-authoring a global study on Strategic Alignment & Leadership. She is a Research Fellow with the Team Flow Institute.
Zora has served as Chair of the IABC Asia Pacific region, as a Director on the IABC International Executive Board, and on multiple committees and task forces. She holds multiple IABC Gold Quill Awards and Chairs the IABC SIG Change Management. Based in Melbourne, she works globally.

Bonnie Caver, SCMP, is the Founder and CEO of Reputation Lighthouse, a global change management and reputation consultancy with offices in Denver, Colorado, and Austin, Texas. The firm, which is 20 years old, focuses on leading companies to create, accelerate, and protect their corporate value. She has achieved the highest professional certification for a communication professional, the Strategic Communication Management Professional (SCMP), a distinction at the ANSI/ISO level. She is also a certified strategic change management professional (Kellogg School of Management), a certified crisis manager (Institute of Crisis Management). She holds an advanced certification for reputation through the Reputation Institute (now the RepTrak Company). She is a past chair of the global executive board for the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC). She currently serves on the board of directors for the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management, where she leads the North American Regional Council and is the New Technology Responsibility/AI Director. Caver is the Vice Chair for the Global Communication Certification Council (GCCC) and leads the IABC Change Management Special Interest Group, which has more than 1,300 members. In addition, she is heavily involved in the global conversation around ethical and responsible AI implementation and led the Global Alliance’s efforts in creating Ethical and Responsible AI Guidelines for the global profession.

Adrian Cropley is the founder and director of the Centre for Strategic Communication Excellence, a global training and development organization. For over thirty years, Adrian has worked with clients worldwide, including Fortune

500 companies, on major change communication initiatives, internal communication reviews and strategies, professional development programs, and executive leadership and coaching. He is a non-executive director on several boards and advises some of the top CEOs and executives globally.

Adrian is a past global chair of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC), where he implemented the IABC Career Road Map, kick-started a global ISO certification for the profession, and developed the IABC Academy. Adrian pioneered the Melcrum Internal Communication Black Belt program in Asia Pacific and is a sought-after facilitator, speaker, and thought leader. He has been a keynote speaker and workshop leader on strategic and change communication at international conferences in Canada, the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, Malaysia, Singapore, China, India, Hong Kong, Thailand, New Zealand, and Australia. He has received numerous awards, including IABC Gold Quill Awards for communication excellence, and his Agency received Boutique Agency of the Year 6 years running.

Adrian is the Chair of the Industry Advisory Committee for the RMIT School of Media and Communication and a Fellow of the IABC and RSA. In 2017, he was awarded the Medal of Order of Australia for his contribution to the field of communication.

Mary Hills, ABC, IABC Fellow, Six Sigma, FCSCE serves as MBA Faculty in Benedictine University’s Goodwin College of Business. Her work in marketing, finance and organizational communication and management brings an interdisciplinary perspective to her students. Mary’s professional career includes serving large corporations such as First Wisconsin National Bank – Milwaukee, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Whiteco Advertising, NiSource, Northern Trust, Unilever and Zebra Technologies. She supported starts-ups through Purdue Technology Center and Research Park of NWI. As a member of senior management, her work includes research, risk analysis and strategic planning for product launches, market expansion, and change and crisis management. In 2009, she co-founded HeimannHills Marketing Group, Chicago and Phoenix, serving as business principal until 2021. Most recently, Mary’s work involves AI’s impact on the role of the communication professional. Her work has been recognized nationally and internationally.

The post Circle of Fellows to Explore the Future of Communication in 2026 and Beyond appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Studies purport to identify the sources of information that generative AI models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude draw on to provide overviews in response to search prompts. The information seems compelling, but different studies produce different results. Complicating matters is the fact that the kinds of sources AI uses one month aren’t necessarily the same the next month. In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel look at a couple of these reports and the challenges communicators face relying on them to help guide their content marketing placements.

Links from this episode:

• Webinar: What is AI Reading? (Muck Rack)
• AI Search Volatility: Why AI Search Results Keep Changing
• Study finds nearly two-thirds of AI-generated citations are fabricated or contain errors
• Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written fully by AI

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, December 29.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email [email protected].

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz Hi everybody, and welcome to episode number 490 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.

Neville Hobson And I’m Neville Hobson. One of the big questions behind generative AI is also one of the simplest: What is it actually reading? What are these systems drawing on when they answer our questions, summarize a story, or tell us something about our own industry? A new report from Muckrec in October offers one of the clearest snapshots we’ve seen so far. They analyzed more than a million links cited by leading AI tools and discovered something striking.

When you switch citations on, the model doesn’t just add footnotes, it changes the answer itself. The sources it chooses shape the narrative, the tone, and even the conclusion. We’ll dive into this next.

Those sources are overwhelmingly from earned media. Almost all the links AI sites come from non-paid content, and journalism plays a huge role, especially when the query suggests something recent. In fact, the most commonly cited day for an article is yesterday. It’s a very different ecosystem from SEO, where you can sometimes pay your way to the top. Here, visibility depends much more on what is credible, current, and genuinely covered. So that gives us one part of the picture.

AI relies heavily on what is most available and most visible in the public domain. But that leads to another question, a more unsettling one raised by a separate study published in the JMIR Mental Health in November. Researchers examined how well GPT-4.0 performs when asked to generate proper academic citations. And the answer is not well at all. Nearly two thirds of the citations were either wrong or entirely made up.

The less familiar the topic, the worse the accuracy became. In other words, when AI doesn’t have enough real sources to draw from, it fills the gaps confidently. When you put these two pieces of research side by side, a bigger story emerges. On the one hand, AI tools are clearly drawing on a recognizable media ecosystem: journalism, corporate blogs, and earned content. On the other hand, when those sources are thin, or when the task shifts from conversational answers to something more formal, like scientific referencing, the system becomes much less reliable. It starts inventing the citations it thinks should exist.

We end up with a very modern paradox. AI is reading more than any of us ever could, but not always reliably. It’s influenced by what is published, recent, and visible, yet still perfectly capable of fabricating material when the trail runs cold. There’s another angle to this that’s worth noting.

Nature reported last week that more than 20% of peer reviews for a major AI conference were entirely written by AI, many containing hallucinated citations and vague or irrelevant analysis. So if you think about that in the context of the Muckrec findings in particular, it becomes part of a much bigger story. AI tools are reading the public record, but increasing parts of that public record are now being generated by AI itself.

The oversight layer that you use to catch errors is starting to automate as well. And that creates a feedback loop where flawed material can slip into the system and later be treated as legitimate source material. For communicators, that’s a reminder that the integrity of what AI reads is just as important as the visibility of what we publish. All this raises fundamental questions. How much has earned media now underpin what AI says about a brand?

If citations actively reshape AI outputs, what does that mean for accuracy and trust? How do we work in a world where AI can appear transparent, citing its sources, while still producing invented references in other contexts? And the Muckrec and MJIR studies show that training data coverage, not truth, determines what AI cites. So the question, is AI reading, has two answers, I think. It reads what is most visible and recent in the public domain, and it invents what it thinks should exist when the knowledge isn’t there. That gap between the real and the fabricated is now a core communication risk for organizations. How do you see it, Shel? Thoughts on that?

Shel Holtz It is a very, very complex issue. I was looking at a study from Profound called AI Search Volatility. And what it found was that search engines within the AI context, the search that ChatGPT and Gemini and Claude conduct, are probabilistic rather than deterministic, which means that they’re designed to give different answers and to cite different resources, even for the same query over time.

Another thing that this study found was that there is citation drift. That is, the percentage of domains cited in July are not necessarily present in June for the same prompts. You look at these results, the number that weren’t present in June that were in July for Google AI overviews, nearly 60%, just over 54% for ChatGPT, over 53% for Co-Pilot, and over 40% for Perplexity. So 40 to 60% of the domains that are cited in AI responses are going to be different a month later for the same prompt. And this volatility increases over time, goes from 70 to 90 percent over a six month period.

So you look at one of these studies that’s a snapshot in time and it’s not necessarily telling you that you should be using this information as a strategy to guide where you’re going to publish your content if the sources are going to drift. And by the way, a profound study by their AEO specialist, a guy named Josh Bliskolp, found that AI relies heavily on social media and user generated content, which is different from what the Muckrec study found. They were probably getting that snapshot in time where the citations had drifted. So, while I think all these studies are interesting, I think what it tells us as communicators looking to show up in these answers is we need to be everywhere.

Neville Hobson Yeah, I’ve been trying to get my head around this. I must admit reading these reports and the Nature one kind of threw me sideways when I found that because I thought how relevant is that to the topic we’re discussing in this podcast? And so my further research showed it is relevant as the content is being fed back into the system and that’s showing up in social results. You’re right. In another sense, I think you can get all these survey reports and dissect them which way to Christmas.

But they have credibility in my eyes, certainly, particularly Muckrec’s. I find the MJIR one equally good, but it touches on areas that I’m not wholly familiar with. This one in Nature is equally good, quite troubling, I think, that that one shows. Listening to how you were describing the profound report on citation consistency over time, I just kept thinking now about the Nature one as an example, let’s say. What if that sounds great, it’s measuring citation consistency over time, but what if the citations are fake, they’re full of hallucinations, they’re full of invalid information? Where does that sit? That’s my question, I suppose.

Shel Holtz Well, yeah, this shouldn’t surprise anybody who’s been paying attention. AI still confabulates. It’s still at the bottom. I think of the ChatGPT or Gemini that this is still prone to misinformation. They are configured more to satisfy your query than they are to be accurate. So when they can’t find or don’t know an accurate citation, they’ll make one up.

We still have attorneys who are filing briefs with cases that don’t actually exist. So this is the nature of the beast right now. If you’re not verifying the information that you get before you do something with it, that’s on you. That’s not on the AI. They’re telling you that these things still hallucinate. They’re working on it. They hope to have that fixed one of these days, but they’re not quite sure how that actually works. So it’s not like just going in and turning a dial or flipping a switch, the researchers are struggling to figure this out. And if it were that easy, they would have done it by now.

Neville Hobson Sure. Although what you just said does not come across at all in any of the communication you see from any of the chatbot makers, except in four point tight at the bottom, you know, it can hallucinate, you need to do your verification. I don’t hear that clear call to a kind of a warning shot, if you like, from anyone when they’re talking about all this stuff, and that needs to change in that case. I don’t feel that it’s as bad as what I got from what you were saying.

Although the point does rear itself quite clearly and it’s got to be repeated again and again. You’ve got to double check everything that you run through. Well, not run through an AI, but the results you get when you do a search. So, you know, it’s all very well talking about citation consistency of time frame from one month to the next. You’ve got to check that yourself. The question will arise, I think, for many. How do you do that? You might use a chatbot to do it, would you? Of course you would, because it’s a tool you’ve got in your armory, but you’ve got to check that.

Shel Holtz Well, I’ve got Google in my armory too. If I see it make an assertion and has a citation, I’m going to go to Google and look it up. I’m not going to look up the URL that the chat doc presented. I’m going to type in the information about the report or the study or the white paper or whatever it was that is cited and see if I can find it. And then if I can and it’s the right one, I’m going to check and see if the link is the same one that the AI provided.

I did a white paper. I used Google Gemini’s deep research for the first pass of this, it was loaded with citations. Where I spent my time wasn’t in doing the initial research, it was validating every citation that it provided before I passed this along to people. So that’s got to be part of the workflow with these things for now. I hope they fix it one day, but for now, you can’t just crank one of these things out and, you know, submit it to a judge or, you know, use it in your medical practice or pass it along to your boss. You have to validate that it’s all accurate.

Neville Hobson Yeah. By the way, didn’t you say once a long time ago now, I expect you didn’t use Google anymore? was only only ChatGPT or Gemini.

Shel Holtz I switch back and forth based on which one is performing better on the benchmarks. I also find that the three primary models, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Claude, are better at different things. So I tend to use different ones for different things. But Gemini 3.0 is spectacular. This most recent upgrade that just came out, I think it was last week, wasn’t it? It’s amazing. So I have sort of shifted most of my work using one of the large language models to Gemini right now. I still use ChatGPT for a few things right now. Of course, they’re going to come out with their own big upgrade, probably. Well, there’s some speculation before the end of the year. So we’ll see where they land. But right now, I find Google Gemini is best for a number of things. And by the way, Nano Banana Pro, the image generator. If I were the product manager for Photoshop or for Canva, I’d be worried because you can just upload an image and edit it in Nano Banana with plain text and just tell it what you want done and it does it and pretty awesome. I’ve been playing with it. I can tell you what I did with it, but it’s spectacular.

Neville Hobson Okay, so yeah.

Shel Holtz And fast. You compare that to OpenAI’s image generator, which takes minutes. You’re just sitting there watching this gray blob slowly resolve. Nano Banana’s, boom, there it is.

Neville Hobson Yeah, I see a lot of people posting examples of what it can do. It looks pretty good. So going back to this, though, I think let’s talk a bit about the kind of verification because I think many people know, I don’t know how many it might be, maybe a small number needs some guidance in what to do with that. It’s a quite an additional step, you might argue, in what some people see as the speed and simplicity of using an AI tool to conduct your research, for instance, or to summarize a PDF file or whatever it might be. So what would be your tips for a communicator then on building this into the workflow so that it becomes a natural part of what they’re doing and not a pain in the ass, frankly? So what would you say to them?

Shel Holtz Yeah, well, my tip is to build it into the workflow. It’s still going to save you, well, first of all, it’s still going to save you time. For me to go through and validate the facts that are presented in a bit of AI research takes me less time than it would to conduct the research and draft the white paper. And by the way, I want to be sure everyone understands, I do heavily edit the white paper for language, for style. I rewrite entire sections based on how I would say this. But for that first draft, think that’s the point is that you have to look at these as a first draft. This is why we have interns, right? Is to crank out first drafts of things and save us the time. And I still think that metaphor for AI being a really smart intern who doesn’t go home at the end of the day, doesn’t need a paycheck and just works 24 hours and never gets sick. I think that’s an apt metaphor.

But to just ignore the need to review these things and think it’s going to give you a finished product, that’s a mistake. And you need to come up with a workflow, define your own, but it has to include validation of the information that it provided. If it doesn’t, you’re setting yourself up for some real grief. I mean, if you share the results of that with somebody who is important in your career, in your life, and they make decisions based on it that turn out to be bad decisions because it was a confabulated citation, then that’s going to roll right back on you. So you have to build it into the workflow, just like any other workflow. This is the step that comes after the first step.

Neville Hobson I wonder if this is, tell me what you think, is this significantly more concerning if you’re in academia, say, or working for scientific firm in the science side of things, where peer reviewed, citation-led work on research for medical breakthroughs, or whatever it might be, or scientific discoveries, typically takes months, if not years to go through a process. What would you do if you were in that situation where you are, I know they’re relying on this and this is now emerging that academic papers in particular, well becoming what, untrustworthy? That’s to me is a pretty big deal if many people see it that way. I’m just curious how you discuss that with someone.

Shel Holtz I don’t think my guidance would change. There is an obligation to ensure that what you are sharing is accurate. And if you are using Gen. AI to produce some or all of this report, that obligation extends to fact checking. Mean, hire an intern to do the fact checking so that you have time to do other things. There’s a reason to have an intern. I’ve had this as a question that we hear, if AI can do what an intern can do, what will an intern do? And the answer may be validate what the AI cranks out.

But the risk is so severe that this just needs to become a matter of routine. And especially in science, where these things can be translated into medicines and treatment protocols and the like, you don’t want to be responsible for people getting sicker or dying because you had a confabulated resource or a citation that you didn’t check before you moved on to the next step with this. And if the peer review of the document that you have created produces those errors, if the peers that are reviewing it find the fictitious citations or the wrong citations, it’s your reputation that’s on the line. No one’s going to blame the AI. They’re going to blame you. So your credibility is on the line.

One other point I want to make here in terms of what I would recommend, I would go back to Ginny Dietrich’s PESO model, paid, earned, social and owned, and recognize that that model hasn’t changed in the age of AI. If you want to be cited, don’t chase the shiny object of the latest report that says, it’s reading this, it’s reading that. The fact that it shifts from month to month means you need to be in all those places. And before AI, we were paying a lot of attention to the PESO model. And I’d hate to see it fall by the wayside as lazy people think they can get away with just doing one thing. It’s gotten so easy because AI reads this. Well, that’s this month. Next month, you’re toast.

Neville Hobson Yeah, of course I recall that many people I know still now talk about I don’t need an intern anymore because I have an AI.

Shel Holtz Yeah, well, then they must be spending a, they’re either spending a lot of time validating with the AI produced or they’re putting garbage out into the world.

Neville Hobson I sense not a lot of time, actually. So this then comes back to you got to put in the time. On the some of the work that I’ve been doing recently on research reminds me of something I did, I guess, two weeks ago, which was checking the links in a report that cited this, this and this. And I would say of the 65 or so links I checked 15 404s or not known or not, you know, or even the browser errors you get when it can’t connect to something. So no one had checked those. But I’m okay with that because that’s why I’m here. That’s what I will do. And you’ve got to do it. I agree, you’ve got to do it.

Shel Holtz Well, exactly. Yeah, and the net is still a gain for you, the communicator. You’re still going to save time. You’re just not going to save as much as you think you will if you don’t have to do anything other than write a prompt. There’s more to it than that.

Neville Hobson Right. So I would say that could to conclude on that then we kind of rang the alarm bell about in the in my narrative intro about, you know, this this report in Nature in particular, that flagged up all these fake citations. Just see that then as something if you’ve got a report that that had lots of links in there and all sorts of things being said, you have to manually check each one. And that then comes

Shel Holtz Yes, yes you do.

Neville Hobson back to good old Google probably. But it’s not just the tool, it’s the framework under which you do it in that for instance, minor thing. But if I was doing that, now I would be doing it on a clean interface like the browser I’m not logged into, probably different browser perhaps than I normally using even a different computer if I really wanted to take to extreme level. But it gives you more confidence that your own persona, if you like, is not influencing anything even unbeknownst to you that it might be doing. I mean, I’m not saying it is, but this gives you the, the best way of doing it, I would say so this is best practice. So we should write a best practice guide on this, perhaps. But you know, it’s it’s food for thought.

Shel Holtz It certainly is. And by the way, I think I said paid, earned, social and owned when I was running down what the letters in PESO stand for. The S is actually shared, which includes social, but has a few other things in it. Go look up Ginny Dietrich’s PESO model, folks, and you’ll find it.

Neville Hobson think she did an update to to this for the AI age. I’ve seen to recall a lot of talk about that. Yeah, as well as a tool for ChatGPT that that you could use just, you know, based on that, basically.

Shel Holtz She did. Yeah, she did. I believe she did. And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #490: What Does AI Read? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

The forward-looking discussion was joined by five seasoned leaders: two professors shaping the next generation of communicators and three senior practitioners traversing today’s real-world pressures. Together, they bridge campus and workplace, theory and execution, to define what readiness really looks like in a world of constant change. Shel Holtz, SCMP, IABC Fellow, will moderate the session.

This episode featured a candid, fast-paced discussion on the skills and mindsets that matter now — and the ones you’ll need next. From AI literacy and data comfort to ethical judgment, change agility, and human-centered storytelling, the panel will share practical frameworks you can apply immediately. You’ll hear how universities are evolving curricula, how employers can cultivate lifelong learning, and how individual pros can future-proof their careers without losing the craft that sets them apart.

You’ll get actionable guidance, plenty of examples from classrooms and boardrooms. Whether you lead a team, teach, hire, or are building your own career path, this conversation will help you set priorities for the year ahead.

You’ll leave with:

• A clear, current skills map for modern communicators

• Practical ways to integrate AI and analytics—without sacrificing trust and creativity

• Playbooks for continuous upskilling across individuals, teams, and organizations

About the panel:

Diane Gayeski is recognized as a thought leader in the practice and teaching of business communications.  She is Professor of Strategic Communications at the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College and provides consulting in communications analysis and strategies through Gayeski Analytics.  Diane was recently inducted as an IABC Fellow; she’s been active in IABC for more than 30 years as a featured speaker and think-tank leader at the international conference, the author of 3 editions of the IABC-published book, Managing the Communications Function, and the advisor to Ithaca College’s student chapter.  She has led more than 300 client engagements for clients, including the US Navy, Bank of Montreal, Fiat, Sony, Abbott Diagnostics, and Borg-Warner, focusing on assessing and building capacities and implementing new technologies for workplace communications and learning teams.

Sue Heuman, SCMP, ABC, MC, IABC Fellow, based in Edmonton, Canada, is an award-winning, accredited authority on organizational communications with more than 40 years of experience. Since co-founding Focus Communications in 2002, Sue has worked with clients to define, understand, and achieve their communications objectives. Sue is a highly sought-after executive advisor, specializing in leading communication audits and strategies for clients across all three sectors. Much of her practice involves a strategic review of the communications function within an organization, analyzing channels and audiences. She creates strategic communication plans and provides expertise to enable their execution. Sue has been a member of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) since 1984, which enables her to both stay current with and contribute to the field of communications practices. In 2016, Sue received the prestigious Rae Hamlin Award from IABC in recognition of her work in promoting global standards for communication. She was also named 2016 IABC Edmonton Chapter Communicator of the Year. In 2018, IABC named Sue a Master Communicator, the Association’s highest honor in Canada. Sue earned the IABC Fellow designation in 2022.

Dr. Theomary Karamanis is a multiple award-winning communication professor and consultant with 25 years of global experience. She is currently a full-time senior lecturer in Management Communication at the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business and regularly delivers executive education programs in leadership communication, crisis communication, and strategic communication. She has held several professional leadership positions, including Chair of the GCCC (Global Communication Certification Council), Chair of the IABC (International Association of Business Communicators) Academy, and Chair of the IABC Awards committee.

Her academic background includes a PhD in communication studies, a Master of Arts in mass communication, and a postgraduate certificate in telecommunications, all from Northwestern University, as well as a bachelor’s degree in economics from the Athens University of Economics and Business. She also holds professional certifications as a Strategic Communication Management Professional (SCMP), online facilitator, and executive program instructor. She has received 40 professional communication awards, including 12 Platinum MarCom awards, 7 Gold Quill awards, 4 Silver Quill awards, and a Comm Prix award. In 2020, she received the Award for Excellence in Communication Consulting by APCC (Association of Professional Communication Consultants) and ABC (Association for Business Communication). She is the author of several books and academic papers on communication, and she also regularly delivers presentations at international conferences and other business forums.

Leticia Narváez, ABC, is the CEO and Founding Partner of Narváez Group, a consulting firm specializing in Strategic Communication, Crisis Management, Employee Engagement, Communication Training, and Change Management. A 30-year experienced professional, she held top-level positions at Sanofi, Merck, American Express, and Ford Motor Co., among others. She builds communication bridges to the highest standards of excellence. She has developed communication strategies for several employers and clients, including those involved in mergers and acquisitions, diversity leadership, crisis management, and senior executive consulting. Many of these strategies have earned global awards for their proven results and successful impact. She has been a speaker at international forums, is a co-author of several books and manuals on business communication, public relations, and inclusion. She teaches Measurement and Evaluation in the Master of Institutional Communication at the Panamericana University in Mexico City.

Jennifer Wah, MC, ABC, has worked with clients to deliver ideas, plans, words and results since she founded her storytelling and communications firm, Forwords Communication Inc., in 1997. With more than two dozen awards for strategic communications, writing, and consulting, Jennifer is recognized as a storyteller and strategist. She has worked in industries from healthcare and academia to financial services and the resource sector, and is passionate about the strategic use of storytelling to support business outcomes. Although she has delivered workshops and training throughout her career, Jennifer formally added teaching to her experience in 2013, first with Royal Roads University and more recently as an adjunct professor of business communications with the UBC Sauder School of Business, where she now works part-time to impart crucial communication skills on the next generation of business leaders. When she is not working, Jennifer spends her time cooking, walking her dog, Orion, or discussing food, hockey, or music with her husband and two young adult children in North Vancouver, Canada.

Raw Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker: Hi everybody, and welcome to episode one hundred and twenty two of Circle of Fellows. I’m Shel Holtz, your moderator today, and I am the senior director of Communications at Webcor. We’re a commercial general contractor in California, headquartered in San Francisco. And I’m coming to you live today from our offices across the bay in Alameda. Uh, and I am also a certified, uh, communication professional through the Global Communication Certification Council. And I am delighted to have a terrific panel joining me today to talk about preparing tomorrow’s communication professionals. Uh, that includes some people from the world of academia. Uh, you’ll learn who they are as they introduce themselves in just a couple of seconds. But first, I’m going to give you the, uh, the first of a few reminders that, um, you are welcome to participate in this discussion. You are watching this presumably through YouTube and there is a chat feature. And if you send us a question or a comment or an observation through that chat window, I’ll be able to share it on the screen and we can get feedback from the panelists who will now introduce themselves, starting with Letty. Um. Hi, everybody. Um, I’m Letty Narvaez, I’m based in Mexico City, and I’ve been working on communication for more than thirty years. For the last ten years, I have had my own consulting firm specializing mainly on employee communications, change management, crisis and risk management, and and a lot of training on measurement and presentation skills. And it’s great to to be here. It’s great to have you here, Letty. Uh, Theo. Mary. You’re next. Hello, everyone. Thanks for being here with us. I’m Theo America. I’m based in Ithaca, New York. This is upstate New York. I work for Cornell University, and I teach MBA and executive MBA students. And I’m also very much involved with executive education. So I get to see a lot of executives and leaders across industries and professions. Um, I’ve been in communication for more than I don’t want to say, but I will, uh, twenty five years now. And I started after my PhD. I started in corporate communication. So I had a corporate life. Then I went into consulting. I had my own boutique firm, and for the past ten, maybe now close to fifteen years, I’ve been full time in academia. I’ve been in contact. I always have contact with executives, uh, through my executive education courses and also through my Um, MBA courses, and I’m looking forward to sharing with you some insights about communication professionals and what communication will mean to us, uh, in the future. And thank you so much for inviting me. Uh, thanks for being here. Uh, Diane, you’re up. Hi, I’m Diane Gajewski, and I am on the other hill from Theo Mary, also in Ithaca, New York. I’m a professor of strategic communication at Ithaca College, which is also my alma mater. And, uh, I’ll embarrass myself and say I’ve been there for forty seven years. Um, in addition to teaching, I practice what I preach through my consulting firm, Gaieski Analytics. Um, I mostly focus on new technologies and, uh, trends in both corporate communication and corporate learning. And I teach almost exclusively undergraduates. And, uh, they are very worried about the topic that we’re talking about today, so I look forward to the conversation. It’ll be a good one. Uh, Sue? Hi, everybody. Sue from Edmonton, Canada. Um, I have been in communication for forty three years. And, um, through the course of my time, I have actually been, um, uh, an instructor with MacEwan University, and I have worked with other academic programs as a guest lecturer. Um, but, uh, I think I’m hoping to bring the perspective today of somebody who’s done a lot of hiring, um, over the years and have seen a lot of different folks come through the door for our small agency, which is focused communications in Edmonton. So, yeah, happy to be here and happy to be here with this great group of very impressive women. So thank you. Thank you. Uh, Jen, your last but not least. Excellent. Uh, hello. From Vancouver, Canada. Just over the hill, as it were, from Sue in Edmonton. Um, and, um. And happy Thanksgiving to those who will be celebrating in the next, uh, in the next day or so. Um, I, uh, I’m, I teach as an adjunct professor at the UBC Sauder School of Business. So I teach business communications to first and third year students, which is, um, which is a, um, something I’ve been doing for the last four or five years. Um, I absolutely am enchanted by it and by the students and, um, love being in the classroom with them. And it, uh, I think only makes me stronger as a, as a professional. Um, in my consulting business, as a storytelling consultant for organizations. Um, and, uh, yeah, really looking forward to the conversation today and and echo what, what I’ve even heard so far in terms of what what the next generation of entering the workforce are worried about and how, um, and how we all just need to keep learning. I’ve been doing some rough math as we’ve gone around, uh, at my forty eight years in the profession. I was a newspaper reporter for a few years before that. Uh, and I think we have well over two hundred years of experience on this panel, so you should get some good wisdom. We don’t look a day over one ninety nine, so that’s true. Uh, it’s good. Genes is what it is. Um, so let’s jump into this and I want to share a quick story. Uh, several years ago, uh, I was invited to come speak to the faculty at San Jose State University by the dean of the journalism department. That was Bill Briggs, who is an Iabc fellow. Um, and one of the questions I was asked, uh, really struck me. They said, what aren’t we teaching that we should be? Um. And I thought about it a minute. And this was in the heyday of blogging. Um, you know, the big social networks didn’t exist yet. Facebook and LinkedIn and the like were not around. Uh, but blogging was getting really big. Uh, and, uh, newspapers were starting to close, uh, in some frightening numbers. And I said, I think what you need to be teaching is entrepreneurial ism. Uh, when I went to journalism school, they taught us to work for a newspaper or a news magazine, uh, a news broadcast outlet or a news radio station. And that was it. Um, and I think today, uh, journalists are going to have to reinvent themselves. I mean, look at the number of them that are doing podcasts, like, uh, Jim Acosta, who used to be with CNN, uh, they’re doing Substack newsletters for communicators. Uh, let me ask, what aren’t universities, uh, with, with communication programs, teaching that they should be. Well, I can start if you want. Um, I want, um, I’m in a business school, and of course, I don’t have communication students, but I have the future business leaders, and we teach them communication skills, and I’m really, um, very happy about it. But I think what we do not teach, and we need to start teaching, and I don’t know how is agility, adaptability and the the capacity to take things as they come and be able to, um, confront the challenges and have grace under fire, uh, being calm under stressful situations. So I think that a lot of the preparation that we do is based on the assumption that you know what’s coming and therefore you do the steps and ABC and the stakeholder analysis and all of that. But I don’t think we teach them necessarily, um, how to be resilient and be adaptable when things change. And I could add also that I think it could be very important. We speak a lot about being strategic, but I don’t think that universities really insist on this, on how to be really strategic, how to participate and to design strategic plans and to, um, to get to know the business much better so that we really can advise on how what kind of of communication strategies we should use, how to, uh, emphasize the human connection and to understand and listen to the needs of our audience so we can, uh, respond with our communication according to the, to our audience needs. And another thing is, uh, measurement and evaluation of the communication. I think that very few universities really, uh, really teach the different techniques and the benefits of really measuring the communication and what we are doing in our communication plans. Good point. I was going to add to what you said, Theo. Mary. Um, uh, sorry, Diane. Um, and just, uh, build on that in terms of, in terms of the agility and the resilience. I would say, like I kind of joked in my intro about, you know, that all of us need to keep learning, but I think there is a critical need to bring that beginner brain along with us, uh, especially for the next generation entering the workforce. They will need to learn and relearn skills and strategies and approaches, uh, within different contexts, at a much faster speed than than previous generations. And so I agree, I don’t quite know how to teach that either. That, um, that, um, ability to pivot, that ability to, uh, to, uh, re-embrace and, um, turn a corner and, and, uh, reengage in a whole new way on a regular basis, not just a couple of times over a career. Um, so sorry, Diane, back over to you. Uh, yeah. Great points. You know, I’d like to build on what everybody has said, I think, and I do teach communication students. And what I think we could do a better job of is teaching them business acumen and, um, financial analysis and being able to, uh, understand how businesses and nonprofits really work. Um, I find that my students often avoid that as I talk to them. They don’t understand how the stock market works. They they really have not much sophistication in terms of understanding, uh, how how businesses really get along. And, uh, and to build upon the point of, uh, assessment, I think is a really important one that what I find is because students don’t really understand how businesses make money and they don’t know how to read financial reports. Uh, they will often come in with, um, you know, very proud of some kind of ROI, thinking that they’ve done a great job because they’ve saved the company a thousand dollars or, you know, or they increase sales by, you know, a couple of dollars. And they don’t understand that in the large scheme of things, that is quite literally lunch money. So, um, I think we could do a better job collaborating across communication schools and business schools. Can I just second that? Because what you’re describing is exactly the opposite of what’s happening in business schools. So my students know everything about budgeting, everything about accounting, and they’re just focused on that, but they don’t necessarily understand the value of stakeholder analysis. Audience analysis how to communicate to different people. So I really think that your point, Diane, is very valuable. Uh, we need to just somehow find a way to merge these schools of thoughts and show students that there’s value to both. Like, of course they want to. They need to know the business side, but they also need to know the communication side. Um, I’m not sure how much I can add to this, except I would say, as someone who’s hired a lot of new graduates, um, we’ve always had entry level positions in our firm. Um, the thing that I would like to see schools teach them is how to better value every voice. Um, you don’t know everything when you graduate, you certainly have learned a lot and you’ve gained a lot of skills. But there’s there’s wisdom everywhere. And so how do we invite conversation? How do we invite people to accept constructive feedback and criticism? I feel sometimes, um, especially young employees, they get offended easily if someone corrects their work, and I feel like they just need to be better at understanding that they don’t know everything. They may have learned a lot, but there’s still. It’s a big world. I learned something new every day. Um, so I feel like if we could get them to to just be open to hearing other voices, um, that would go a long way to develop their soft skills around the boardroom table when they eventually get there. Yeah. Diane, uh, my favorite, uh, ROI assertions by by young communicators is when they come in and tell me the ROI was something that has absolutely nothing to do with money. Uh, you know, uh oh, we we we grew our readership. You know, that’s that’s not ROI. ROI is always money, always expressed as a percentage. Uh, it’s a formula. It’s it’s, you know, not negotiable. Um, but, uh, Sue, you mentioned, uh, entry level positions. Uh, one of the things that I’m hearing a lot about the, the threat, uh, to employment that AI, uh, is, is, uh, potentially going to, to bring us, uh, is that if it takes away a lot of the drudge work? Uh, well, that’s what a lot of entry level positions are all about. Uh, so, so what do we do with entry level positions in order to, uh, get people started on their careers in the right direction, doing work that that matters, um, but is still entry level. It’s not, um, you know, raising unrealistic expectations about what? Somebody brand new to the field might be able to do. Yeah. So what we’ve done is we’ve really brought our entry level staff in to things like client meetings and, um, you know, leadership meetings so that they can understand the business of the business. Um, not so much the financial statements necessarily, but we’re a small agency. So there’s, there’s how do you get new clients? What do you do with them? What’s the process? So we’re trying to teach them skills that they can. Then um, they will be the front end part of that of course. But then eventually they will start to manage projects on their own. And having had the experience of, um, you know, being in the, in the room when the big meetings are held, being in the room when decisions are made, they can see the debate, they can see different points of view, and it really helps to round them out. So I feel like that that’s probably something that more organizations can do. Do not put your, you know, new employee in a room by themselves and say, okay, here you go. Um, they need interaction and they need role models. They need people to understand how do I behave at work? Um, what does a what does a board meeting look like? Um, because this is all new experience for them. You can’t just, you know, suddenly be thrown into a board meeting and expected to, um, expected to, you know, swim. You’re probably going to sink if you haven’t had that exposure. So I really encourage people, if you’ve got an entry level position, is make sure you’re teaming them up with mid-level or senior level people so that they can shadow you to important meetings and, uh, see how the assignments are, are managed and how strategy works and how to anticipate things like that’s critical thinking that they can learn by observing. Yeah, that’s a great point, Sue. Um, you know, I, I think we’re running into, uh, almost like a triple threat of problems We still have students coming off a Covid experience. Um, the ones graduating now at least had a much more normal high school and college. But, you know, there was still there was still a lot of disruption. Um, then many organizations are doing more hybrid and remote work and, uh, still pointed out a lot of the entry level jobs are this kind of, you know, sort of routine grunt work which people can say, oh, you know, you don’t need to come into the office. You can do that at home. Um, you know, and then we have, you know, AI, um, stepping in and doing a lot of those kind of tasks. So what are young employees going to be doing? So, um, I, I know that our students are very worried about all of that. One of the things that I’m telling them is that they have I’ve got to kind of get them to the point where I was in my career, fifteen years in, and be much more adept at speaking to executives and understanding their language and holding their own and actually being able to push back. Um, what I’m doing a lot of is having consulting projects with my students. We, you know, always gave them projects, but now I am trying to take on projects where clients will, um, allow meetings to be on zoom in front of my class, and I’ll have the students watch me interact with a client, and we’ll debrief afterwards. And I’m trying to model how to politely push back and understand that what a client or a project sponsor comes in asking may not be at all what they need. And, um, you know, I think they need to learn how to do that in a convincing way, Even though they are young. But the ability to be in the office and have mentors and have that sort of informal learning cannot be overemphasized. If I may interject here, I’m so happy to hear you say all these things. I think that the industry needs and we as educators, we need to understand, in essence, there are no entry level positions anymore because that’s AI. It’s really if you think about it, it’s what we call an entry level position is a sort of a mid-level position because you require three years of experience, you require a master of analytics tools, the ability to manage stakeholders. And that’s a lot to ask. I would agree with both Diane and Sue that organizations and this is not on the candidate, but this is on businesses that they need to maybe rewrite job descriptions and focus on trainable capabilities. So like maybe curiosity, writing fundamentals, critical thinking and learning mindset. So I love that Sue said. Bring them in in a meeting. Show them how it’s done. So shadowing or I hear some businesses have this, um, rotational, um, programs where they go from one department to the next, uh, for training. So I think that this is where we are supposed to go as a, as a society, not even as communication professionals. Yeah. Something else that I think would also contribute to the, the entry level or the or just graduated is, uh, the experience of, of working in a company, in a big organization and also the experience of working for a consultancy or an agency. Having worked myself like for more than twenty years in different companies, you learn many things that you have not learned at the university as the importance of interacting with the cross-functional situation to to learn about the other areas of the company, to interact with all of them. So you can you can advise them on on communication strategies and to support them to to get to reach their objectives and the importance of the human connection, not only not only the communication tools, but what understanding, learning, listening so you can respond to their own needs. Um, the adaptability and then being on the on meetings within the organization so you can learn from other leaders. And also if you work in an agency then how to work with the client, how to respond to a client, how to contribute and advice. So both experiences, I think are very important for for someone who’s just starting in their career. To marry you. You mentioned AI, which it’s it’s inevitable that any panel is going to talk about AI these days. Um, I am reading continuously on LinkedIn professors, uh, saying they don’t allow AI in the classroom. They don’t teach it. Uh, to me, that’s insane, because as soon as they get to the workplace, they’re going to be expected to know how to use it, uh, and apply it in their jobs. Um, how I’m wondering, for those of you who are teaching, uh, what’s your view and how are you employing AI as as part of your curriculum? I’ll start. Since you mentioned my name. Um, You’re very right. Uh, there’s a lot of talk and a lot of backlash in the academia about AI, and I want to recognize that it’s different for different courses. But I will tell you how I am managing this. I’m telling them to use it as much as they can. First of all, AI literacy will be is a skill that, uh, people need, uh, at the workplace. And I think my students need to be able to, to use it. I still tell them that they’re responsible for accuracy of the final outcome, and they should have a unique perspective. So through the prompts, they need to give a perspective to the assignment or to the project that they’re doing. And the other thing is that AI cannot replace the critical thinking of the human. And because I’m in communication, just like all of you, they need to be able to defend it so they get an outcome. Okay, fine. It might be perfect. Can you come in front of me in person and justify it? Defend it, explain it. Um, and give me all kinds of aspects on the specific project. And I think at least with my level of students, because they’re, they’re a bit older, they’re not undergraduates. Um, I think they get it. And a lot of them are working towards that. So how do I use it? Uh, so that it’s very authentic because of course, authenticity is part of what leadership is nowadays. So if you come to me and you feel robotic or you feel like you are AI generated, you do not promote trust. And that defeats the purpose of any organization or any leader. And people are still grappling with that? Um, but I do feel that there’s a need for us to incorporate AI into what we’re doing and still find what is the differentiator, uh, between using AI, everybody will use AI. But what makes you stand out as a leader? What will make you stand out is if you own it, if you have a unique perspective and if you can present it with credibility, empathy and confidence. Just to build on the innovation factor, um, I recently had, uh, students doing a group project and they all each group in, in my class had a different idea, groups of four or five. And they were building that into a group presentation. And, um, I, uh, had them. I also embrace AI in the classroom and in, in, in all the ways that you described the human input in human. In human. Humans at the beginning and end of the process. Um, but I had them ask, uh, AI to take their idea and expand on it in bold and innovative and new ways and and help them consider some ways, some some different, uh, elevated ways of thinking. And they and frankly, I were quite their jaws dropped. These were third year students because, um, because AI returned to them all like five, five or six or eight different ideas in the classroom. And each group got very, very similar responses. And so we had this very robust discussion about originality and, uh, and unique thinking and, and so just to circle back to the last question about entry level positions or whatever we’re calling them, um, I actually think that that original thinking can be part of, of the learning process in workplaces because although they’re coming into the workplace with, with perhaps more, um, mature skills than, than many of us did, they haven’t necessarily caught up, uh, in other ways, especially especially some of the Covid impact, uh, young people. Um, and so they may be, um, you know, they may be looking for a professional maturity and opportunities to grow in other ways, uh, that I think exploring critical and innovative thinking can really, uh, allow them to do so. Um, yeah, I there’s we need the AI fluency. I’m not sending my my students out into the world without that. Yeah, I’m I’m doing the same thing. I require my students to use it in different ways, and not just the large language models to, you know, help them write things. I have them, uh, do at least prototypes using AI generated images and video. So, for example, in an intro PR class, one of the assignments is to do a PSA, a video PSA, and uh, they don’t have time to go out and and shoot it professionally. And a lot of them don’t have those video skills, but I will have them mock something up on AI. Um, I’ll have them mock up things like, uh, posters, uh, or bus wraps. Um, in some of my other classes, I will, uh, have them use AI as a thinking partner, as a brainstorming partner, uh, to help them come up with clever titles for a white paper, for example. Um, and then I also, uh, as they’re writing recommendations, I will have them, uh, ask AI what’s missing in this report, or if I were to deliver this final report to clients, what might their questions or pushback be? Or how might different stakeholders react to these Suggestions? Um, I’m also building some simulations where, um, AI will act as various stakeholders, and they can interview those stakeholders and get different kinds of interviews and feedback on on an issue. So, uh, but you know, what’s really interesting is students are all over the place. A lot of them really don’t like AI. Some of them because they don’t know how to prompt it very well, get frustrated. They, they they work with it. And it doesn’t, doesn’t give them anything that they find as usable. And so we need to work on that. But a lot of them are, um, ethically, uh, very worried about AI. Uh, some of it in terms of harvesting their ideas or other kinds of data or profiles about them and the environmental impacts. Um, Ithaca is a place where there’s a lot of people very interested in the environment from way back, and our college attracts a lot of students who are, um, very concerned about sustainability. And so we have a number of professors and students who really don’t want to use AI because of what they feel are the significant, uh, climate impacts. As, uh, as an employer, I’ll just pop in and say that we use we have our, um, staff use AI not to draft things, uh, to final product or anything like that, but more for research purposes. Uh, I loved your examples, Diane, of some of the things that you’ve asked your students to do. We do the same, you know, read this. Tell me what’s missing. Um, just to prompt ideas. Um, you know, when you’re staring at the proverbial blank page, you know, give me five words that describe space. Um, you know, that kind of thing. Um, we use it carefully at this time. Um. We’re still waiting to see. And I know you can do a whole show on this. We’re still waiting to see where it all shakes out in terms of, um, you know, need for disclosure and all that stuff, uh, that’s happening in the world. So, yeah, I mean, we do expect students to come with some AI, uh, fluency when they show up to work. Yeah. We have a comment. And this is from, uh, Brian Kilgore. Uh, I think he means twenty twenty five here, not twenty fifteen. But why don’t PR students in twenty twenty five have video production skills? Uh, any thoughts on that? I mean, I’m doing video all the time, uh, largely based on the trend of of people paying attention to short form video. Yeah. Our our staff do it with their, with their phones. I mean, they do video production and we have actually on our staff, we have a graphic designer who’s an animator. And so he does animations and that sort of thing. So you can absolutely do Video without having to have the old school, you know, video camera situation happening. Yeah. Our students certainly can do video for social media. But, you know, if you’re asking them to do something that might be like a public service announcement where, you know, they would need locations and actors and all that sort of thing, they’re certainly not up to to that level of production or complexity of logistics. Yeah. There are things where I would still hire a video production company, but on the other hand, for example, for recruiting, uh, I saw a trend of injecting videos into, uh, job listings that have people currently doing that job talking about what it’s like to do that at this company. And I went out and recorded the interviews. I edited it together. I did all the titles and the transitions. I just used Camtasia, you know, if you can use word, you can use Camtasia. And, uh, you know, they’re fine. Um, are they up to the level that I would get, uh, production quality from a professional? No. Clearly not. But, you know, some of these things, uh, as Martin Waxman would say, just have to be good enough. Yeah. From from what I’ve seen, they’re good with video production and tech and using even, like, their own phones to do stuff. I think that the, the script is a gap, like the key messaging, how they’re reaching their, their audience. So I see a lot of good videos, like from a video production standpoint, but I don’t see the background of it that I would have liked to see, you know, like like how do you reach your target audience? What are you trying to say? The key messaging. You know what we did that with, uh, with a few of our staff. We do a lot of videos and, uh, you know, we’ll get new staff or young graduates out of school and we’ll say to them, hey, how’d you like to write a video script today? And we walked them through the process of how you do that, how you do the key messages, how you, you know, make it interesting and engaging, uh, concise, uh, because you’ve got about fifteen seconds these days. Um, you know, if you’re doing it for social media. So again, we need to expose young employees. I say young, but I mean new to the field. Um, you know, right at the beginning, don’t let them, you know, hang out for two years before you let them do something like write a script, model the behavior, show them how to do it. And they’ve been terrific. Yeah, I’ve been, uh, actually doing some, uh. Yeah. Go ahead. Mary, I want to ask a follow up question to Sue because you’re employing people and I hear a lot. So I fully agree with what you said. Uh, the backlash when I give that advice to employers, just, you know, get people engaged really early on, they’re like, oh, they don’t know nothing. So let them just learn first and then I’m going to engage. Engage them. So how do you feel about that? Like how do you would you, um, respond to someone who says they’re not ready? They’re very young. They don’t know what they’re doing. Um, what would you say to that? Well, you don’t learn anything sitting in a cubicle by yourself. I’m sorry. So to say that they’re not experienced, they’re not going to get it sitting in a cube by themselves. So we always bring our staff along, uh, on, on client meetings, both on zoom or out of the office or at the client’s workspace. Um, we did a website for a client. Uh, that was a retail site. So we took the staff there to go and look around and experience it like a customer. So you have to do these things because it’s a real world out there. You cannot just sit at your desk and expect to, I don’t know, learn things by osmosis and waiting two years is to wait. You’re going to lose good people in the short term, because they will go and find a company that will give them those experiences. And arguably, those of us with two hundred years of experience don’t know what we’re doing. So there you go. There’s that. There’s a lot of learning to do both ways. That gets to what I was going to say. I’ve been creating animated videos, uh, which, you know, two years ago I would not have had the budget to do. Now they’re pretty damn close to free. Uh, I watched a couple of YouTube videos on how to do it. Um, I paid the ridiculously low monthly fees for some of these services. And for example, we’re doing one that is, uh, their three minute management tips. And I’ve got a sort of a grizzled, wise old construction manager out in the project trailer or out on the construction project, uh, talking about this particular management issue. And then we do cutaways to scenes that sort of convey the idea, tell the story, and he comes back and says, well, here’s the four things that you need to remember. Um, and so far, uh, they seem to be well received. Uh, they take me about a half a day to to crank one out. Um, which which leads to the question I have. Yeah. Uh, I had to learn how to do this. Um, you know, uh, how do we keep people engaged in learning new things? I find that a lot of the people who speak to that. Yeah, go for it, Sue. Yeah. So we we hired a really talented young guy fresh out of university, uh, a couple of years ago. And, uh, he expressed an interest in learning all about digital media. So we supported him with, uh, training courses, with, um, webinars, with research, anything he needed. And now he is, uh, making incredible, um, advancements for our clients in the areas where they want to either grow their client base or they want more, um, click through to a register for something or what have you. Um, He designed himself for one of our fundraising clients. Uh, he came up with an idea that raised through digital media. Organic? No, uh, no paid posts. Um, he did a little video, he did a little pitch, and he raised thirty thousand dollars in ten days for that client. Just an initiative he did on his own. I’m going back to your question, Shel. I think it’s quite. If we want to future, future proof our communication careers. Precisely. It’s to adopt a mindset of continuous learning. Because technology will evolve. But curiosity, adaptability and ethics will always matter. So, uh, we need to advise to learn one new tool every few months. Seek feedback often. Never stop refining your ability to tell stories that inspire action, because the future will see professionals moving away from manual content creation and focusing more on leveraging creativity, contextual awareness and strategic input. And the winners will be business communicators and agencies that can integrate AI to drive insights, campaign evaluation, and and stakeholder engagement skills. Less susceptible to automation. If I may add to that, I’ll tell you what I tell my students in class and also even in executive education workshops, which is very risky. But I do tell them I give the content and I always tell them what I’m telling you now is probably good and valid for the next two to three years. I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Maybe in three years time we come, you come back and I’m going to tell you something different. So I kind of position, uh, all the content, especially communication based leadership based on the fact that there’s also so many societal perspectives to take into account. What I’m telling you now might not be the same in five years from now, and people need to understand that there’s a dynamic, um, nature into what we teach, at least at least what I do with leadership and leadership communication skills. It’s it’s almost as if, uh, Frank Diaz was listening in. I, I happen to have LinkedIn up on one of the screens here in the office, and he just posted. Are we hiring internal comms roles for yesterday? Uh, three years after ChatGPT launched, ninety one percent of IC internal comms roles are designed as if generative AI didn’t exist. Uh, based on an analysis of one hundred job postings. Uh, he said, uh, ninety percent of roles still demand strong writing skills. Uh, while storytelling is vital, reframing the role around a skill that is rapidly being commoditized. By AI scaling, eighty percent ask for strategic expertise. Yet this is rarely defined. Employers want strategy, but they describe tactics, managing channels, drafting updates and supporting campaigns. And his killer stat only nine percent of roles mention any AI capabilities or skills. Um, I don’t know if that’s worth a comment, but, uh, I thought it was interesting that that scrolled by just as we were talking about this. You know, I will say that my clients on the on the client side of things, from my perspective, um, if I think of my three, say, three top clients right now, like in the last six months, um, none of them are. They’re very they’re slow to AI. And so, um, I do think that the that the hiring organizations are doing right now are not necessarily with that skill set in mind, because the organizations themselves aren’t, um, Um, for various reasons, including, uh, firewall related and and security related, etc.. Um, for various reasons, the organizations themselves are are hesitant or moving more slowly toward that, including for Diane, some of the reasons you talked about from an environmental impact perspective, organizations are getting their their their own strategies around their own strategic heads around that part of it. Um, so I do think that’s worth considering. Like, we’re not it’s not like it’s not like new employees, depending on the industry, are are new to the field. Employees are running to running to catch, uh, running to catch, catch up kind of thing. Um, it might be the other way around. I think what’s also interesting is that AI is rapidly being baked into every kind of platform. So you can’t not use AI in a way, if you use Canva, if you use PowerPoint, you know, Web browsers, I mean, AI is baked into everything. So, um, I think at a certain point it’s not even going to be relevant to mention it. It would be like saying, um, that you have internet skills, you know, so we’re we’re all on the internet, right? It’s kind of assumed, uh, so, you know, I think you have that. And then as others have pointed out, uh, most organizations don’t have their heads wrapped around AI yet either. And they still think of it, especially in terms of the kinds of things that communicators do. Uh, it’s seen as kind of cheating, you know, it’s like, well, you’re having this write it for you. And do you really know how to do this? Do you really know anything? Or are you just having AI do your job for you? Yeah, I guess you could always make the t, I, uh, calculator uh, argument there is, you know, there was great resistance to having a Texas Instruments calculator to do your math for you. And now it’s a given that you’ll do that both in school and at work. Uh, I want to get Brian’s follow up comment in here. Uh, he said there’s no significant difference writing a video than there is writing a brochure than inviting a TV news crew to come to a factory for a business interview. Sue, you have a thought on that? Yeah, I have to disagree. Um, I mean, the video scripts that we write are very strategic, and they’re definitely, um, set to meet the client’s needs with whatever that is, whether it’s, uh, like I say, it could be sales, it could be fundraising, it could be, um, hiring. Um, and so that is very different than, um, just asking a news crew to come. Uh, of course, videos belong in the owned category of media. So you have the right and the ability to control the message and the distribution of that message onto the channels where you want it to be seen. So yeah, I’m not sure I would agree with you, Brian, on that one. Um, the skill level is very different because you have to think both, uh, with words and visuals together at the same time, um, when you’re writing a script. So. Yeah. Okay. Uh, I don’t remember who it was who mentioned critical thinking earlier, but I did write it down, uh, several years ago when I was still an independent consultant. Uh, I had a client who asked if I could, uh, create an online course for his staff on critical thinking because they didn’t learn it in school. Uh, this was an organization that dealt with a lot of scientific papers, uh, generally papers that were, uh, not complimentary to the kind of product that this organization was, an association, uh, professional, uh, business association, not like ABC. It was around a a product type. Um, and they would come up with a response to it that was not based on critical thinking, and he felt it was important for them to learn it. Um, I did develop that training, but I’m wondering, uh, do you find that students have not been taught critical thinking at earlier grade levels? And is it important for students of communication to to learn that before they enter the workforce? Absolutely. It’s it it is quite probably the most critical skill that we can encourage and, and, and teach and insist on and hold to a standard, um, and, you know, uh, like Mary, I teach in a business school. And so I would say that those, uh, qualities are more baked into the business curriculum in general, um, because of because of more, um, um, quantitative analysis Processes that that come with business. Um, and, and so ensuring that we are also bringing that same level of rigor and thinking to communications teaching, uh, I think is, um, is is absolutely essential. And to, you know, that idea, that slow process of, of questioning everything and, and coming to our own conclusions and, and, uh, applying our, our, our own original human and ethical brains, um, to processes. So for me, critical thinking, a huge element of critical thinking has to do with ethics and integrity as it relates to our work and our businesses. Let me add on to that. Critical thinking is a core course, uh, for for our business school. It was not like that. Uh, shout out to my good friend and colleague Amish, who’s amazing at teaching it, but she was the one. She’s a lawyer, uh, by by bye profession, and she was the one to propose it and make it a core course for the curriculum. But what is interesting is that we do a lot of executive education together, like for senior professionals, and sure enough, they get a leadership development program that combines critical thinking, which Risa does, uh, with communication, which I do. So it’s a very important skill. Um, it’s often overlooked, but I do feel that there’s, um, I see a trend, uh, where the industry has really recognized that this is something that people really want. I’m not sure that it’s embedded in undergraduate education, though. It is. It is difficult. Yeah. Sorry. Go ahead. Uh, I just wanted to mention that I think that, uh, if there’s one thing that can differentiate us as communicators, uh, from just, uh, writing or speaking or delivering a message. Is that the skill of critical thinking, uh, adaptability, data literacy, uh, to know how to interpret analytics, understand human behavior, collaborate across functions, and being able to translate complex ideas into human language, I think will will make us invaluable. So I think, uh, that really would be the difference that we can make, uh, in order to be strategic and to give a strategic advice to the CEO and to the executive committee. I think it goes back to those job descriptions, uh, you know, and, and expectations. You know, I see that business leaders say they want critical thinking, but then I also see how they treat communication professionals, especially young ones, and they treat them like order takers and and they want them to be responsive and helpful. Right. And give them good customer service. When really I think what critical thinking implies is to be able to look at a problem from a very different angle and probably reframe things and show, um, the client or project sponsor the person requesting your services to kind of push back or give them a different viewpoint or a different approach to something. And it’s and I think in our job descriptions and expectations, we’re, we’re supposed to be, um, you know, pleasant little order takers who are creative and come up with cute ways, cute words or graphics to kind of make our audience happy. And, and and that’s not critical thinking. So I think there’s two aspects of it, I think especially for newer employees, early career employees. They’re kind of not sure how to employ that critical thinking. They’re not sure whether they’re just supposed to do what they are asked to do and not raise questions, or whether they are supposed to use their brains. Yeah, I think that’s really on the employers, to be honest. They need to, you know, make sure that they’re they’re being open to all of that kind of thinking. I mean, as I said at the beginning, there’s wisdom in many voices. And even if you are like five minutes out of university, you have life experience and cultural background and, you know, whatever, um, that that can inform something maybe we’re working on. So I don’t know why I would discount that just because you’re young or you’re fresh out of school. I mean, that makes no sense. Um, so, you know, I think you’ve really hit on something, um, Diane, that, uh. I think it’s important, but I think the onus is on the is on the employer to be honest. Yeah, I’ve been paying a lot of attention very recently to quantum computing. Uh, there are people who are saying that it is going to be more consequential than AI, uh, and bigger than AI. Uh, I really can’t wrap my mind around how this works. The idea of superposition is, is something that I just can’t grasp. But, uh, I am looking at the fact that these computers, which, uh, should be, uh, ready for businesses to buy in the next three to five years if what I’m reading is right, will be able to do in five minutes what it would take a supercomputer today, uh, a couple of trillion years to do. Uh, it’s going to be remarkable when it comes to things like drug discovery. Um, I wonder how many communicators at the mid level are paying attention to emerging technologies and, you know, massive trend shifts that will prepare them to thrive and be relevant as as they move forward. So what do those mid-level or mid-career communicators need to do in order to be relevant, and how do they impart what what they what they learn and what they do to to those, you know, incoming communicators, they need to take training from folks like the wonderful people on this panel who are educators, uh, with their various universities. So you need to keep up training. You know, I think all of us probably started as I did, which is on a manual typewriter. Big day when we moved up to an electric with an automatic correct button. Uh, everything I know about computing is. And technology is self-taught. Um, I think we’re beyond the ability for people to teach themselves. And so continuous learning. It’s just that simple. I will I will second that and say that everybody, including us, need to do continuous upskilling and especially mid-career communication professionals. And also I think that they the the way that I conceptualize mid-career communication professionals right now is that they would have some, uh, AI fluency and data data literacy, but the differentiator for them would be the ability to frame decisions, uh, which goes back to what Diane was, was saying to guide leaders and how to navigate complexity. And I will confess that in classes, it’s very difficult to teach that. And or we have not been trained as as professors to teach navigating ambiguity or how to, um, do strategic thinking. And I think that we need to reinvent ourselves and how we teach to help young people to go into the into the work with more skills, um, into that direction we have. Go ahead. Um, I was just going to add that I think that part of the upheaval that we’re discussing and talking about and bringing into classrooms, um, is right across the spectrum of all careers. So, again, we are most of us with our two hundred years of experience are, um, are though although I, you know, we are bringing some fresh thinking, we have grown up in a framework that is that is linear, that talks about a early level career, a mid-level career, and an advanced level career. And I think that’s part of the upheaval that’s going on right now, is rethinking what those entry points in the career and entry and exit points and contribution points look like. Um, I, uh, you know, I’m sure for any of us in the classroom, I, I it’s a cliche, but I learn as much from my students as, as I hope they learn from me. And, uh, and, and I would jump at the chance and I tell my clients I would jump at the chance to employ, uh, many of them, um, as business school graduates with strong communication skills and, and, and vice versa. Um, and the same. So I think it comes more to the packaging of and the, the curiosity and again, the ethics and integrity that we bring at afresh in the face of new ambiguities at all points in our career that makes us that is going to make us valuable, that future proofs us. We. I’m sorry. Go ahead. Yes, definitely. I would also recommend just to build that is, uh, evolving from tactical execution to strategic leadership. That is, shift your value from from producing content to shaping decisions, to influence strategy, advise leaders and connect communication to business outcomes. Uh, to build tech fluency but not take of sexual obsession. So you don’t need to be like an AI engineer. But you do need to understand how AI, analytics, automation, and digital ecosystems reshape audiences and reputation and workflows, and but also to strengthen our unique human advantages like judgment, empathy, cultural sensitivity, um, facilitation, storytelling, ethical decision making. I think those those characteristics I think could help also mid-career professional. We have about three minutes left. And I do have a last question and I’ll go around and ask you each to give me a a nice, terse answer. Letty, you suggested this question, so I’m going to ask you first. And that’s what’s one thing you wish you had known earlier about the future of communication? Um, I think, uh, mainly, uh, that I had to develop strategic judgment, uh, becoming comfortable with ambiguity, uh, strengthening my storytelling and influence skills and understanding that trust and not technology is is the real currency. Theo. Mary, how about you? Well, this is, uh, relatable to Letty’s experience, but I’m a very structured person, and I like preparation. And I like the degrees and the studies and all of that. That’s why I have a PhD. Um, but I wish I knew sooner how much adaptability and agility would be a huge skill for the future. I can confess that even now I know it. Cognitively, I know how much adaptability means in this world and how we need to change. Uh, like in real time, even like I’m going into classes and I’m getting interactions I almost have to change every day. And I find that very challenging, very difficult. But I also will tell you that it’s it’s a skill for the future. Agility, adaptability and and resilience. Diane, what do you wish you had known? Boy, um, so I’m kind of a tech nerd. I was a radio and television major undergrad, and so I feel comfortable around technology. I’ve always been playing around with whatever was new. Uh, but what I didn’t realize, and what a very kind client, uh, kind of advised me, was that, um, there are times that when I meet, especially with more senior executives, I need to get my hands off the technology. One. One very nice client, said, Diane. You’re great at setting all this stuff up, but you don’t. You shouldn’t ever do that. Bring somebody with you and have them set all this stuff up. So I guess I wish I knew earlier how to be convincing to upper level management and how to get out of the nerd, uh, technology creator content creator mode and get more into the strategic conversations. Great. Sue. Um, similar to Thea Mary. Um, I wish that I had known when I started my career that change was going to be as rapid as it is today, um, in the mid nineteen eighties, the organization I was with had a major organizational change program, and my goodness, there was a lot of pearl clutching and swooning and the whole thing around. Oh, change, change. What’s that going to mean? And now today, it’s like we’re going to change. People go, yeah, okay, cool. So I wish I just wish I’d known that I had to get comfortable with it a lot faster and just know that that’s the way it is. And what does Jennifer wish she had known how much fun I was going to have. And if you’re not having it and you’re not around people who are inspiring you and and, um, giving you juice, giving you fuel on a regular basis, then, um, look for it somewhere else, uh, because we all got to be having some fun. I couldn’t agree more. Uh, I want to thank the panel. It’s been a terrific discussion. We could probably go on for another hour, but I do need to let everyone know about next month’s circle of fellows, which will be episode one twenty three, uh, scheduled for five p m Eastern time on Thursday, December eighteenth. It will be, uh, morning on December nineteenth for two of our panelists, uh, we have Zora Artis and Adrian Cropley coming to us from Australia and Bonnie Carver and Mary Hills from here in the US, and we’re going to be talking about, uh, something very, uh, related to what we’ve been talking about today. It’s our crystal ball moment, the future of communication opportunities for our profession in twenty twenty six and beyond. So mark your calendars. That’ll be a fun one. Uh, it’s always fun when Adrian’s, uh, part of the panel. Uh, again, thank you everybody. It’s been great. Uh, and see, everybody next time. Thank you for facilitating, Chelle. Thank you for everything. Hey, everyone. Bye. Bye bye

The post Circle of Fellows #122: Preparing Communication Professionals for the Future appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

In this episode, Chip and Gini tackle the difficult subject of firing an underperforming and problematic employee. They discuss a real-life scenario where an employee with a bad attitude refuses to do their work, causing frustration among team members.

They advise against prolonging the inevitable firing decision, suggesting that acting swiftly can alleviate overall team stress. Both hosts share insights on why Performance Improvement Plans (PIPs) are largely ineffective, stressing the need for proper documentation and the guidance of an HR advisor during termination processes.

Additionally, they highlight the importance of showing proactive steps to the remaining team to mitigate the workload burden and maintain morale. The episode emphasizes the critical role of leadership in making tough decisions for the greater good of the team and the business. [read the transcript]

The post ALP 289: Firing underperforming team members appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.