For Immediate Release

The history of public relations over the last 30 years is a litany of one failure after another — failures to recognize and embrace technologies that represented seismic shifts in how people and organizations communicate. The internet. The web. Social media. Smartphones. The video shift. And now, with AI, the industry seems poised to do it again. As many organizations explore how AI will reshape them, PR agencies still seem unable to figure out billing models to replace the now-useless hourly rate. In this short midweek episode, Neville looks at a post from Stephen Waddington that laments the industry’s intransigence, and Shel and Neville discuss what PR should be doing. Links from this episode: The future of jobs in PR: will we get the third technology shift wrong too? (by Stephen Waddington) It looks like PR has its head in the sand about AI (by Neville Hobson) Senior practitioner neglect of digital/social skills a huge threat to PR’s future (2015 post by Shel Holtz) Once Again, This Time with AI, the Communications Profession Will Be Late to Embrace a Valuable Technology (2023 post by Shel Holtz) The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, June 22. 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 five hundred and eighteen of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz. Neville Hobson: And I’m Neville Hobson. So here’s a question I want to put to you right at the start, and I’d like you to sit with it as Shel and I work through this topic today. Public relations as a profession has faced two seismic technology shifts in the last 30 years. In fact, more than two, but I’m just going to mention these two. The internet arrived in 1995. Social media arrived around 2007. And in both cases, PR largely got it wrong. Not wrong in the sense of ignoring the technology. Wrong in the sense of fundamentally misreading what it meant. In 1995, we thought the internet was a publishing problem. In 2007, we thought social media was just another broadcast channel. And the disciplines that grew out of both—search, content marketing, influencer marketing—were largely built by people who weren’t us, people outside the profession who saw what we missed. So the question is: are we about to do it a third time? We’ll address that question in just a minute. That’s the challenge Stephen Waddington lays down in a piece he’s just written for Influence, the member magazine of the CIPR, the Chartered Institute of Public Relations. Stephen is someone whose thinking I respect considerably. He’s been one of the sharper and more honest voices in UK PR for years. And this article comes off the back of a book he’s just co-edited, AI and Public Relations: A How-To Guide for Implementation and Management, published in May. And what he’s arguing in this piece is that this is no longer a theoretical debate, as job reductions are happening now. He gives specific examples. Three account executives doing media monitoring—that’s now one tool. A two-person intranet team—that’s now a fraction of the effort. The UK government has listed public relations professionals among the twenty occupations most exposed to large language models. We’re on the list. Early career employment in those sectors is also in relative decline. Now, Waddington is not a pure pessimist. He sees a plausible optimistic path. The career pyramid becomes a diamond. Firms building roles around insight and risk management rather than billable hours. A rough near-term reduction of perhaps fifteen to twenty percent in entry-level positions, followed by net growth as scope expands and new roles emerge, the way digital did after 2000. He thinks in-house teams especially have an opportunity here. When AI absorbs the routine, it frees space for the work that corporate communication teams have always needed but rarely had capacity for. But he gives serious, genuine weight to the pessimistic case too. And this is where I think the article gets interesting. He references Martin Ford, author of The Rise of the Robots in 2015, and Ford’s argument that previous technology waves hit one tier of the workforce and the tier above absorbed the displaced. This time Ford says there’s no tier above. The advisory work that absorbed previous shifts is itself the target. Waddington doesn’t fully accept that in his article, but he doesn’t dismiss it either. And then there’s the argument that I think should be keeping every agency head and comms director awake at night—the pipeline. He’s hearing a common response from firms right now: freeze your apprenticeship schemes, freeze your graduate intake, let AI cover the production work. And he calls that, bluntly, organizational self-harm. Because in five years, those organizations will have nobody who understands how the systems actually work, why they fail, and crucially when to override them. You cannot run an advisory profession without a pipeline. And you cannot build a pipeline if you spent five years dismantling the entry points. So that’s where I think we should start today’s conversation. Not with the technology, with the choices. Because Waddington’s closing argument, and it’s what I find compelling, is that human agency still exists here. The technology isn’t making decisions. We are. The question is whether we’re making them wisely, or whether for the third time in thirty years, we’re about to hand the future of our profession to people who aren’t us. Shel, what’s your instinct on this? Shel Holtz: Very much what yours and Stephen’s is. I have been saying for decades that the public relations industry is always, always, always late to the game when there is a new technology that is going to shape the way communicators do their jobs. We were late to the internet, for sure. We were late to the World Wide Web. My first book on communicating online—well, actually, my first book was on intranets, but the first one that got any attention was Public Relations on the Net—came out before the World Wide Web, before there was a graphical user interface. So there were plenty of opportunities for PR before the web, based on the capabilities of the internet. Then we missed the web, then we missed social media. In between we missed some other seismic shifts—mobile, being able to communicate with people based on the fact that they now had this computer in their pocket. We missed the pivot to visual communication, we missed the pivot to video communication. And now, yeah, we are poised to miss the pivot to AI. And that’s not to suggest that PR people aren’t using it. I think they are, but I think they’re using it at a very superficial level and are succumbing to a lot of the hype out there about things like job loss and “get rid of your entry-level people.” That’s all mundane drudge work that the partners and senior people don’t want to do—the account execs—so hand that all off to the AI and you don’t need to pay those people anymore. And you’re exactly right. I was listening to a podcast over the weekend where they were talking about the same issue, but they were talking about it in the context of law firms. And they were making the point that the associates that are brought in out of law school do the drudge work that the partners don’t want to do. They write contracts, right? They do things like that. And now that the AI can do that, who needs them? Well, the question becomes: where do the future partners come from when the ones who are already at the partner level retire? There’ll be nobody to take those jobs. We are not rethinking the industry, and we’re not rethinking it from two perspectives. One of those perspectives is the agency. The other perspective is the in-house side of communications. They’re two sides of the same coin. But I think we need to split them apart and look at them in terms of how we need to reinvent the profession. You and I have talked about reinventing how we bill, how we price, because the hourly model makes no sense anymore. But what does an entry-level person do if the AI can handle a lot of that drudge work? And it can. I mean, we’ve talked about on this show that I’ve set up a Hermes instance and it is out there. In fact, I haven’t checked my Telegram account yet, but there should be 10 links to recent news stories that are prime for me to news-check because I set up an agent to do that. I have an agent set up, a skill set up, that I can deploy anytime I want to. It is set up to analyze the websites of twenty-two of our competitors. And all I have to do is tell it what I want it to analyze. Do I want it to look at how they handle their project portfolios? Do I want it to look at how they handle their thought leadership? I can ask it any of those questions and it’ll come back and give me a very nice report. I could absolutely set it up to do media monitoring. I’m starting to question the need for my media monitoring service at work, although the agent that I have set up to do some of this certainly can’t get behind the paywall the way that the media monitoring service can, because they pay the licensing fee for all of those. So if the AI can assume all of this work, it’s not a question of saying we don’t need entry-level people. It’s a question of reimagining what entry-level people should be doing. In terms of AI: What should they be doing with AI, and what new things can we be having them do that we haven’t thought of before, or that we always wished they could do if they didn’t have all of this drudge work that they had to spend their time on? It’s time for a reinvention, and I don’t see anybody talking about that. I haven’t seen a whole lot of ideas about where all this should go. Neville Hobson: Yeah, I’m with you on that a hundred percent. Exactly my sentiment as well, that you don’t see people talking about this in a truly serious way. I see on LinkedIn—if that’s any barometer, I don’t know if it is or not—but I see people mentioning this now and again and “we ought to do something about that.” But there’s no webinars, no seminars, no get-togethers on the topic of reinventing the agency, let’s say. It’s a topic I’ve written about myself, and value-based pricing versus time-based pricing. And it’s interesting how Stephen Waddington addresses that topic in his article. It’s quite a pointed observation he makes that’s worth pushing on. If you’re still selling time rather than value, he says, AI will break your model. That’s a direct challenge to the billable-hour structure that much of agency PR still runs on. So the firms getting this right are building around insight, outcome, and risk management instead. It’s worth asking how many firms are actually making that structural shift versus just talking about it. Not enough. Doesn’t mean to say they’re ignoring it. Far from it. I think it’s largely because they don’t know what to do. How do they address this? So there’s an opportunity for someone with some insights and answers to help educate firms like that. There’s a consulting opportunity, if you like. Shel Holtz: I was thinking exactly the same thing. If somebody’s looking for a pivot in their career, that sounds like one to me. Neville Hobson: Yeah, yeah. So we are at that place. Again, go back just three years, 2023, when we wrote our pieces about that CIPR survey, and twenty-five percent of the respondents said they’d never ever use AI. It was pretty absolute, the answers. Here we are, three years later, and I bet you that number’s down to five percent, if not less. I can’t imagine anyone—and it causes a very broad question, “would you use AI, yes or no?” It’s a bit like “should we stay in the EU, yes or no?” I mean the Brexit referendum—well, people, what a dumb question. But so that’s where we’re at. But I believe a lot of the landscape is now so polluted with everyone’s opinion that it’s very confusing to zero in on what are the issues I need to be thinking about in an organization. Plus, I see so many people—I saw one just this morning—someone’s got a PDF book on how to move your business to selling value, basically, not time. And it’s not how many hours you did, it’s what did you deliver to the client. So it’s great, but it needs to be more authority than that, I think. And this is where the profession comes in—professional bodies like the CIPR, the PRSA in the US. The CIPR has done a good job in raising awareness about AI in the right way, in context related to public relations. They’ve had this AI panel for some time now with senior practitioners leading it. This book’s come out and it’s got a lot of support from practitioners in the UK and beyond. So maybe now is the time that this is going to get taken a bit more seriously than people do. I think though what Stephen worries about—and I think it’s not a misplaced worry—is the point that people are being laid off. Layoffs are happening all the time and most people believe it’s because AI is going to be more efficient and all that kind of stuff. And there must be some truth in some of that. But he also mentions something quite interesting in his article, because he says that most of the conversation about AI and jobs focuses on redundancy risks from above—leadership cutting roles. We’ve talked about that quite a bit. But Waddington notes a quieter pressure running in the opposite direction. Junior and mid-career practitioners are walking out of organizations they consider too far behind the curve. So firms that move too slowly aren’t just at risk of getting the technology wrong, they’re at risk of losing the people who could help them get it right. The talent drain is bi-directional. Now that’s an interesting element to bring into this discussion, I think—that it’s those folks who are walking away. He doesn’t say, and I hadn’t found anything before we started recording, as to where they’re all going. Are they leaving the profession entirely, or are they just looking for a place that—in a sense they feel it’s worth going to this company because they’ve got it switched on, that they’re clued into this? So maybe that’s the state we’re in. Doesn’t answer the questions, mind you, and they’re coming thick and fast now, I think. I see, again, LinkedIn is a kind of barometer of sentiment, if you will—not in the analytics way, but the feeling you see expressed in some posts from some people who are worth reading about it. And that includes many of the people that I follow and that you would follow as well. So you’re seeing this, but it’s all very random. That’s the thing. And it requires something more than that. And voices like Stephen’s, yours when you were talking about this—we’ve missed about three, four, five times, that sort of thing. What’s going to make people really pay attention to this? Shel Holtz: I hate to say it, but it’s the same thing that has always made the industry pay attention, and that’s when they suffer financial pain. The reason we have not embraced as an industry these technological changes is our billings were fine. We were doing just fine as an industry financially. So why should we make this risky change to something that we don’t quite understand and we’re not convinced is going to have all that much impact or will necessarily stick around all that long? That leaves an opening for other industries—advertising and marketing—to sneak in. It also leaves an opportunity for boutiques that specialize in this to start up and take money off the table that was there for the PR agencies that were already in business. And this seems to be a recurring pattern: if we’re not feeling the financial pain, we’re not gonna make any change. As soon as we start to feel that pain, as soon as we see our clients going to the boutiques and going to the marketing agencies, then we go, “we better change.” And then we’re behind the curve. So I think that’s the big issue and the big challenge—to be proactive rather than reactive when these technologies create these opportunities, or create the requirement, if we wait, that we must change because we’ve already seen these revenues go to somebody else. One thing to keep in mind: absolutely there have been layoffs within the industry and they have been attributed to AI. It is important to keep in mind though—and this was reinforced in that very same podcast I was listening to that I mentioned earlier—that if you look at economic data, there’s no evidence of mass layoffs as a result of AI. The unemployment rate is pretty much where it was before all of this. The number of new jobs that are being reported, at least in the US, has actually been pretty strong. The jobs report the last month was quite encouraging. So we keep hearing about the mass layoffs and they may be coming. They may not. Because frankly, what I see—and I don’t know if this is unique to the construction industry, I doubt it; I think it may be a bigger issue in the construction industry, but I think this is probably true of most jobs—is it’s not the job that gets replaced by AI, it’s tasks within the job. And then there are other tasks that the AI can’t do. The other thing is that there are things that we have wished that we could do, but haven’t had the time to do, from an internal comms standpoint and even, I suspect, a PR standpoint from inside the organization, the client side. I mean, I remember when I was in my first corporate job. This was with Arco. I was there from ’77 to ’83 with some brilliant communicators, but the company believed in it. So they funded the internal comms department. We had 25 employees in internal comms in five cities. And each of us had beats, just like you were a newspaper reporter with a beat. I had two beats. I had Arco Petroleum Products, which was the gas stations and the merchandising of cans of motor oil and things like that, and Arco Marine, which was the oil tankers that transported oil mainly from Alaska down to the refineries along the West Coast. And I spent time—I mean, that was my job, was to go hang out, to spend time, to shadow somebody, to do a ride-along, to ride on a tanker, to spend a day at one of the gas stations and really get a sense, and to be able to report on this a little more intimately than just calling somebody and doing an interview over the phone. And in public relations, I think it’s important to remember that “relations” part of the public relations label. How do you build relations? Well, if AI really does take away a lot of that drudge work that we spend the time doing while we’re sitting at our desk, then we have time to get up from our desks and go out and hang out with the publics that we are dealing with and build those relations. And why wouldn’t we want to do that? AI can’t do that. AI can’t get up, get their car and go to where the public is. Maybe it’s a community relations organization, maybe it’s a division of your business. Maybe it’s a customer base that is gathering—well, let’s say it’s Ford Motor Company and there’s a car club that’s meeting. Whatever it may be, we have the opportunity now to become much more entwined with those publics. And do a much better job of understanding them. Yeah, we still want to do the data, we still want to do the analytics, but there’s nothing like sitting with them and looking them in the eye and talking with them to build an understanding that’s going to help you communicate with them and help you build trust among them. That’s just one idea of what we can do with this freed-up time. And this is an important point—and I saw this in one of the reports that came out just last week, I think it was—the value that we get from saving an hour because AI can do it just leaks out of the bottom of the organization if we don’t know what we’re going to replace that hour with that has value. And we hear about all the savings of time that AI is going to give us. I haven’t heard a whole lot about how organizations are figuring out how to reallocate that time among those employees. Neville Hobson: Yeah, yeah, neither me. No, I agree. And you do hear a lot of talk about the concept of that. I mean there’s lots in this topic, Shel, really, and you’ve thrown some bright light on some of the things we should be doing. I like the idea of going out to meet your publics, as it were. It’s winding the clock back, actually, to how we used to do all this back in the day, before all this tech was there. Shel Holtz: Yeah, it really is. Neville Hobson: We had to go out and find the sources and interview them face to face and, you know, meet down the pub or whatever. So maybe we need to examine what worked in the past and bring it to the fore again. Shel Holtz: When I was a newspaper reporter, before I made the switch to corporate communications, I was with a local community daily newspaper, and I used to go hang out at the bar after work where all of the government workers hung out after work. Got to know them, got to listen in, got some pretty good stories out of that. But also I could pick up the phone and call some of these people because they knew me. I wasn’t just the reporter who called when I needed a quote or needed some information. I was the guy they just had a drink with. Neville Hobson: Yeah, exactly. Lessons to learn there, I think. So yeah, lots of good ideas here. I think Stephen Waddington did a good job in literally describing the landscape and expressing some of his concerns. That’s prompted this conversation. So let’s hope this adds to the topics that people need to be talking about. So listeners, hope this is helpful. Shel Holtz: And listeners, if your organization is actually making some changes and doing some pivots, we’d love to hear about it. And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.   The post FIR #518: Is the PR Industry Blowing It Again? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

First, they were told to use AI. Experiment! Add it to your workflows! Go wild! Then the bills started piling up, and companies realized the cost was not tenable. Now the walk-backs are happening. Usage caps! Caution! Slow down! Among the issues communicators need to address is employees questioning leadership’s judgment. In this short midweek episode, Shel and Neville explore approaches communicators can take to help employees understand the pivot while maintaining the perception of leader competence. Links from this episode: AI can cost more than human workers now Microsoft reports are exposing AI’s real cost problem: Using the tech is more expensive than paying human employees When AI Costs More Than the Worker It Replaced AI isn’t paying off in the way companies think. Layoffs driven by automation are failing to generate returns, study finds AI layoffs may be backfiring on companies Uber, Microsoft, and Others Burning Through AI Budgets. Now What? Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months. Now its COO is questioning whether it’s worth it Uber Burns Its 2026 AI Budget In Four Months On Claude Code Sam Altman says OpenAI’s top token spender uses 100 billion tokens a month — and they’re not even the world leader OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admits AI token costs are becoming ‘a huge issue’ — company seeks improved value as overspending becomes a meme Token Billing Exposes AI’s Missing ROI And Puts Billion-Dollar Bets At Risk AI savings misses should make executives uncomfortable AI saves workers a day a week, but they don’t know what to do with it The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, June 22. 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 everyone and welcome to For Immediate Release. This is episode 517. I’m Neville Hobson. Shel Holtz: I’m Shel Holtz. In some companies right now, that AI that was supposed to replace expensive humans is costing more than the humans it replaced. The numbers are kind of breathtaking. Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months. In fact, I just heard today that they’re introducing a monthly AI spending cap of $1,500 per employee. One unnamed company, a real one though, spent half a billion dollars on AI in a single month because nobody had bothered to set a spending limit. An NVIDIA executive flat out admitted that for his team, compute now costs more than the engineers using it. A lot of these companies didn’t just overspend, they made decisions on the strength of what they thought AI could do. And in plenty of cases, those decisions cost people their jobs. The pitch was that AI can do this work for a fraction of the cost. Then Bain and Company studied a thousand companies and finds that most aren’t getting those savings. Gartner found the layoffs delivered no better returns than not laying anyone off at all. In its study, Bain looked at the books and saw money leaking out of the top, companies spending the budget without the savings showing up. And Boston Consulting Group went and asked employees and found that the leak runs from the bottom too. Over 40% of regular AI users say they’re saving a full workday every week. But Boston Consulting Group’s point is that saved time doesn’t automatically become value. If nobody tells an employee where to redirect those reclaimed hours, that value just evaporates. So two consultancies looking at two completely different ends of the organization landed on the same diagnosis. This is a management failure. It’s not a technology failure. So put yourself in the shoes of employees who are still there. They watched colleagues walked out the door because they were told the machine could do it cheaper. And now they’re watching leadership start to walk it back. In most cases, walk it back really quietly. What does that do to employees who see their leaders’ judgment, their competence? Because that is where this becomes a communication story. It’s about trust, credibility, and what we as communicators are supposed to do when leaders make a big public painful bet that doesn’t pay off. We’ll share our thoughts about that right after this. Now there’s a lot we can talk about with this story, like communicating a suddenly altered governance model. But let’s start here. The bet companies made was about people, that AI could replace human labor at a fraction of the cost. When that turns out to be wrong, employees don’t just see a line item on a P&L. They see leaders who either didn’t understand the technology they bet the company on, or who used the AI story as cover for cuts they were going to make anyway, what we’ve come to call AI washing. Both of these readings are poison. The second one travels fastest. A communicator’s first job is to make sure that the accurate story is the one that gets out there. And to add a little context to that idea, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, just recently said that this cost discussion is new. It started early this year. Before that, nobody was talking about it. And that’s probably because before early this year, most employees were prompting AI chatbots, and that didn’t blow up budgets. What changed early this year? Agents. Now employees have agents running complex tasks in an endless loop, and that burns tokens like nobody’s business. I heard about one employee who burned through a billion tokens in a month. That means costs are exploding. It’s not something anybody really anticipated, and a lot of CEOs were caught unaware. You know, they paid for the subscription cost to say Anthropic, now they’re paying the subscription, but they’re also paying for tokens. So Neville, if you were leading a comms department in a company that laid off a bunch of people because AI could do their jobs, and now it’s either costing more for the AI to do those jobs, or the AI isn’t doing it as well as the people did, how do you communicate that without making leadership look like fools? Neville Hobson: Yeah, it’s a good question, isn’t it, Shel? I mean, you’ve painted a picture that’s pretty dire, it seems to me. And I like to think that this is a kind of outlier territory we’re in. This is not the mainstream. But I’m willing to be proven wrong. You know, I don’t recognize this in the UK, so it could not yet be a big deal over here. But I’m thinking you mentioned that the original AI narrative, if I can describe it that way, was sold to people as we’re replacing you with robots or we’re replacing you with tech. I wonder, is that the case everywhere? Because I would have thought it was, many would have sold it as additive. It’s AI plus you, not AI instead of you. And that’s a wholly different kind of message if that were the case. Either way, they’re walking it back. And I think there’s a handful of things the communication leader should do. And that person would also be the counselor and the advisor to the leadership of the organization. So I think one of the first things, if not the first thing, is that you mustn’t let the leadership hide behind euphemisms. You know, restructuring, right sizing, optimizing for the future, that kind of stuff. Employees see through all of that, particularly in this example. And it makes things even worse, I think. The communicator’s job is to push for plain language, even when that’s uncomfortable. So that’s one thing. The second, and again, this may well be the first. I’m just putting these out there as bullet points effectively without saying which is the most significant. Acknowledge the whiplash directly. Acknowledge it. Don’t pretend that the earlier message just didn’t happen. All those lovely messages about this rosy future’s coming when we’re introducing AI. You could say, we told you AI would be a productivity multiplier for everyone. We believe that. The reality has turned out differently, and you deserve an honest explanation of why. Of course, your next bit is so what are you going to say? But that’s the framing you need to do. Separate the human cost from the technology story. The people losing jobs are not a line item. Communication that treats them as a budget adjustment will destroy trust with everyone who remains behind. And the people who remain are watching very carefully. Give the survivors something real, not platitudes about the future, concrete information about what the new operating model looks like, what’s expected of them, and what support they’re getting. And there’s a harder truth for communicators, it seems to me, and this kind of popped out of the woodwork sideways when I was looking into this. If you’re the comms person in a situation like this, and leadership won’t let you be honest, won’t acknowledge the contradiction, they won’t speak plainly to people losing their jobs, then you have a professional and ethical problem, not a communication problem. And that’s a different ball game. And if you’re in that situation, I would say, easy to say this naturally, is get your resume brushed up and start looking around someplace else. You don’t want to be in that kind of environment. So the best communication advice in the world can’t fix a leadership team that wants to paper over a broken promise. And that’s worth saying out loud. And I think these are the things that should be on the communicator’s to-do list in a situation like this that could, I suppose, go some way towards restoring or maintaining some level of trust in the leadership, where we do, we hate what you did, we’re angry at you, but we believe that you are willing to fix it in some form. And even saying like, yeah, I’m with you on that, you thought this would work and it didn’t. So there’s other questions that will arise too. But either way it’s going to be an uncomfortable journey to get to an outcome that you like. Shel Holtz: Yeah, to your first point, no, I don’t think every organization is going through this. I think it’s the ones that are actually providing employees with a budget to use tokens. I mean, we heard the stories about the leaderboards that were encouraging people to rise to the top of the leaderboard for the number of tokens they were burning, because that would indicate, it would signal that they’re using AI, which the companies wanted them to do. But you know, the models, the frontier labs were not really forthright with their pricing structures on the tokens. This was something new. They introduced it. It’s not very transparent. Not all of them even have the ability to show you how many tokens you’ve burned through. A couple of them do, but it’s not clear what that means in terms of your costs or what you have left available. But you know, from the communication standpoint, yeah, the trap I see here is that the original decisions were announced really loudly. Shel Holtz: They issued press releases. They had all hands meetings. It was discussed on earnings calls. The correction here is happening more like a whisper. Spend caps are being added quietly to governance language. I know Uber is out there talking about it, but not everybody. The leaderboards for those token maxing exercises are just vanishing without explanation. Contractors are appearing in company offices to do the work that the AI was supposed to do. Some of them are the employees who were laid off in the first place. So, you know, when you boast loudly and walk back quietly, employees are going to fill that silence, right? Information abhors a vacuum. And they’re going to fill it with the worst possible interpretation. But, you know, leaders do have this instinct to either double down, you know, this is what we said we were going to do, and by God, we’re going to do it. Or they go quiet, and both those approaches are wrong. I think what actually rebuilds credibility isn’t a groveling apology. It’s a clear here’s what we expected, here’s what the data actually showed, and here’s what we’re changing in response. I think that reframes what looked like a wrong bet into a process that we employed to arrive at the best outcome. And it’s a continuum, and we’re here at the continuum. We’re not at the end game. We’re still learning and adapting and adjusting, and we still believe in the promise of AI, which by the way, I do. Look, employees don’t lose respect for leaders who update their thinking. They lose respect for leaders who pretend they were right all along when they weren’t. So we should counsel leaders to stop measuring AI adoption and hours saved, and start measuring whether that saved time is actually being reinvested into something that matters. We should never have been celebrating who can burn through the most tokens the fastest. In communication terms, that’s like focusing on which communicator can produce the most articles for the intranet and ignoring whether people are modifying their behaviors or reinforcing their support for company goals or whatever other outcomes you had determined that those articles were supposed to produce. Deciding what an organization celebrates, what it puts on the scoreboard, that’s partly our job. Neville Hobson: Yeah, I’d say you’re right. It’s interesting. I think there’s a kind of an underlying question behind all this, it seems to me, that I was mulling over when I was looking at this. The real question is, can communications actually repair the damage that’s been caused by this? Can it? I think the honest answer is partially. So good communication can reduce the damage, preserve some trust with the people who stay and give the organization a chance to rebuild its credibility over time. But it can’t undo the promise. It can only help people understand what happened and why. Now that may sound like, well, in that case, this is doomed. No, not at all. Because if you get to that point, help people understand what happened and why, you’ve then got a foundation where you can build from, it seems to me. And that’s connected directly to your point you just made, that you have to, you know, grasp the nettle as it were, take the bull by the horns, etc., think of the metaphors, and be honest and truthful, fess up. It’s not like, yeah, we screwed up, not at all. We made the bet, we had all the research, everyone was convinced this would work, and indeed our vendors who persuaded us to sign up for all those tokens were saying the same thing. There’s also another element. I’ve been reading about this in, I’ve forgotten, one of the US papers that I subscribe to, about this supposed huge AI backlash in the US that isn’t happening here. Yeah, it’s not happening here, although it’s a whole different landscape here in that context. Not on the scale that you have in the States. But I’ve been reading a bit about that. Maybe that needs to be factored into this as well, because that would fuel people’s anger, I think, at the outcome that they’re experiencing, particularly if there’s kind of iffy communication somewhere in there that doesn’t resonate with employees. So it’s a complex picture. But I think the real question is, can communications actually repair the damage? And I think the answer is precisely that, partially. Shel Holtz: Yeah, you raise a really interesting point. If 70% of the population is feeling negative about AI, you have to figure that that is reflected in your employee population. And now you’ve got this piled on top of that. That’s just fueling those views. So you have to factor that into the approach that you’re taking to communication and maybe even into the employee profiles that you’re using to craft those communications on that whiplash that you were talking about. Important to remember that for, you know, like a year, employees were pushed. Yeah, there were mandates, those leaderboards I mentioned. They were pushed to use it as much as humanly possible, and now they’re being told, oops, use it carefully. Yeah, and I think communications does set the narrative that connects those two poles. You know, without it, the reversal just looks like leadership didn’t know what they’re doing. Shel Holtz: And again, that reads as incompetent. So I think we do have to build the bridge. We learned something on the road. Here’s what’s changed and why. It doesn’t mean that the promise of AI isn’t still there. It’s just the road that we are taking to get there is a little more winding than we expected. And by the way, speaking of the whiplash, according to that Boston Consulting Group survey, nearly half of workers, 47%, say they spend more time managing and directing AI than doing the actual work they were originally hired to do. Think about that against what leaders promised, because the pitch was that this was going to be a labor-reducing thing, a productivity improver. And what employees are actually living is the labor didn’t get easier, it just got transformed from doing the work to supervising the AI that does the work. Boston Consulting Group found that four in ten reported an increased cognitive load, which is, I have to say, exactly what I have been experiencing. I’m not spending less time, I’m spending more time, and AI is part of the reason for that. So when the lived experience doesn’t match what was said in the announcement, the gap is where leaders’ credibility can go to die, right? It’s the communicator’s job to close that gap. Make sure that the story leadership is telling matches the work that people are actually doing and the experience they’re actually having. Neville Hobson: Yeah, I would subscribe to that view. I’m also thinking, Shel, that, you know, the way this has been presented, let’s say, is as if, you know, lots of communication when this started, big promises from leadership, and then silence. And now there’s this, we’ve got to rethink all this and you’re not going to be able to do that. So there was no effective communication in the meantime, there was no updates on what’s going on and this is what people are doing and these are the benefits they’re having. So I feel there was a lack of continuity in the communication. Otherwise this wouldn’t have landed as a big surprise, or as big a surprise as it has to many. There would have been signs that might have prompted some to say, whoa, hang on a second. I’m getting this little note here saying I’ve used so many tokens. I mean it could even be, what are these tokens it keeps talking about? How was that communicated? That every time you do this, this is going to happen. And I’m thinking of my own experience as an individual and the experiments I’m running with Claude, for instance, that when I was experimenting with Claude Cowork, it would, or it might have been the project, I can’t remember which one it was now, but there was a little script I could put into the model that told me how many tokens I used. And it didn’t tell me that and then some kind of tech gobbledygook that I wouldn’t have a clue what the hell does that mean. It actually told me this project you’ve done used so many tokens, which is nought point one two percent of your total allowance until the next reset. Now that makes me think, that’s okay. So, did they have anything like that in the organization that enabled people to just keep a running total on what they’re doing? You know, it’s kind of like the average MPG in your car kind of thing. Everyone knows that kind of thing. That’s helpful, even though it’s not very scientific or detailed, but it would be enough. And maybe I haven’t encountered it myself. I see people talking about this on LinkedIn quite a bit, where they are getting fed up with this tool telling me I’ve reached my token limit, and I’m thinking, okay, they’re obviously doing the kind of work that not everyone is doing that burns through tokens like this. And it’s quite tech oriented, those kind of comments. So you’ve got to take that into account. But I think it does come back to, from a comms point of view, that you told people this is what was going to happen, this is why we were doing this, and there’s this lovely rosy future for all of us. Did you explain the detail about how things were going to actually happen? Probably not, I would say. So otherwise there wouldn’t have been the backlash at the end. The backlash would have started earlier and you might have been able to head it off. You might have been able to make a difference. So these are all, you know, what-ifs perhaps, but nevertheless, it comes back to that underlying question, that can communicators actually repair this? The answer is partially, it seems to me. Shel Holtz: Yeah, and I could definitely see myself burning through a lot of tokens without a tech rationale for it. If I set up ten agents to scan the media environment 24 hours a day, seven days a week, each with a different area of focus, and they’re just constantly running, that’s tokens being burned. That’s like the car never being turned off and going through the gas. So, by the way, imagine the message that companies can send to their employees if the company was more deliberate and slower about the implementation of AI. They know it’s coming. They’ve given Copilot to employees, but in terms of everybody going out and building agents and things like that, well, we’re still remediating our internal data to make it useful for an AI model. And we haven’t launched our training yet. No, they can rub their hands and say, you know, being slow and deliberate paid off. Look what’s happening to all these other organizations. We’re pretty smart leaders here in this company. By the way, one other communication opportunity I want to address before we wrap up, and that’s around governance, because there’s, you know, a remarkable detail in this story. The companies that overspent mostly already had the tools to prevent it. You know, spend limits like you set up in the agent that you had that told you how many tokens you’d gone through. Routing simpler tasks to cheaper models. I just heard this morning on a podcast that there’s something you can sign up for if you use their tools, it’s automatically going to route you to the right model for the task. So you’re not always using the high-end model, the reasoning model, the thinking model, that costs a lot. Budget caps, all of these rules have always existed as capabilities inside the platforms, the companies just never switched them on. So for a communicator, that’s a gift because it lets leadership say we’re putting real discipline in place without it sounding like punishing employees for using too many tokens, like they were initially told to do. The framing here is everything. The governance change needs to be framed as here’s how we make sure this actually pays off for us. And it lets employees know the company’s approach to AI is maturing. If you frame it as AI use is now restricted, well, that signals panic and confirms the exact incompetence story you’re trying to tamp down in the first place. Neville Hobson: Yeah. Again, what was communicated, how was it communicated, to what depth was it communicated, and how did you know that people absorbed it well? So what kind of feedback mechanism did you have to see if people understood the message? But I think there’s also another element, this is an organizational one, which is, you know, you’ve got a hundred and fifty employees, let’s say you’ve got five hundred employees in your company, did every single one of those five hundred need unlimited token access to do anything they wanted? No, they shouldn’t have done. So the example you mentioned, a tech person or enabling someone to be monitoring something twenty-four seven, not everyone would need to have that. And in fact, you’d need to structure it so that only these guys who need to do that. And I would imagine you’ve done a comparison to say this is definitely going to be cheaper than doing it that way, which you’ve always been doing it. So that would make sense. I wonder how many didn’t even do those kind of, you know. Shel Holtz: Many, if not most. Yeah. Neville Hobson: Right, I wouldn’t be surprised. So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at this outcome that we’re discussing here. And again, that is now the fifth time I think I’ve mentioned this, that communications can only repair this damage partially. And I think the bits it can repair are going to have some good outcomes, I would say. Shel Holtz: One other thing that communications can do here is to set the stage. It’s, this is not the end game. We have not reached the place where, now we get it, everything’s right. The message is anticipate more change from this. I mean, the frontier model companies, Anthropic, OpenAI, you know, they’re going to change their pricing models because they know that people are dissatisfied. They know that it’s opaque. They know that it’s costing more than people and companies can afford. So you can look for this to get changed. I just recently heard somebody suggesting an outcome-based pricing model as opposed to a token-based model. I don’t know how that would work, but it’ll be interesting to see what they come up with. But you need to prepare employees for more change. You can’t let them be surprised again. Look at what agents did to the way this has pivoted. There’s going to be more of this on the horizon. You know, prepare yourself, but in the meantime, we are still on the right path of figuring out how to apply this to the organization’s best advantage. And that’ll be a thirty for this episode of For Immediate Release. The post FIR #517: How to Communicate AI Whiplash to Employees appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

The Economist has gone public with an experiment: it has created a shadow website featuring an AI-friendly version of its front-of-paywall content. The idea is to improve the odds of this content surfacing in AI answers and responses to AI queries. It’s based on a new standard, llms.txt, which has been described as the robot.txt of AI. What does this mean for communicators? Neville and Shel break it down in this short midweek episode. Links from this episode: The Economist tests AI-ready web pages The Economist prepares for a two‑track internet: one for humans and one for AI agents The Economist is testing content read by AI agents How The Economist is using AI to extend its global reach The next version of the web will be built for machines, not humans The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, June 22. 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 For Immediate Release. This is episode number 516. I’m Shel Holtz. Neville Hobson: And I’m Neville Hobson. Something quiet is happening to the web, and The Economist is one of the first major publishers to talk openly about how it’s responding. A piece published by Digiday last week describes how The Economist is building what its VP of generative AI, Josh Munker, calls two versions of the web. One version is the one we’re all familiar with: richly designed pages, feature photography, navigation, everything optimized for a human reader browsing with intent. The other version is quite different: stripped back, structured around questions and answers, designed not for you, but for an AI agent acting on your behalf. Now, if that framing sounds familiar, it should. In episode 515 last week, we spent some time on what Google announced at its developer conference in May: that searching the web will increasingly be done by AI agents rather than by humans, and that people will focus on acting on the information those agents surface rather than clicking links themselves. I made the point then that the question for communicators was shifting from, “How do we get found?” to, “How do we become part of the information environment that AI systems draw from?” What The Economist is doing is a direct practical answer to exactly that question. And here’s what makes this particularly interesting. The Economist itself published a piece last December describing this shift in precise terms: a move from a pull internet, where people initiate actions, to a push model, where agents act unprompted, setting up meetings, flagging research, handling tasks, often without a human ever typing a query. They wrote about it then as an emerging phenomenon. Now, six months later, their own team is operationally responding to it. They’re not just observers of this trend; they’re participants in it. The logic behind their approach is straightforward. A growing share of people, particularly in B2B contexts, no longer start their discovery process with a search engine or a home page. They start with ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude. They ask a question, get a synthesized answer, and may never visit the original source at all. For a publisher like The Economist, that creates an obvious problem. If your content isn’t structured in a way that an AI agent can parse and surface clearly, you effectively become invisible. Not because your content is poor, but because the intermediary can’t read it properly. So The Economist is experimenting. Right now, the focus is on content that already sits outside the paywall: marketing copy, B2B sales material, the kinds of pages where you want a potential subscriber or corporate client to find you. They’re building parallel versions: the polished human-facing page alongside a clean, agent-readable equivalent. The aim is to show up accurately and usefully in AI-generated answers. Now, why does this matter to communicators beyond the publishing world? Because what The Economist is describing isn’t a publishing problem. It’s a communication problem. And it connects to something that one researcher quoted in The Economist’s December piece put plainly: Marketers and communicators may need to pitch not to people, but to agent attention. The audience increasingly will be algorithms, and the humans will act on what these algorithms surface. Think about your own organization’s public-facing content: press releases, executive bios, policy statements, corporate FAQs, product and service descriptions. All of that content is increasingly being read and summarized by AI agents before it ever reaches a human. If that content isn’t structured to be understood accurately by an agent, you lose control of how your organization is represented in AI-generated answers. And unlike a Google snippet, you may not even know it’s happening. Alessandro DeSantis, a media consultant quoted in the Digiday piece, puts it bluntly. He calls agent optimization a defensive baseline, not a competitive advantage, but the minimum requirement to remain visible at all. There’s a deeper question sitting underneath all of this, which we’ll get into: Who do you trust in the AI-intermediated world? What does it mean for the communicator’s job when the first reader of your content isn’t a person at all? Shel, you and I discussed the Google side of this in FIR 515. Here’s a publisher responding in real time. What’s your take? Shel Holtz: I have lots of takes on this. This is, I think, a big issue. The first thing I want to point out is that, as I read the commentary of people who are talking about this, there’s an expectation that in the not-too-distant future, the AI version is all that we’re going to need to publish because we’re going to be publishing for AI as people rely on AI to get their information. I find this a troubling idea. I think people are ignoring the fact that right now, 25 to 60 percent, depending on the nature of the site, of visits to a website are direct. They are not coming from a search engine. It’s somebody who already knows the URL. As I mentioned in a post I published to LinkedIn last week, nobody going to Amazon starts at Google and says “online retail site” and waits for the URL to come up. They just type Amazon.com. There are a lot of people who know the URLs. There are URLs published in magazine articles, in advertising, in TV commercials, for example. And then there is the dark web: I send you a link by email or in our Slack channel, and you click it. There’s no search involved at all, so there is no opportunity to see that AI overview. So I think we have to keep in mind that there are still a lot of people who are coming to our websites, not through Google or some other search mechanism, or starting with Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini or what have you. They’re coming directly to your website, either because they know the URL or it has been shared with them by somebody else. So I think we do need to keep that in mind. The other reason I think we need to maintain our own websites is because we own them, and we don’t own that intermediary. You publish that Markdown version of a web page and you provide the proper router to it. Was it called LLM text, I think? They’re calling this the robots.txt of the AI era. And it’s going to share with the person who’s making the query what it shares. It may not be exactly what is on your page. So now you’re down to using a third party. Neville Hobson: Something like that. Shel Holtz: So, yeah, it’s good to have at least as a statement of record what your original content was. I have some other thoughts about this, but I’ll let you react to that first. Neville Hobson: Yeah, no, I get it totally. Yet the trend seems to be quite clear. This is the way it’s moving. And I would say that, from what I’ve been reading, not just this, but The Economist is actually a probably good signal for what other media properties may or may not be doing or might want to do, depending on the outcome of The Economist’s experimentation. Being discoverable in this new way is critical; otherwise, you are invisible. And I think the behaviors of people are gradually changing, not to the extent that it’s a groundswell. I don’t see it like that myself. Maybe it is generational, potentially, I suppose. But I think applying that kind of “it’s because of age differences in the different generations” is a bit of a tired argument nowadays, I think, as a kind of answer to everything. We’re seeing a shift in how people not only find information, but how they think about going about finding information. So the idea of thinking, “Okay, let me just type into this search box: How do I do so-and-so? Where do I go to?” or whatever words you might use. I kind of talk in literally conversational language when I’m searching for something, and I’ve had more good experiences, way more than not good, with Google Overviews as a result. And again, I sometimes stop and think, “What did I just do then?” I took Google Overview and I didn’t go any further than that because it gave me exactly what I wanted. And not only that, I’ve got a list of all the sources it looked at as well. So why am I going to spend any more time on this? I got what I need. So this is evolving fast, even though it’s still not totally clear exactly what’s happening. And I think the idea — and this is my take on this, Shel — the idea of, as a matter of course, sharing URLs in an email or in a WhatsApp message with colleagues in the workplace, that ain’t going to be the way it’s going to be as a matter of course. There are going to be other, better ways of doing it than that, generally speaking, of course. So this isn’t suddenly going to happen next week. This is going to take some time to evolve. But it seems from what I’ve read, Digiday being one good example, and a handful of others I’ve also looked at, this is the clear trend that’s evolving. And The Economist is clearly betting on their experiment that AI-agent content prepared for AI agents is an essential move for them to take as a publisher so that they do not become invisible. And I get that. Shel Holtz: I agree that it’s an essential move. I’m not suggesting that organizations not do this. I’m just suggesting that they not abandon their websites. For now, we’ve got to keep that 25 to 60 percent that are coming directly to your website in mind. You also have to keep in mind that your website may have things on it that can’t be duplicated in an AI Overview. In fact, the advice that’s circulating out there is that if you want to drive traffic still to your website, you need to have that kind of content. It may be calculators, for example, interactive elements that just can’t be summarized. You have to get to the website and interact with that tool. I know that the ability to purchase from an AI Overview is coming. It’s not here yet. I haven’t heard a timeline for when it’s going to be here. It’s coming, but for now, if you want to make a purchase, you need to go to the website to do that. So I’m suggesting that there are still reasons to provide a website. You need to do both. Now, when I say you need to do both, I think it’s important to understand that you don’t need to have a one-for-one of all of the content on your website. You need to make a judgment about what on your website you want to have summarized by AI and what is unnecessary or superfluous, or what you otherwise just don’t need to spend the time on. It doesn’t matter if the AI gets this particular content summarized in Markdown so that it can give you the AI summary. So I think you have to do some strategizing. But undoubtedly, what’s coming from the web development platforms that are out there is the automation of this. I think it’s inevitable that WordPress and Wix and Squarespace and Webflow and all of the other services out there for creating websites are going to add the ability to automatically convert this page to Markdown and put it in the right place. I think that’s probably going to ease this. I haven’t heard any conversations from these website creation companies about this, but I do think it’s inevitable. Neville Hobson: It is, I agree. One hundred percent, it’s inevitable. And like I said earlier, this is not sudden. So your point about keeping your website with links and all that stuff — for some years, that’s still going to be the case for many people, but it’s going to decline. I think it’s interesting what you said about some stuff not lending itself well. I totally agree. And in fact, one of the tips for communicators that I came up with from all the stuff I’ve been reading is to go through your key external pages in your organization — the About page, FAQ, leadership bios, product or service descriptions — and ask, “If an AI agent were summarizing this, what would it say?” And you talked about the examples you made: content buried in carousels, PDFs, JavaScript-heavy pages, or dense narrative prose is harder for agents to parse accurately. So restructuring even a handful of high-priority pages into clear, direct, quick Q&A formats is a practical first step. It could matter a great deal. And the other thing, which I picked up from Digiday, but also from some others, is worth noting for everyone, I think. The technical landscape is still forming. Nobody has the full picture yet. But as The Economist example tells us, they’re not waiting, and neither should we as communicators. You start with what you can control: your own content, your direct audience relationships, your messaging clarity. And as Digiday concludes, the organizations that experiment now, even tentatively, will be better positioned than those waiting for a definitive playbook that may never arrive. And I think if I were doing this — and again, it’s easy to say, “Well, if I were doing this, I’d do X.” It sounds easy, doesn’t it? — but the idea of literally kind of duplicating your website for this purpose is quite a bit of work. But it could stand you in good stead where your competitors haven’t done that and they’ve still got these beautifully designed, laid out, immaculate photos and stuff that’s animated, designed for human readers, without the version designed for the algorithms. And I think that, to me, would be a key thing to truly investigate thoroughly in your organization: What am I committing to if I say, “Okay, our gorgeous website wins awards for its design, and here are all the metrics showing all the leads it delivers and all that kind of stuff. What do we need to do to get on the radar of the AI agents version?” So you build a version. What’s entailed with that? One thing I didn’t see in Digiday’s piece, and I haven’t found it anywhere else yet, is what exactly is involved in creating a duplicate of your website designed around this? Where, for instance, you’re treating everything as structured data, not just copywritten text, which doesn’t translate well to an agent-intermediated world, to quote Digiday. So it talks about, you know, starting to think about your key messages as discrete, unambiguous statements that can be lifted and represented accurately without context. That doesn’t mean dumbing things down. And this bit I did like: It means being deliberate about what an agent will extract if it only gets 30 seconds with your content. Now, there’s a good pointer that the way of thinking about how you present yourself online now isn’t about beautifully designed websites and the nuanced meaning of words and phrases that are emotive about your products or service. It’s about data. And you need to appeal to — and this is a human emotive statement, which isn’t really applicable — but you’ve got to appeal to the AI agent. What will appeal to an AI agent? It doesn’t care, using the word “appeal.” It’s what will make it index you and include you when someone types, speaks, or whatever it is that produces search results, where the engine or tool you’re using goes out and pulls in all the information. You want to be sure you’re included in that. So it’s a bit of work to do. Shel Holtz: Yeah. It’s not a one-to-one copy and paste from your existing website. In fact, we know that AI likes Q&A, for example. If your website’s not already in a Q&A format and the text can lend itself to that, you’re going to want to repurpose it that way. We know that it likes what’s in the top 30 percent of the content, so you’re going to want to front-load the most important information. And frankly, if you’re not doing this, then your company is not going to show up in those AI summaries, or at the very least, it’s not going to show up represented the way that you want it to. I do have two other issues to point out. One of these is the increased use of agents. You mentioned an agent, but it’s an agent that’s working on behalf of the model. Now I’m talking about the agent that’s working on behalf of me. In which case, that LLMS.txt file is going to become the routing layer to your official content. And this is a big deal for regulated industries, because people have to find the canonical information. They have to find the approved information, not necessarily the one that was created for AI. So if you’re doing this, you do need to make sure that what you are creating for AI is official. It is going to present the information that the lawyers have approved, that is going to pass muster with the regulators. The other thing is that if I can rewrite the text of a web page for the AI version of this that I’m creating, I can put something completely different on that page. And this becomes an ethical issue that we need to watch out for. People might try to game this. I mean, remember the early days of SEO and all of the gaming of SEO that we saw with tags that had nothing to do with what was on the page. They just knew that this was a popular search term, and it would drive traffic there. We can see the same kind of gaming with this LLMS.txt routing to the AI-compliant pages, with information on it that’s there to get you into the search results, there to get you into the AI summary, not necessarily to give you the same information that you would have found on a web page. So this can be problematic, and I think it’s something that the industry’s going to be watching for. Neville Hobson: I agree. So you compile your list of “these are the things we need to pay attention to,” but again, in the back of your mind, you’ve got this reality: The technical landscape is still forming. No one has the full picture yet. That would include what are the requirements of this, that, or the other. So assume it’s going to be like we currently have, although I would argue it’s not going to be like we currently have. It’s going to evolve, but that’s going to take time. So you need to do that precisely. I would say pay attention to experiments like this. And again, this is a media company doing this, so they are publishers of content that might mention your brand. That’s why it’s important to you that you show up in these kinds of search terms as well. So a lot to pay attention to here, Shel, I think, really. Shel Holtz: Yeah, and remember, The Economist isn’t doing this with their articles yet because that’s still behind the paywall. This is all that stuff in front of the paywall. I mean, eventually it’ll get there to some degree, although I don’t know how you do this behind the paywall when it’s just showing up on, you know, Google Search or… Neville Hobson: No, again, the technical stuff is not worked out yet. They’ll find ways here. The other thing to mention — I’m glad you mentioned The Economist. I meant to mention this, but the final point in Digiday’s piece, I thought, was really interesting. It’s a reminder, I suppose, that for all the experiments, The Economist sees AI as infrastructure rather than authorship: something to speed up research, workflows, and product delivery, not a shortcut to churning out more copy. So AI is not going to be writing their content, they say. It will do all this stuff at the back end, if you will, that would enable its journalists, its human journalists, to do the stuff that they do well. That’s admirable. And I think The Economist has a track record of that kind of behavior in its history. So it’s great. I think it’ll be interesting to see what other major properties do, including the big ones in the U.S., the big ones here, and elsewhere in the world. And I bet you they are working on stuff like this, too. They have to be. Shel Holtz: No doubt. And that will be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release. The post FIR #516: Your New Shadow Website appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Employees at the Pentagon have spun up over 100,000 AI agents. In the private sector, we’re seeing reports of 10,000 or more agents being deployed by employees at a variety of companies. The problem is that most organizations lack governance to address agents, and the problems this explosion of agents operating on employees’ behalf can cause are innumerable. In the long-form FIR episode for May 2026, Neville and Shel delve into the rise of agents, the harms they could cause, what companies should do to ensure these agents deliver benefits rather than problems, and how communicators can take a leading role in addressing the issue. Also in this episode: AI copyright lawsuits are coming for communicators Google’s search overhaul could signal a post-citation era Placing your thought newsmakers, thought leaders, and subject matter experts on podcasts is becoming a standard media relations practice “I worked all weekend” is no longer an argument for the fees you charge Short-form video clippers are creating go-to content from long-form videos — including yours Dan York outlines the big enhancements in WordPress 7.0 Links from this episode Slopaganda, the New Rules of Narrative Warfare AI Copyright Lawsuits Pose Growing Risk for Communicators Practical Considerations for Managing IP Risk in AI-Generated Content Best Practices for Mitigating Copyright Risks in AI-Generated Content AI in Litigation Series: An Update on AI Copyright Cases in 2026 Powered by A.I., Google Changes Its Search Box for the First Time in 25 Years Google Search as You Know It Is Over Why Podcast Placements Are the New Press Coverage Including Podcasts in Your PR Strategy Podcast Guesting vs. Traditional PR: What Works in 2026 U.S. Newsroom Employment Has Fallen 26% Since 2008 U.S. Podcast Consumption Reaches Record High: The Infinite Dial 2025 You Can’t Beat AI. Steve Rubel on AI, Media Analytics, and the Future of PR AI and the End of Billable Hours The Clipping Economy: How Short-Form Video “Clippers” Are Overrunning the Internet How Short-Form Clips Took Over the Internet The Clipping Economy The Case for and Against Clipping Inside the “Clipping Farms” Driving Fintech’s Marketing Boom Companies Have a New AI Problem: Too Many Agents Businesses Will Have Over 150,000 AI Agents by 2028, Says Gartner AI Agents Introduce a New Class of IT Management Challenges Why Most Enterprise AI Agents Will Fail — And What Leaders Are Missing How Smart Governance Can Contain Agentic Sprawl Six Capabilities Enterprises Need to Scale Agentic AI in 2026 Pentagon Workers Vibe-Code 100,000 AI “Agents” to Use on Unclassified Networks Links from Dan Yorik’s Tech Report Turn Your Blog Posts Into Podcast Episodes Google Search as you know it is over Google Changes Its Search Box for the First Time in 25 Years WordPress 7.0 Field Guide AVFTCN 040 – Returning From A Hiatus, and Plans for 2026 The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, June 22. 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 everyone and welcome to the For Immediate Release podcast long-form episode 515 for May 2026. I’m Neville Hobson. Shel Holtz: And I’m Shel Holtz, and we have six really interesting reports to share with you today. And not all of them are about AI. I’m not saying most of them aren’t, but a couple are on other topics of interest to communicators. Also have a really excellent report from Dan York looking at the latest upgrade to WordPress, a massive upgrade, one of the most significant upgrades WordPress has seen in some time, and Dan’s report is fascinating as he talks about this. But we are going to start by filling you in on a new podcast on the FIR Podcast Network. We haven’t had a new show on the network in a while. You know, we started this as just FIR and we needed a place to house multiple FIR shows. Those who have been listening a long time may remember FIR book reviews and FIR speakers and speeches. And we had a number of these. And then we had some people say, hey, can my podcast live on your network? And we said, as long as it has something to do with communications, sure. So all of them have pretty much faded except a couple that Chip Griffin continues to crank out, but now we have a new one. And the reason we have a new one is because I’m doing it as a new podcast by me and my longtime friend and colleague, Steve Crescenzo. And it is called On the Same Page. It is an internal communications focused podcast. We’re recording it twice a month, about 20, 25 minutes per episode. And each episode focuses on an element of the strategic internal communications framework that I developed. It was several years ago. It was actually before I took a job in the private sector again. I’ll have been at the company I work for now nine years in October. So yeah, I developed this a long time ago. Then I wrote 28 blog posts about it. Somebody said, turn it into a book. So I did. And I have found a publisher for that book. So the podcast and the book are companion pieces and the first episode of On the Same Page is out now. You can find it on the FIR Podcast Network or wherever you get your podcasts. For me, that’s Pocket Casts. For you, it may be Apple Podcasts or any of the countless places that you can get podcasts these days, including Spotify. So we’re there. We’re on Spotify, as is this podcast For Immediate Release. And speaking of For Immediate Release, Neville, we’ve done a few episodes since the last long-form monthly episode. Neville Hobson: Yeah, we have published quite a few, four in fact, over the past month. All of them have listener comments and that’s unusual, pleasantly so, every single episode with comments. So let’s run them down. So in the long-form, episode 511 for April, on the 27th of April, our lead story was the tale of law firm Sullivan & Cromwell and how in spite of AI policies, training programs and guardrails, a public document went out filled with AI-generated errors. No human in the loop, seems, as we explored what went wrong and what it means for organizations trying to operationalize AI responsibly. We also talked about new evidence that AI is not leveling the workplace, why AI is raising the bar for PR, the rise of slopaganda, and much more. Comments, Shel, on that one? Shel Holtz: Yeah, a couple, and a couple of responses to the comments. We’ll start with Wayne Asplund who said, for what it’s worth, I have a way I tend to think about this. Simpler work, smarter decisions, better customer outcomes. You should be focused on all three when working with AI. If not, you’re reducing quality and raising risk. The obvious example is what you talk about. If your only care is speeding up work and you’re not focused on the customer outcome, which describes many people, magnify the risk and reduce quality. You reduce the smart side of things too, because you’re not engaging with the content. The model works for all sorts of AI activities. And Neville, you had a response to that. You said, simpler work, smarter decisions, better outcomes is a good test of whether AI is actually adding value or just accelerating activity. The law firm example feels like a case where the first of those dominated: speed and efficiency, but the other two didn’t hold. And that’s where things break down. I particularly like your point about engagement. If people aren’t really engaging with the content, then the smarter decisions part never really happens. It just looks like it does. The balance you described feels like something organizations need to make much more explicit, not just assume. And then we had Philip Weiss who loved the word slopaganda. My thoughts on this are from an earlier post, and he shared the post that he wrote called Slopaganda, the New Rules of Narrative Warfare, and the link to that will be in the show notes. And Wayne Asplund replied to Phillips saying, “some of the creative terms coming out at the moment. One newspaper I read stoked the fear of job losses by talking about the job- the job-pocalypse. And another article I saw used the term e-idiots.” Definitely going to pinch that one. Neville Hobson: Ha Excellent. Great to have. Shel Holtz: And by the way, the idiot’s comment reminds me of a T-shirt that I saw the other day that said any fool can use a computer, many do. Neville Hobson: Yeah, that’s good. Yeah, it’s good when we see that kind of engagement, comment discussion taking place in the all on LinkedIn, of course, right? Shel Holtz: yeah, yeah, although I think I got one or two of these actually off of Facebook this month. I can’t remember which ones, but. Neville Hobson: cool. Excellent. OK. So our next show, we asked the question, when does AI stop supporting decisions and start shaping them? In episode 512, published on the 4th of May, we explored a provocative idea that AI is becoming the new executive influencer. Some research suggests leaders are already relying on AI for the majority of the decisions. But what does that really mean in practice? We have comments, right? Shel Holtz: Yeah, Vincent Brunel left a comment saying, accountability question is the one that keeps me up at night when AI shapes the outcome, who actually owns the decision? The algorithm suggested it can’t become the new, I was just following orders. And Dean Landaish, I’ve known Dean, God, I can’t tell you how long through IABC. Having done lots of genealogy work with AI, its use for policy and decision guidance frightens me. Even with safeguards in place, AI systems will eventually tell you what you want to hear rather than facts or even even-handed evaluation. Like the social media algorithms, it eventually feeds you what it thinks you want based on patterns. Aside from writing progressively more restrictive prompts to stop this, I’ve had to go so far as erasing and dumping my user history. I wonder how many neophyte business users will build in proper safeguards to prevent the bias creep that AI builds over time. Neville Hobson: And next, a Harvard Business Review article about redesigning marketing organizations for the agentic age provided context in FIR 513 on the 11th of May as we explored what happens when AI moves beyond generating content to orchestrating workflows and organizational systems themselves. We discussed examples of using Claude CoWork and AI agents in communication workflows. Work that once took hours now happens in minutes. Comments, right? Shel Holtz: David Bradfield from up in Toronto. Great episode, Shel and Neville. The shift to the agentic age is less of a tech hurdle and more of an accountability crisis. If a communicator can’t hold an autonomous agent accountable to the brand’s ethical and strategic guardrails, the operating model isn’t just slow, it’s dangerous. I’ve just launched Avalere Advisory, which is very much aligned to the opportunities you cover. The narrative code only works if you have the right cultural upskilling and governance to match. Moving managers from task supervisors to agent auditors is key. I love the focus on the narrative code. It’s something we were building into my last corporate role for our CEO and other executives. It’s the backbone of the unified model communication teams need to succeed. And another comment from Vincent Bruneau who wrote a year ago, this was demos. Now it’s workflow design and organizational architecture. The speed of that shift is what makes the experimentation point so critical. The gap between those who are testing and those who are watching is widening fast. Neville Hobson: And finally, was Twitter a unique moment in media history rather than a repeatable model? That’s a question we asked in episode 514 on the 18th of May when we explored the growing arguments that text-based social networks are entering irreversible decline, not because text itself is disappearing, but because giant algorithmic public feeds may no longer fit how people want to communicate online. And comments, One comment. Shel Holtz: One comment from Mark Hillary, who says, of smaller rooms is a good analogy. I have my friends and family on various private WhatsApp groups. This now serves the same function that social media used to perform. As social media becomes more more aligned with entertainment rather than connectivity to a network, everything changes for people who want to communicate to a wide group of people. Neville Hobson: Brilliant. So now you’re up to date on FIR episodes. Shel Holtz: Yep, that’s right, and 515 will get underway in earnest here in just a minute, but first I do want to let you know that Circle of Fellows is coming up, the May episode this coming week. It’s the second of our special episodes with Brad Whitworth moderating a panel to discuss the remaining chapters of the book, The 7 Cs of The New Communication Compass. The book’s author and editor, Dianne Chase, is going to join Brad along with the remaining fellows who wrote chapters who weren’t part of the last episode. That includes Zora Artis, who wrote the Cohesion chapter, Cindy Schmieg, who authored the Collaboration chapter, and me. And I actually was the moderator last month. This month, Brad is doing it so I can be there to talk about the chapter I wrote on community. The panel is going to be live streamed at 5 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time this coming Thursday, May 28th. Participants of the live stream will be able to ask questions, share comments, observations and experiences and be part of the discussion. But if you can’t join us live, there is, of course, the audio podcast and the YouTube replay coming up after the episode has been recorded. So as I said, we’re going to jump into our first report dealing with copyright right after this. I have two reports today that have nothing to do with AI at all. I hope that’ll be refreshing, but let’s start with AI. According to the law firm Davis and Gilbert, 99% of public relations firms are now using AI. That’s a pretty dominant number and it could be a rounding error that would take you up to a hundred percent, I suppose, or maybe there was one company that said, uh-uh, not us. But the top use cases should come as no surprise. They’re using it to write content, take notes and summarize meetings, spark ideas and monitor media. In other words, AI is touching just about everything communicators produce. And while we’re busy adopting these tools, copyright laws have been piling up. Now the specifics I’m about to cover are based on US copyright law, but copyright is a thing in most of the developed world. So even though these cases may not apply in the UK or Europe, principles, at least some of them probably do. So let’s look at an update from the law firm Norton Rose Fulbright published in March that walks through six of the most important AI copyright cases working their way through the courts right now. First, there’s Thaler versus Perlmutter. The Supreme Court denied cert on March 2nd, which means the rule is now settled, at least for now. Purely AI-generated work cannot be copyrighted in the U.S. Period. If a human didn’t, and here’s some core language to keep in your mind, if a human didn’t make a meaningful creative contribution, you cannot and do not own it. In Bartz v. Anthropic, the court ruled last June that training on copyrighted books was fair use, but storing pirated copies was not. Anthropic settled for $1.5 billion, the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history. The fairness hearing happened just this past May 14th, like a week and a half ago. The judge didn’t rule from the bench, she took it under submission, but observers expect final approval any time now, and authors are looking at roughly $3,000 per work. And by the way, I have applied for that relief for several of the books I’ve written. And if I get it, Neville, you’ll get a piece of that three thousand for the How to Do Everything with Podcasting book. Neville Hobson: ha ha! Twenty years after we wrote it. Yeah, okay. Wonderful. Wonderful. Shel Holtz: That’s right. But yeah, it’ll still earn you 1500 bucks if this all goes through. Yeah, in Kadrey v. Meta, we saw the same fair use conclusion on training, but a different judge in the same district disagreed with the Bartz judge on market harm. He basically told the plaintiffs they brought the wrong argument and signaled that a future plaintiff who actually builds on Neville Hobson: Excellent. Look forward to it. Shel Holtz: An evidentiary case on market harm, showing that AI-trained models flood the market and depress demand for the original works, that could win. Then there’s Disney and Universal versus Midjourney, where the studios are alleging willful infringement of their characters, Elsa, Shrek, Darth Vader, the minions, and ask for statutory damages of up to $150,000 per copyrighted work, plus an injunction and disgorgement of Midjourney’s profits. Now, here’s where the story has often gotten more interesting. Since Norton Rose published their article pointed to the Disney OpenAI deal, the one where Disney was investing a billion dollars and licensing characters for OpenAI’s Sora video app as a sign of two things. First, that formal licensing was becoming the path forward. And second, that every signed deal strengthens the case against AI companies that didn’t license because it proves a licensing market exists, which is exactly the kind of market harm courts look for in fair use cases. Well, on March 24th, OpenAI announced it was shutting down Sora. The consumer app went dark on April 26th. The API goes dark in September. And Disney’s billion-dollar investment, the so-called bridge between Hollywood and AI never closed. According to Deadline, a Disney insider said simply, the deal is not moving forward. So one of the most cited pieces of evidence that an AI licensing market was emerging, it just evaporated. That makes the legal terrain more uncertain for communicators, not less. You might still be tempted to say that’s an interesting legal story, but it’s a problem for the AI companies and law firms. Not for me, not so fast. A PRSA panel reported in a recent piece on the PRSA site titled, copyright lawsuits pose a growing risk for communicators, quoted Samantha Rothaus, a partner at Davis+Gilbert, who made the point that for communicators, accuracy in AI-generated content isn’t just about looking smart. Inaccuracy, she said, can be misleading and deceptive, and that creates regulatory and legal risk. Another panelist, Michael Lasky, said he sees significant gaps in AI policies and governance within the PR field, and those gaps create significant risk. And Debevoise & Debevoise & Plimpton article from early March written by attorneys who advise marketing and communication clients lays out exactly where that risk lives for us, for communicators, not for the AI labs. And it lives in three places. One, ownership. If your team uses AI to generate a campaign asset, a logo concept, a hero image, an ad headline, and there’s no meaningful documented human contribution, you can’t copyright it. You don’t own it, and a competitor could pick it up tomorrow and use it. And there’s nothing you could do about it. Two, vicarious liability. Debevoise, and I know I’m not pronouncing that name right. It’s the name of a law firm. They flagged this and it’s worth understanding. If you’re using a third-party AI tool, and you are, and that vendor’s model was trained on infringing material, courts have already held in non AI cases, that the company using the tool can be liable too. The rule is roughly this. If you benefit financially from someone else’s infringement and you had the contractual ability to control how they were operating, you can be on the hook, even though you didn’t do the infringing yourself. So the AI provider’s training practices and your indemnification language are now your problem too. Have you read your AI vendor agreement? Do you know what’s indemnified? What’s excluded? And third is output infringement. If an AI tool produces something substantially similar to a copyrighted work, even unintentionally, even because of a sloppy prompt, and you publish it, you can be sued. One analyst made the point that images are especially exposed. Reverse image search trolls are already a cottage industry, and AI is just going to feed them. So what should communicators be doing? Three things, none of them particularly unusual. First and probably most important is to build an IP clearance step into your AI workflow, the same way you’d clear a stock photo image or a freelancer’s contribution. Document the human contribution to anything you actually need to own and read your vendor contracts with your legal team, specifically for training data sources and indemnification carve-outs. The legal landscape is going to keep shifting fast, as the Sora story demonstrates. Communicators who get ahead of it now are the ones who will be in a position to keep using these tools aggressively. Everyone else is going to be playing defense, and defense is a really bad place to communicate from. Neville Hobson: quite a picture. So I think that actually makes it adds a significant dimension to what we’ve already been talking about, not just you and I, but many, many people we have on this podcast. On the example I mentioned in an episode recently, we talked about the law firm that submitted, it was actually a document to a court in a bankruptcy case. It was a corporate bankruptcy, with big numbers involved, riddled with errors because no one had checked it. So that’s been the focus: human in the loop has got to check it. It’s deeper than that, There’s your kind of, in a sense, your obvious level of foundation of the things you need to do to ensure that you’ve done everything you possibly can to ensure that what you produce using an AI assistant to help you. It doesn’t contain errors that can trip you up because you didn’t check it. Here we got something that makes that even worse sounding, frankly. What troubles me most is the statistic in the PRSA’s piece, quoting the law firms report they did that 99% of PR firms are using AI. And we already know from other reporting that, you know, many of those, I’m not going to say most because I don’t know, don’t have the governance in place to protect them. Do they have a human in the loop? I’m getting very cynical about hearing that phrase because I hear it like it’s a nice thing to say and there’s absolutely no substance behind it whatsoever because we’re seeing evidence and prominent examples. So there are others that aren’t so prominent, but they’re happening where they don’t have a human in So we’ve talked about this before. You had an idea a few episodes back that you need to have verification specialists. Maybe it had got to come to that because not everyone has the ability to verify. And even if you do, what’s the legal implication of that person? Is that the responsible person on behalf of your firm? What if they’re the intern doing that? It’s got to have someone with authority to do that kind of thing. So 99% using AI, the top reason. writing content, 79 percent. That really does make this sound very serious indeed, that you could run into deep trouble. Now, I know you said this is the examples you gave under US copyright law and copyright law is jurisdictional and it’s based on geographies. It hasn’t changed any in hundreds of years in that regard. So if you’re a global firm operating in 20 countries, you need to understand the copyright law in each of those 20 countries. So the risks are high, I would say. And you painted some dark picture there of here are the potential consequences if you don’t do this. But this needs to be part of your thinking. You mentioned as well, reverse copyright trolling to find stuff that could land you with a request of payment for the copyright infringement, stuff like that. Shel Holtz: Yeah, the digital version of ambulance chasers. Neville Hobson: AI-generated images. Right. But that’s part of the landscape, I guess. So it’s something to take seriously. I did note the concluding part from the PRSA story where they’re talking about this same law firm did a survey last autumn. Thirty-seven percent of PR companies they surveyed were developing their own closed proprietary AI systems specific to their clients. Will that protect them? I think it gives a false sense of security because I doubt it would. So you can’t think, I don’t need to use, you know, take your pick, Claude, Gemini, chat GPT or whatever. Even I create a bespoke version of the LLM, I’ll build something unique. If you haven’t got safeguards in for this, it won’t matter. You’re still going to run into trouble. So this is huge, I think. I can see lawyers everywhere rubbing their hands with glee because this needs legal input to this in each of those different jurisdictions of the copyright law. Shel Holtz: Yeah, I’ll give you two quick examples just from my own experience in recent days. And by the way, Chris Penn, this goes back a couple of months, but he did publish a post on LinkedIn that gave you a prompt to use in order to check your output for copyright violations. And he said, it may not catch absolutely everything, but if you’re sued, you could pull up the fact that you did that as a good faith effort to ensure that you weren’t violating copyright. It could stand in your favor in a lawsuit, but presumably most of the instances it would actually catch. But these two instances that I’ve experienced recently, was a search I was doing. I use AI for tech support all the time. I find it better than tech support. And I was trying to resolve something. I won’t get into what it was, but it said, if And the language it used was very specific, right? It said, if you’re losing sleep over this, stop. Google has said that they understand that this is a bug. They’re aware of it. All of us are experiencing the same thing. They’re working on it. It should be fixed in a day or two. So I was looking for more information on this. So I went to Reddit and I did a search and there I found exactly that same language in a post that somebody had left in the discussion for this particular software product. So it’s not that Google Gemini had taken that information and put it in its own words. It had actually taken those words from whoever wrote that post and shared it with me as a response to a prompt on Google Gemini. So yeah, if that were copyrighted, that would be copyright infringement right there. And if I quoted it, that would be problematic. The other I shared on LinkedIn, I thought this was a really interesting story about somebody who uploaded a photo, an image and said, is an AI-generated image that I created. I prompted the model to use the style of Monet. And there were thousands and thousands, according to the article, there were like 1.6 million people who said, this is AI garbage, it’s slop, it’s horrible. Here’s what’s wrong with the art, the lighting, the brushstrokes. And then it was revealed it was actually a real Monet. It was not an AI-generated. He just said it was. And I shared that on LinkedIn, got some interesting comments. But one of the comments I got said, all AI-generated art is theft, presumably because all AI-generated art was trained on real art, just like all AI-generated text responses is based on text that it pulled off of the net. But with people having that attitude and the person who shared that comment isn’t the only one I’ve heard say that. You know that there are people out there who are looking for this. As I said a minute ago, the ambulance chasers of the digital era are the ones who are out there looking for something actionable and then going out and finding somebody to represent in a lawsuit based on that. So copyright and AI, especially in this period we’re going through right now with AI backlash in general, I think you’re going to see this activity ramp up. And I don’t see any reason why corporate communications using AI can’t be caught up in some of these legal actions. Neville Hobson: There is plenty to think about in that case. So moving on to our next topic, if you’ve been following how AI is reshaping search, and I’m sure many of you have, we’ve talked about this on FIR before, including our discussion a few months ago about GEO, Generative Engine Optimization. Then what Google announced at the developer conference recently in May is the next chapter. And it’s a significant one. Two pieces caught my attention amongst the many reporting about this. Sarah Perez’s writing in TechCrunch and a report in the New York Times by Tripp Mickle, Kate Conger, and Brian X. Chen. Both cover the same announcement, but from different angles. And together, they paint a picture that communicators really need to sit with. Here’s what Google announced. The search box, that iconic long slender bar that barely changed since 2001 is being overhauled for the first time in 25 years. It is getting bigger, more conversational, and more interactive. But that’s almost the least interesting part. What’s really changing is what happens after you type. Instead, or you even speak, actually, now, instead of a list of links as part of an AI overview, Google will increasingly serve you AI-generated interactive experiences, custom visuals, dynamically built mini-apps, and what they’re calling information agents that work in the background around the clock, tracking the web on your behalf and alerting you when something relevant changes. TechCrunch makes the point starkly. Searching the web will increasingly be done by AI agents rather than humans. People will focus on acting on the information those agents surface rather than clicking links themselves. The New York Times goes further with a quote from Richard Kramer, a financial analyst with Arete Research. He said, and I’m paraphrasing here, that Google is reducing everyone to raw data providers. The open web, said, is on the way out. Now think about what that means for communicators. We spend years adapting our content strategies, first for SEO, then for GEO, trying to get our content picked up and cited in AI-generated answers. But what’s the strategy when the answer isn’t a list of links, isn’t even a text summary with citations, but a dynamically generated interactive experience that never surfaces a source at all? That’s the question I want to dig into. We’ve moved from SEO to GEO, and now we may be moving into territory where there’s no citation game left to play. I’ve got some thoughts about that. But first, though, what do you think, this means for communicators? And what should they actually be doing differently right now? Shel Holtz: Well, I think communicators need to adapt. We always have. So has the marketing world and the advertising world. When Google first came out, I mean, you know, first of all, I have to say, I think this idea that it’s the end of the open web is utter nonsense. If anybody can go build a website, then the web is open. The question is, can they be discovered? Well, depends on how well they play the game. It could be that they just want to notify their customers that this is where you come to do X, Y, and Z with this company that you have aligned with. So, you know, that could be easy. But, you know, if you want to be discovered more broadly, you’ll have to figure out how that gets done in this new world. There’s going to be a way. I do think some of the things that Google has introduced here are interesting. The agents… I don’t know, man. They just seem to me to be the AI version of Google Alerts. How many of the emails that I get every day are based on the alerts that I have set up for things related to the company I work for and the topics we discuss and the markets that we serve and things like that. I have all of these Google Alerts set up. I’ll be happy to make them agents now on Google, that’s just fine. I don’t see that that’s going to change my relationship with it all that much. It’s going to surface pretty much the same information. I do like the multimodal capabilities that they’ve introduced. You can now include multiple images and things like that in a search. But they’re not getting rid of those 10 links down at the bottom. You just have to scroll all the way past the AI overview, which is getting more sophisticated and occupying more of the page, but those 10 links are still going to be there. In fact, I was listening to the episode of Hardfork that dropped yesterday, and they interviewed Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google. And he said, people are always going to want to be able to click a link, especially based on the kind of search they’re running. He says, that’s what Google does. We’re never going to abandon the links, but they certainly have pushed them farther down the page. And we know that the AI overviews have led to a significant decrease in the number of clicks that people are enacting on a search results page. So that kind of traffic has dried up to a large degree. So, you know, even though you can still get to those links, I don’t think that solves the problem for people who want to be discovered on the web. We’re going to have to figure this out. I would continue to look at the AEO slash GEO approach to visibility and also keep your eye on what the search experts tell us as they gain experience with this revised version of Google. Neville Hobson: Hmm. I’m not sure that the links and AI overviews are going to stay as they currently are. I’m certain they’re not. One of the, in fact, three of the articles I read that go into quite significant technical detail about this are based on people’s interpretation, a lot of what was announced at the Google Developer Conference. So there’s no clean answer yet where this is going. We don’t know yet. But there are a number of directions worth looking at from a communicator’s point of view, I believe. So I’d start with if it means that the citation game, as I might describe it, was fundamentally about being findable. So you are signed, your content is cited, it shows up in AI overviews. So getting your content into the results that humans would click on. But that’s not what’s going to happen here. If agents are doing the searching and humans are acting on what the agents find, the question shifts from how do we get found to how do we become part of the information environment that AI systems draw from? That’s a subtler form of presence. It’s less about individual pieces of content, they’re more about sustained authoritative voice over time. This won’t happen quickly. So if you’ve not done prep, for overviews, you’re behind the curve on this because when this lands and becomes clear how it’s going to work, I think it’ll attract huge interest, particularly thinking about, we have a, one of the topics we’re going to talk about is on this AI agents topic, that you’ve got AI agents out there while you’re fast asleep or traveling or doing something else when you come back to your computer the next day or the next hour or whatever it might be. It presents you with the answers to your question. And they are unlikely to include links. They will be, in the sense, for many people, the complete answer to your question. You won’t need to click anywhere. That will appeal to a lot of people. So this is doing all the donkey work, as we might say. I think it suggests that owned channels will matter a great deal, not less. So a search as a distribution channel is being restructured. Direct relationships with audiences like lists, communities, podcasts, trusted platform, et cetera, become more valuable precisely because they don’t depend on being surfaced by an algorithm or an agent. The communicators who’ve invested in direct audience relationships are going to be better positioned than those who relied on search-driven traffic. And I think you made the point that AI overviews started something which was lessening click-throughs. And that is going to get even worse with this from a website owner’s point of view. There’s no click. So that whole model will have to change. So I think that said, there’s some other issues here too of interested communicators. The human moment is still the moment that matters. Even if an agent does the searching, a human makes a decision. So the communication challenge shifts to the point of decision rather than the point of discovery. That’s a more interesting place to operate, closer to the outcome, closer to the relationship. One of the downsides to thinking about this is you are still, let’s say, the human in the verification loop. You’ve got to check all this stuff. Do you just believe what the agent’s surface is? We’re not at the stage yet where it’s a bit like, self-driving cars, know, you’re 99% sure it’s not going to crash and kill you. Well, you actually need 100%. You don’t need 99%. And this could be in that kind of area. Shel Holtz: I’m not even 100% driving my own cars 100% safe. Neville Hobson: Well, you got it. You’ve got to conduct that. So the uncomfortable conclusion that I take from what I looked into was that some of what communicators have been doing for years, content volume, keyword optimization, SEO-driven publishing may genuinely be losing its value. So the honest conversation with clients and employees is we need to redirect effort from producing content for search algorithms to building genuine authority and direct audience relationships. That takes time and you will not see the benefit of that for a while. In the meantime, you’ve got utter disruption to the existing model heading our way. Shel Holtz: Yeah, we definitely need to do that. But I do need to reiterate that as they were making the announcements about the brand new updates to Google search at I.O., they did double down on including reference links. Here’s what I got. Even though Google is transforming search from a simple box of links into an agent driven conversational interface powered by Gemini 3.5 Flash, they are integrating reference links deeper into the experience. There’s going to be a split over how that’s done. If you’re getting AI overviews doing a regular search, they’ll still appear at the top of the standard results page and you’ll still get the blue links visible right below it. If you go into AI mode, click the AI mode button. It completely replaces the traditional results page. Within AI mode, websites are either explicitly cited as references within the AI response or they receive no visibility at all as there are no traditional link positions under. Neville Hobson: Right. So that comes into the area of there’s no clean answer yet. So you’ve got the kind of vested interest vendor saying, well, the link’s going to be down here. I’ve not seen that prominently mentioned in any of the tech reports that I did read. Indeed, I’ve seen one that said this is not prominent at all. Where does that fit then? Or is it going to be parallel? If AI agents are going to be out there on your behalf doing all the search work, you don’t have to do anything. How does that fit? Is it going to be like, well, if I don’t want to use AI agents, I can still use the old search. Is that how it’s going to be? No one knows yet. So this will emerge, I’m pretty sure. And it may well be right that they’re scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll. There are all the links I’m used to seeing. I don’t think that’s actually how it’s going to be, matter what they said in the I.O. Developer Conference. We don’t know. Shel Holtz: or contextual. Neville Hobson: So you and I are actually doing what everyone else is doing, speculating what it all might be. But there’s some clear direction, such as what I mentioned just now, for communicators in particular to pay attention to here, that you could see wind of change is blowing here. And whether there’s still going to be links at the bottom of the page or there’s an AI overview somewhere else on the page, you need to pay attention to this, what’s changing. The AI agents are going to really change things here. Shel Holtz: Well, here’s the thing, even if there are links contextually in the narrative of the AI overview or there are still blue links below, people aren’t clicking them anyway because they’re getting that AI overview answer. And we talked about this when they first released the Amazon Echo because they talked about the issue of one. Yeah, we talked about the idea that this is one true answer. It’s not 10 links. And if you don’t like those, you can scroll to the next 10. Neville Hobson: There you go. Four years and years ago, yeah, yeah. Shel Holtz: It’s one true answer and you don’t know where they drew it from. Neville Hobson: Yeah. But I think it’s shifting, though, the behavior, how it works, the idea that you enter a search term, either speak it or whatever it might be, and on the fly, will create interactive visuals. It will do all sorts of things that search can’t do until now. And so you won’t get an AI overview that’s just text. It might have links to it. Whenever links to visual, it’ll have the content there and then, as I understand it from what I’ve read, but hey, it’s not clear yet. So I’m sure we’ll see voices of people that you pay attention, that I pay attention to with some sensible analysis. There’s not enough information to go on yet. The trick I’ve been thinking most about is how do I separate, I won’t call it slot because it’s not, it’s just someone’s opinion that’s not informed from the stuff that is informed. So I’ve got a handful of the latter, and probably scores of the former. I’m trying to ignore all that stuff. To me, this is like the first alarm bell. Alarm is the right word, the first alert bell that you are about to see as a communicator, a fundamental shift in how search works. And it’s going to be, I think it’s going to be pretty. It’s going to be chaotic. So you need to pay attention to this in the right way. And that’s where you need I guess really to find voices that are authority that you can trust to hear how they’re described. Shel Holtz: Well, let’s switch gears and put AI behind us for a few minutes and talk about something entirely different. Ron Culp’s blog, Culpwrit, ran a guest post earlier this month by Anuj Agarwal with a title that’s hard to argue with, Why Podcast Placements Are the New Press Coverage? By the way, I met Ron when he was running comms at Sears when I was doing some internet consulting there. Ron is one of the senior dons of public relations these days, and I do pay attention to what’s on his blog. In his post, Agarwal isn’t talking about having a podcast. He’s talking about pitching your client, your executive, your subject matter expert as a guest on someone else’s podcast. That distinction matters because that’s where actual news is happening. And if you’re not doing this yet, you’re already behind. Now let’s start with the audience math because the case is overwhelming. According to Edison Research’s Infinite Dial 2026, which they released back in March, 80% of Americans 12 years old and older have now listened to or watched the podcast. 58% listened in the past month. That’s about 167 million Americans, an all-time record. 45% listened in the past week. And among 18 to 34 year olds, weekly podcast reach is now equivalent to broadcast television. I want you to let that sink in. I’m going to say that again. Among 18 to 34 year olds, weekly podcast reach is equivalent to broadcast television. For your client trying to reach younger adults and appearance on the right podcast has the same weekly reach as TV. Now compare that with what’s happening on the traditional media side. Pew Research found that newsroom employment in the US dropped 26% between 2008 and 2020, and that bleeding has continued ever since. Newspaper newsrooms alone are down 57% from 2008. There are just fewer journalists and fewer editorial slots, which means there’s been a shift around where people are finding their content. Your clients still want earned media that channels worth pitching have just expanded. So why is a podcast appearance more valuable than a traditional press hit? Four reasons, and they’re all important reasons. First is the time on stage. A press mention is a paragraph. Even a feature article gives you a few quotes wrapped around someone else’s narrative. A podcast guest appearance gives your client 30 to 60 minutes of uninterrupted access to an audience that chose to be there on a podcast that’s likely to be specialized as opposed to generalized. That’s not just longer, more time. It’s a fundamentally different kind of exposure. The audience hears how your client thinks, not just what they say. They hear the tone, the texture, the moments of pushback. And Nielsen research has shown that listeners trust long-form audio hosts more than they trust traditional advertising. And that trust transfers to the guests by association. Number two is durability. A press hit spikes for a day and then disappears. A podcast episode lives forever. It sits in someone’s back catalog. It shows up in search. It gets clipped and shared on LinkedIn six months later. That’s the long tail at work. And Neville, I don’t know if I’ve shared this with you, but I get emails from the host of our archive site. Remember, we switched sites at one point and we archive the old site where many, many, many episodes of FIR live and I’ll get emails saying your site has exceeded the allowed site traffic for the month and won’t be accessible until the first of the month. Who’s going and visiting this site that hasn’t been active in 11 or 12 years and listening to those old episodes of the show? 40% of podcasts Neville Hobson: Hahaha AI agents, I would hazard a guess. Yeah. Shel Holtz: No doubt. I don’t know if they’re listening to the episodes, but they could well be scraping that site. But 40 percent of podcast consumers now name YouTube as their primary podcast platform, which means a single guest appearance can produce both an audio asset and a video asset all from one hour of your client’s time. And that’s content you can repackage and repurpose for multiple channels. Here’s the third reason. And this is the one I really want you to hear, because most communicators miss it. A podcast appearance is increasingly how you earn traditional press coverage. Newsworthy things your client says on a podcast get picked up by the mainstream media. And now they’re not just quoting your client, they’re amplifying an extended quote in context and they’re sending readers back to the original episode. Look at Jamie Dimon. A couple of weeks ago, he gave a podcast-style interview at a Norway Sovereign Wealth Fund conference where he warned that the private credit market is worse than people think. That’s a quote, worse than people think. That single cent has generated coverage across Bloomberg, Reuters, Fortune, the Financial Times, and erased about $500 billion in alternative asset manager value the same day. The Jensen Huang interviews, a Stratechery, BG2, the All-In podcast, those generated Fortune and CNBC stories, and they do every single time. Howard Lutnick told the All-In host that, “‘Boeing executives follow me around like puppies,’ because of how he was structuring trade deals.” Fortune quoted that line word for word in a feature on the Trump administration’s trade strategy. The podcast appearance was the press strategy. That’s the model. You’ve got to, you’re not just earning a podcast placement, you’re earning the cascade of secondary coverage that flows from it. And finally, there’s depth of message. An interview lets a thought leader actually develop an argument. In a newspaper, quote, complex ideas get compressed into one sentence, usually the wrong sentence, often the safest sentence. On a podcast, your client gets to explain the why behind the what. That’s where credibility gets built and where the next sales conversation gets seeded. Now, the catch, most podcasts aren’t worth pitching. Agarwal makes this point bluntly, and he’s not wrong, of the millions of shows indexed across hosting platforms. A lot of them haven’t published in months, maybe years. They have audiences that are minuscule. They’ll book anyone with a pulse. Recommending a weak placement to your client costs them time and signals that you’re vetting is getting lazy. So here’s what to actually look for before your pitch. Publishing pattern, you know, at least two episodes a month consistently over the last six months? The guest history, scroll back through 20 or 30 episodes. Who were the guests that they booked? If your client doesn’t fit that pattern, walk away. Niche depth over raw audience size. I mean, a 600 listener show inside your client’s exact industry will outperform a 50,000 listener general business show on almost every metric that actually matters. The host social application. A host who promotes new episodes on LinkedIn extends your client’s appearance for free. And listen to one recent episode before pitching. If the host lets guests just monologue without pushback, the audience tunes out and your client gets nothing. And here’s what your client needs to bring to the conversation. Not talking points, a point of view. One counterintuitive take, one framework that actually gets used, one honest answer to a hard question. Hosts are really good at spotting the difference between a guest with something to say and a spokesperson reciting messaging. The appearances that earn return invitations, produce shareable clips, and get picked up in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal are built on original thinking. The PR pros who figure this out now, who develop a real podcast pitching practice the same way they developed a media relations practice 20 years ago, are going to look like wizards to their clients. Neville Hobson: That’s quite a landscape you described there, Shel. I think I look at it in a way when I hear all these statistics being rattled off about how many people listening to podcasts, what’s up, my kind of eyes glaze completely because, you know, and then I hear about, you know, the Jamie Dimon of this world and these kind of, you know, CEOs of mega corporations and how they move markets with a phrase that gets picked up in the mainstream media. That doesn’t happen with, you know, as a matter of course for everyone. Amongst all the rubbish podcasts you outlined, where you’ve got minuscule audiences or not, I think about this, if I were advising someone to start a podcast and it was a business that’s a medium sized business, maybe a thousand employees in a not particularly exotic sounding industry, but they’re the market leader and they’ve got some interesting stories to tell. How is that relevant to them, knowing that the CEO of JP Morgan or whatever said something in the FT report, completely and utterly irrelevant and not likely to happen to them. So what would be of interest to a company like that who has, as I say, stories to tell, it’s worth doing something with them for a podcast for all the reasons you mentioned that how they get noticed and so forth. So that’s the trick, finding that relevance to convince them or to pitch them if you like on doing it. I mean, you’ve got some good stuff mentioned in this piece you’ve been discussing that are valid, absolutely would make a good way to pitch it. I did like the section in this piece where it talks about how to build the skill before a client formally asks. And totally. And it got me thinking, it says, identify 15 podcasts relevant to their audience and industry. It got me thinking immediately and this is where AI comes into play. Okay, so we can’t escape. This is about AI as well in this topic. Your example, where the experiments you’ve been doing, where you’ve been looking for podcasts in your industry that take guest speakers or all the criteria you’ve done and you’ve been sending out agents who’ve returned with amazing data. That is exactly how you would approach this. And you get your results fast and probably well, they’re probably definitely more accurate than if you do this manually yourself. So where the guidance talks to you about filter, filter these findings you get from shows that publish consistently and actively except guests, there’s your AI tool to do that for you. So you could apply that to this. And it would probably, again, depending which AI tool using, I would say it will give you things you didn’t know to ask even because you didn’t know, but it would find something. So AI would help you do this without doubt. But that’s not the main trust the story though. The thing you’ve outlined is very good. I agree. I just think you need to make it wholly relevant to your client who is not a Fortune 500 company, who is just a regular business, even with 20 employees, they still got a story to tell. If they’ve got a valid story to tell, there’s a chance that they’ll get noticed. And your goals might well be very different from that mega corporation example that you had, where it might be resistive temptation to listen to the sales guy to say, we want leads generated and I want to get 10 sales out of this. You might, but your goal might be different to that. Still got to be a measurable goal. So talking about our CEO will do a thought leadership piece. No, please don’t go there. You need a measurable goal. It could be leads, it could be something less esoteric than that, quite simple, raise awareness of something that you can measure. Now that then puts it in the area of something that you as a communicator know about measurable objectives. So I think scaling it back to reality is a way to do this, not just look at how many millions of people listen to podcasts, because that to me is a total eye glazing metric for most people. Shel Holtz: Well, I think the point to be made from the number of people listening to podcasts is just that it’s a valid medium now as influential as TV. You know, if we had made this case 15 years ago, it would have been a tough sell. But the fact is that a lot of people have started to recognize the importance of being a guest on a podcast. I mean, this is something the Republicans figured out during the last presidential election cycle. So I think the scale is important, especially as you look at the numbers of diminishing opportunities in the mainstream press. In terms of Jamie Dimon, yeah, I mean, I made the point that he’s going to get on a general business podcast with 500,000 listeners, a million listeners and make news. But I also noted that for some CEOs, for some thought leaders is probably the podcast that has 600 listeners that’s in that niche area. Now, you mentioned the agent I created. It’s actually a skill. I created this in the Hermes agent platform that is configured when I launch it to go out into the podcast space and find the podcasts that meet these criteria that I listed there. But I’m able to enter the information about the person or the story or the thought leadership concept that I’m trying to pitch. So if, for example, I want to get a story out there with this guy that we have who works on all our airport projects. He is a design manager. He is really good. And he has some thought leadership ideas on construction work airside in active airports. Now, do I want to get that into the construction trades? No. What do I care if builders hear that? I want to get that into the airport trades. where the people who are hiring the builders will hear it and hear about his expertise and hear his thoughts and go, yeah, I think I want to talk to them about our next airport project. So yeah, I have the AI agent set up to go do that. It even does a first draft of the pitch based on what it knows about the host and the content of each of the podcasts it returns to me. But yeah, I have to go out there and make that pitch. I’ve got one going on right now based on a sustainability story. So it’s interesting finding the places where we want that story to go because everybody’s looking for more sustainable ways to build, but how does that affect our reputation? So I have to cue this skill in the Hermes platform to find ones that are going to be of high value for me. But I have no doubt that if my CEO gets on a podcast or that design manager gets on a podcast, and says something really interesting, it’s going to find its way into ENR, the engineering news record, which is the primary trade publication or building design and construction or any of the other trade publications out there. And that’s that trickle down. It’s not the scale of what Jamie Dimon can do, but it’s the same concept exactly just at that smaller, more niche scale. Neville Hobson: Yeah, I think that’s the key thing for me, certainly, is you’ve got to scale it relevantly to your client and their audience and market. The only other thing I’d add to that, Shel, is to let our listeners know, listen to episode 513, where you’ll hear Shel talk at length about the experiments he’s been doing with Claude CoWork, particularly, but also this example that you kind of touched on, as it were. It’s worth the listen. Neville Hobson: Well, Dan, that was quite a report. I think an excellent assessment of what’s happening with WordPress. I know you’re a big, long time fan and user of WordPress. And so you did a good job in conveying the significant changes from WordPress 7. I think it’s worth emphasizing, and you did make the point, Dan, that a lot of the cool stuff that you talked about, AI-driven in particular, is only on the hosted WordPress, the WordPress.com service, not self-hosted WordPress. So no doubt that will be coming at some point, I would imagine. So Shel Holtz: Yeah, the FIR site is on WordPress, but it’s the hosted version. And I’ve read about this. I upgraded it to 7 and went looking for these cool features and they weren’t there. that’s Dan’s report clarified that for me. Neville Hobson: No, exactly, exactly. It’ll come, I’m sure. So thanks a lot, Dan. That was a really, really good report. So our next topic, going now back to the AI, the AI themes we’re following. Yeah, we can’t escape AI at all these days. We know that. But here’s the thing. There’s a Substack writer I follow called Ruben Hassid. He writes a newsletter called How to AI. And if you don’t know his work, He’s worth your time. There’ll be a link to that in the show notes. He publishes twice a week. He’s prolific. He’s sharp. And he has a gift for making uncomfortable ideas land without making you feel attacked by them. His latest piece is called You can’t Beat AI. And before you groan at the title, it’s not the piece you might expect. It’s not a doom narrative. It’s actually a remarkably clear-eyed analysis of what’s happening to the value of knowledge work and what to do about it. The core argument is this, AI is getting cheaper at a rate most people haven’t fully absorbed. We’re talking about a 6,000-fold reduction in the cost of AI intelligence over four years, he says. Not twice as cheap, 6,000 times cheaper. And crucially, not just cheaper, smarter too. So your salary is now being compared to a subscription, and the subscription is winning on price. The part in his newsletter that really got my attention was his argument about what this means for how we communicate our value. He makes the point that for decades, time spent was a proxy for quality. If something took six hours, that effort signaled something. It signaled expertise, diligence, craft. But now that production is cheap, now that a decent first draft, a market scan, a slide outline, a campaign proposal, can be generated in 30 seconds or less, time spent is a weak argument. He puts it simply, nobody cares that it took you all weekend. The better argument he says is, I understand the real problem. I knew what to ignore. I found the missing risk. I made the decision easier. I saved the team from doing the wrong thing beautifully. And that lands differently for communicators, I think, because most of us would say, Yes, of course, we’ve always sold judgment and strategic counsel. But here’s the uncomfortable follow-up question. Do our clients and employers actually pay for that? Or do they still at some level pay for the volume of deliverables, the press releases, the reports, the campaigns, and just assume the judgment comes with it? That’s what I want to explore, because if intelligence is becoming a commodity, communicators individually and as a profession, need to get much clearer and much more explicit about articulating what they offer that can’t be replicated for $20 a month. What do you think about all that, Shel? Shel Holtz: Well, I think we’ve been talking about this issue of pricing in the AI era. Yeah, I mean, yeah, even well before AI, the hourly model has been questionable. I’ve shared this anecdote, I think probably five or six times on the show. But for those who haven’t heard it, when I was a consultant, Mark Schumann was visiting us. He worked for the same consulting firm I did at the time. And he was talking about value-add, which I opposed. I said, that should be baked into our hourly rate. And he said, okay, how does the hourly rate factor into the fact that I bring 35 years of experience to this job and I have a brainstorm in the shower that took me 20 seconds. I wouldn’t have had that brainstorm if not for that 30 years of experience, 35 years. But it still produces tremendous value to the client that may make them millions of dollars or save them hundreds of thousands of dollars. How do you value that 30 seconds it took to have that brainstorm? And I haven’t come up with a really good answer to that yet, except pricing based on outcomes. That said, I have to say that when I was an independent consultant, which I did for 21 years, I had some clients who wanted me on a retainer. And the retainer was so that they could call me when they had an issue. They didn’t want me to produce anything. They didn’t want me to write anything. They didn’t want me to create anything. They just wanted my counsel. They wanted an hour on the phone. So for X dollars, they got 10 hours a month and they could call and say, we’re going through this. What do we do? Or what’s your experience with that? I think you can still charge based on time for that. It’s the time you’re spending on the phone with them. So I don’t I don’t think charging. based on time vanishes, you just have to figure out what your formula is, where you can factor in how much time it took, where you can factor in what the overall value of it is. And then finally, what you can factor in as the ROI that the client has gotten from this, that you can come up with a formula to make a reasonable return for your effort. But the old model of saying, you know, he’s billed out at $375 an hour. It’s going to take 25 hours for this project. Here’s your price. And by the way, if there’s scope creep, we’re going to come back to you and tell you how many more hours that adds to the project. That’s not going to wash anymore. Not not under these circumstances. Especially by the way, I have to say, not when they can go to AI and ask the question before they come to you for that hour of phone time. Neville Hobson: I think that’s a key. I mean, that’s the key thing. A client might say when you present the proposal, you just outlined, for instance, that they’ll say, you use AI. You’ve told us consistently how you’ve developed skills in how to use the tools that give you the results that you’re seeking. and you have expertise in that area. So if that’s the case, how come you’re me, you’re quoting me X hours at so much per hour at this price? So what’s your AI doing? better question might be, well, what are you doing in that case? So that’s something that we need to figure out. And I don’t think anyone has yet how to kind of Deflect that into the real questions that need to be answered, the real discussions that need to be going on, which is not that. That’s kind of an emotional based one. But the point you made, absolutely true. Anything you’re thinking of doing, the client’s already also looking at the AI tools they use to find an answer to that. They’ll be second guessing you even. In which case, that cannot sustain itself, that kind of model. It’s not going to suddenly vanish, I’m sure. And to your point too, I agree with you that some elements of service that you might provide that others will buy from you will probably still be time-based, such as the retainer model, for instance. Then again, I think your competition is the smart AI model, frankly. So that comes down to the, you you’re being… Your salary has been compared to a subscription now by the client in particular. So again, more change coming to communicators and not just communicate, but I’m focused on this. What does it mean to communicate? I’ve written about this a few times in my blog. I’ve had many conversations with people about this recently on how to counter the interference of AI. As one person put it to me, you can’t, it’s not interference. you’ve got to learn to live with it. You’ve got to learn to make the most of it, ally yourself with augmenting your ability and not just churning out stuff from a chat bot effectively and do what we’ve been discussing in previous episodes about hallucinations and setting out stuff riddled with errors because you didn’t check it. So your methodology has got to shift. And it doesn’t address the base question, which is how do we migrate as a general rule from time-based charging to value-based charging? I hear that question being asked a lot. I’m asking it too, and I don’t have an answer to that yet. So that requires some exploratory analytical conversation. And it may well turn out that there isn’t a single model that works for everyone, although there must be elements that will be consistent no matter what you do. And it requires significant input from your client or your employer to have that conversation that give you as the communicator, the kind of intelligent input you need from the business owner or your employer. What are they looking to achieve? What do they want exactly? And how can this help them achieve that? So we haven’t started any of that yet, other than asking the question. So we need to pay attention to this sooner. Shel Holtz: yeah, we definitely do. But there’s one other factor to keep in mind here. And this is a phenomenon that I have been experiencing in addition to reading about it. And that is that for all of the productivity gains that we’re seeing from AI, and we are, mean, the time it takes my agent to go out and find those podcasts for me to do that would be hours with the agent. send it off. I go do something else and it delivers the results when it’s done, which is not hours and hours. It’s usually 15 or 20 minutes. But does this mean that I now have an extra day that I can take off because I have got all of my work done? No, I’m as busy as I ever was. I am filling those hours with work for my employer. I believe it is high value work and it’s either figuring out how to do something with the AI or managing those AI agents or creating the agents or skilling up the agents or it’s doing the things that AI can’t do. So yeah, I’m busier than I’ve ever been. And by the way, I know we’re not talking about the job-pocalypse here as we heard it referred to earlier. But increasingly, I know there are some things that AI can replace customer service agents being a great example. I think for most of the jobs out there, there’s elements of your job it can replace. It can’t replace the whole job. And for all of the companies I’ve seen announcing layoffs that are tied to AI, I have not heard one of them say, and these are the full-time agents that have replaced the full-time work that this person did. I think they’re just anticipating what they’re going to be able to do with AI. So I don’t think we’re going to see the job loss that we’ve been talking about because I think they’re going to realize that what we still need 70% of what this person does and he can devote more time and attention to that because the 30% that the AI can do, we’re going to let the AI do. So, the reason I point all this out. is that while companies may for a while think, who needs an agency? I can do all this with AI. They’re going to realize what they’re producing is slop, that they don’t have the time to put in the effort required to generate the right kinds of agents, the right kinds of skills, the right kinds of prompts. They don’t know how to assemble all of this together in a strategy. And they don’t want to take the time to work with AI to do it. my God, this is what agencies are for. I’m going to have an agency do it. So the agencies will take advantage of the AI, but I think there’s still going to be work for agencies to do. There just may be a valley as companies say, the AI can do all this for us before they realize, well, you know what? It really can’t. Neville Hobson: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I guess a short answer to this, there’s no single answer to how you do this. There’s no real way of proving value in an age of cheap intelligence, I suppose, to use that way of describing it. It’s going to get cheaper, according to Hassid, I agree, based on what he said in this, but also what I’m seeing others say. But there’s still a role. I think we need to be clear-eyed about what the future holds in this regard. And you’ve mentioned a good point, I think, about job losses and the way in which that’s currently playing out, where people are taking a big hammer to a tool that doesn’t require that at all to solve, where you’re just laying off people. You’ve got some leaders in some organizations who truly do not deserve to occupy those roles in those companies, the way they treat employees in this regard. But you’ve also got some very sensitive, empathetic people who don’t do it like that. So that’s the landscape we’ve got. In the meantime, I would say communicators need to think about this more. Even if you don’t know the answers, OK, compile all your questions then. Then do some research yourself even to find out what others say. Hey, I will help you do that. And at least get this on your radar before it’s too late. Shel Holtz: Yeah, and it is definitely going to get cheaper for no other reason that the AI companies don’t want to be spending the money they’re spending on their infrastructure, especially the power requirements. So they are investing in finding solutions to this, not because they are all deep, sincere environmentalists, but because it’s costly to them and they’d rather not be spending that money. All right, well, we’re going to shift away from AI again for a moment. Here’s a phrase that was, Neville Hobson: There you have it. I bet you we’re not. Go on then, go on, go on, go on. Shel Holtz: Yeah, bet we are. Well, maybe not entirely. Here’s a phrase that wasn’t in my vocabulary three months ago, the clipping economy. And if you’re a communicator, you need to know what this is because it’s already changing how content about your client or your employer travels and whether you have any control over where it ends up. Here’s what’s happening. A piece from NPR featured a 24-year-old guy in Antwerp, Belgium named Emre Bayraktar. He was working three part-time jobs. He was cleaning cars. He had the night shift at a warehouse. He was making sandwiches at Subway. But in his spare time, he’d take long influencer interviews, edit them into short clips and post them. And one night he got a notification telling him that he’d earned $12 on one of his clips. Two weeks later, he’d earned $2,500. Today, he runs a network of 40,000 freelance clippers. 40,000 individuals like him who take long-form content and turn it into short term clips. He runs that network and that’s the model. Streamers, podcasters, brands, even political campaigns post bounties on marketplaces and anyone with a phone and a video editor can claim the bounty by chopping up the long-form content into vertical clips and posting them to TikTok, Reels, Shorts, X. You get paid per thousand views. NPR cited recent bounties at a dollar per thousand views for Major League Baseball clips, $25 per thousand views for an AI startup. Forbes reported that generating a million views through one of these clipping companies, a company literally called Clipping, founded by a guy named Anthony Fujiwara, cost somewhere between a hundred bucks and a thousand bucks. Fujiwara’s company did $7.7 million in sales in 10 months. MrBeast started his own clipping company called Vyro late last year. Ed Elson, who co-hosts the Prof G Markets podcast with Scott Galloway, calls this the clip economy. And his argument is that the clips are no longer promotion for the show, the clips are the show. The live streamer, Hassan Piker, pulls about 33,000 viewers for a typical live stream. His average clip pulls 700,000 views. The clip is 20 times bigger than the thing it was clipped from. And Adam Rosenberg from Digiday says clips used to be the byproduct. Now they’re the product. And yeah, I’ve got personal evidence. This is true. I think I mentioned just recently someone I work with told me she does not watch Saturday Night Live. She’ll watch 10, 12, 13 clips so that she can see the funny bits. So what does this mean for those of us who work in PR and corporate communications? Let’s answer three questions. First, do you need to watch for Clippers using your client’s content out of context? Yes, always. The streamer Tim “TimTheTatman” Betar, told Digiday that being clipped out of context is now the cost of putting anything long-form online. Clippers will pull the line that fits a narrative they want to push and let it travel. If your CEO does a 45 minute podcast and says something deliberately provocative at minute 31 to make a setup payoff at minute 33, you should assume someone is going to clip the provocative part and lead the payoff on the cutting room floor. So monitor for that. Set up alerts on your client’s name across TikTok, Reels, and Shorts the same way you set up Google Alerts 20 years ago. And have a response plan ready because by the time you find the clip, it may already have a million views. Second, should legal get involved? Sometimes, but think carefully before you reach for the cease and desist. Frank Poh, who runs a creator focused law firm called Poh Law, told Digiday that publicity rights are the live legal issues here, meaning your client’s image, voice and likeness being used to sell something without permission. If a clipper is making money off a clip of your CEO, and especially if the clip is being used to promote a product, you have an argument. You have a case, but if it’s a clipper just monetizing views on a clip that’s substantially accurate, you’re probably stuck with the Streisand effect. Going after a clipper with 200 followers can generate more press than the clip ever would. Pick your battles, save the legal response for clips that are deceptively edited, false or commercially exploitative, and let the rest go. Third, and this is the one I expect people are going to push back on, Should you pay clippers to amplify your clients content? Well, here’s the case for it. The Digiday piece pointed to a clip of John Hamm dancing in a club on the Apple TV show, Your Friends and Neighbors, that went so viral that Hamm got asked about it on The Tonight Show. That’s an enormous earned media outcome from a 30 second clip. Spencer Pratt, the former reality star now running for mayor of Los Angeles, is openly running paid clipping campaigns through the Whop platform, and disclosing it, which is the right way to do it. fintech, crypto, and AI companies are the heaviest users of clipping farms precisely because they operate in legal gray areas. Most clippers don’t disclose payment, which means almost every paid ClipYou commission is potentially a violation of the Federal Trade Commission rules. Here in the U.S., the U.K. Gambling Commission has already taken enforcement action. X has flagged the practice publicly. Instagram CEO Adam Masseri put out a video on April 30th saying the platform will crack down on re-uploaders. And if you go down this road, you disclose every payment every time, no exceptions, and you assume that the FTC is reading your contracts. The clip not going anywhere. The question isn’t whether your client gets clipped, it’s whether you have a strategy for when it happens. Neville Hobson: Well, that’s quite a story, I had not heard about this either. The whole idea of clipping farms or as the NPR piece wove its story quite skillfully in an interesting way about the kid in Antwerp, how he started out and then the other examples in there of these people. There’s not really a flip, but a kind of an alert note. that the ones who are making the real money on this, they say, tend to be the middlemen clippers rather than the original creators. And that, think, is clearly a sign that this is ripe for intervention by regulators and others in companies who see this kind of behavior. So this may well be one of those things that is temporary in the context of that. The idea of clipping, though, isn’t. And so some big names are going to move into this soon, I would guess. But the thoughts occurring to me when listening to what you were saying was, how does this kind of start? How do you find companies to do this? You asked a question not rhetorically on should your employee or client get involved in this? It’s high risk, but potentially significant. return on that risk, think, like the example you mentioned of the John Hamm example. I heard about that. I heard about that without realizing it was because of a clip. So this probably is one of these natural evolutionary steps in the stage of where we are with online communication, online digital communication that is generational largely, isn’t it? If it’s what is it, Gen Z or even Gen Alphas, I suppose. sharing all this stuff to TikTok and other places. I’ve not seen it on Facebook, but again, I wasn’t knowing what to look for. I’d make a point of looking. How do you identify this stuff, particularly if they’re not disclosing anything? Does it look kind of like, that guy posted this really interesting clip, not knowing that he’s a clipper? Definitely, you need to be aware of this from a communicator’s point of view. you’ve looked into this more than I have. So it’s difficult to say more than that at this point. But I think this is a phenomenon. It’s growing. We’re going to see more of this before, in some way or form, it gets regulated. I don’t mean that from an official point of view. But I don’t see this as remaining unfettered for much longer. Shel Holtz: No, not at all. I mean, figure the kid in Antwerp has what, 44,000 clippers working for him. Then there’s the Whop and the one that MrBeast started. So you’ve got to figure there’s tens of thousands of people out there creating these clips. How many can they create in a day? Probably hundreds, if not more. And they’re probably flooding the Internet. We just don’t see them because we’re not looking for things that are associated with the tags. Neville Hobson: Incredible. Shel Holtz: that they’re putting on them. you’ve got to figure that people are seeing clips and assuming that they’re something that was created because somebody was passionate about it or it came from the company or it came from the person whose image you’re seeing when that may not be true at all. Somebody else is making bank off of that without permission and may not even need the permission. But I got to tell you, the next time I get somebody at my company placed on a podcast, assuming there is a video, I will be clipping that podcast and sharing those clips both to raise awareness of what our spokesperson said, but also to drive views back to the podcast so they can see everything that she said. I’ll be doing that. In fact, for on the same page, the new podcast I started with Steve Crescenzo, I am using a service called Opus Clip. That’s what they do is clips. You upload video. And it creates clips with the closed caption type of, here’s what they’re saying in real time. And I’ve been sharing those on TikTok and Instagram and Facebook and not X because I’m not there. But we’ll see if it drives any more awareness of the show, but this is real and it’s big and it’s important. Neville Hobson: Yeah. Yeah, I did like the concluding part of the NPR piece where they where someone said, suddenly I realized clips aren’t the promotional material for the content. Clips are the content. And that, to your point on your colleague you mentioned, who doesn’t watch Saturday Night Live, watches the clips so she could pick out the best bits to her, the best bits that she finds on TikTok without watching the show. I do that with some stuff and I never realized, hey, that’s clipping. I didn’t realize that. So that actually got me thinking a bit about something I was doing not long ago with a podcast. I was contracted to a company to produce podcasts. We did a little bit of that. And I remember thinking at the time that the clips are getting more traffic than the actual podcasts. Okay, I have learned from, I should have. paid more attention to that. So maybe we could try with FIR. I mean, I’m thinking one of the reasons we don’t do that, I’m sure from suddenly speaking, just from my point of view in in producing content is I didn’t have time to do it. I have no time to spend. So I would look for something that made it dead simple to just create five clips and I could look at each say absolutely spot on with the have to say Now I need to edit the front and the back. No, no, Just give me that content. Riverside offers that tool, as you know. And maybe there’s something we can do there. But that might be interesting. Shel Holtz: Yeah, I haven’t been terribly impressed with Riverside’s clips so far. That’s why I’m paying separately for Opus, which I think does a better job. And they do give you some editing tools that makes it really easy to clean them up quickly. I picked on the same page for this for two reasons. One is every other week. So I have plenty of time between episodes to do this. And the other is it’s brand new. So we’re trying to gin up awareness. So we’ll see how it goes. I don’t have any metrics on this yet, but I’m really curious to see how it pays off. Neville Hobson: Yeah, definitely worth paying attention to. The Wall Street Journal ran a piece on the 15th of May in its CIO Journal section that I think deserves more attention from communicators than it’s likely to get because on the surface it looks like an IT story, but underneath it’s something more interesting than that. The headline is, Companies have a new AI problem. Too many agents. The reporter is Belle Lin and she spoke to technology leaders at companies including Lyft, Davita, GitLab and FICO about a phenomenon they’re calling AI agent sprawl. We’ve talked about AI agents quite a bit recently. So this really is relevant to those conversations. Here’s the situation. As agentic AI platforms have become easier to use, we’re talking tools that even non-technical employees can operate without involving IT. People across organizations are spinning up AI agents. at a remarkable rate. Agents that summarize emails, write briefs, analyze data, automate workflows, conduct research. One company told the journal its 3,500 employees are creating dozens of new agents every single day. Another has over 10,000 agents already deployed. And Gartner projects that within two years, so that’s before 2030, the average Fortune 500 enterprise will be running over 150,000 agents. So that’s the average enterprise multiply that by how many Fortune 500 enterprises around the big numbers. The IT problem is obvious as the journal costs cybersecurity duplication conflicting outputs, but only 13% of organizations believe they have adequate governance in place. That’s a striking gap. Now here’s where I think communicators need to lean into this. When you have agents operating across an organization. often invisibly, often without central oversight, summarizing information, drafting communications, automating decisions, who is responsible for the accuracy and consistency of what those agents produce. And when something goes wrong, when an agent produces conflicting results or surfaces inaccurate information that makes its way into a client communication or an internal briefing, who owns that? Who manages the narrative around it? We’ve talked about agentic AI on FI before, as I mentioned, mostly from the angle of what agents can do and why communicators should be paying attention. This story is the flip side of that conversation. It’s what happens when agent adoption outpaces the governance frameworks needed to manage it. And it’s a reminder that governance isn’t just a technology challenge, it’s a communication challenge. Somebody in these organizations need to be thinking about transparency, accountability, and trust. And that sounds a lot like a communicator’s job to me. So we talked about some really serious errors made by organizations by not having the human in the loop, as I mentioned earlier. This, in my view, fits into that conversation, except it’s now become much more urgent if you’ve got this scale emerging, which clearly it is emerging. And what do we do about it? So is it the communicator’s job? I kind of qualify my own question. Sounds like a communicator’s job, but is it? What do you think? Shel Holtz: Well, partly. I mean, there’s definitely a role here for IT and definitely a role for the senior leadership of the organization. But we absolutely have a part to play here. So I think one of the problems is that a lot of organizations establish their governance, their guardrails, their policies in the early days of Gen.A.I. as they saw employees starting to use it, say, hey, we’d better have some rules, especially since we’re going to adopt it. So many companies that had Office 365 contracts suddenly had access to Copilot and wanted to make that available. So they came up with their governor’s policies before anybody was talking about agents. Well, I can’t say nobody was, I’m sure they were at the AI labs and… Neville Hobson: Yeah, just one, don’t forget, the journal says only 13% of organizations believe they have adequate governance in place, which means what? 70%, 80%, something percent do not have it in place at all. Shel Holtz: Yeah, that’s the thing. And I think those are the ones that may think that they do because they spent a lot of time, they worked with legal and HR and they came up with their governance and now we have agents and the governance doesn’t address them. It addresses prompting and it addresses things like don’t put sensitive information into a prompt in a public AI model, doesn’t say a word about agents. So I think one thing we need to look at is revisiting the governance policies that we have. And here’s where a communicator can come into. into play is look at your governance and then propose some enhancements in the great language that only we communicators are able to craft and send those to legal NHR and IT and say, you know, we need to update our governance. Here’s a proposed draft and at least get things kick started. But, you know, not all of the agents are ones where we need to be thinking about them. Although, I think there are some issues where we could get involved, but I work in a construction company. I have project engineers who are doing things like submittals and RFIs, stands for requests for information. And a lot of that, I think there’s potential for agent work. I’m not that interested. If you can be more productive in your job as a project engineer, more power to you. I think where there’s some process. One of the things to worry about is I don’t want every PE spinning up their own agent independently. If somebody comes up with a good agent to do this with, we should be sharing that throughout the organization so that there are consistent results and we don’t have to be worrying about any mistakes or misphrasing or anything that went into the creation of an agent, creating bad results over here on this project, but great results on this one where they knew what they were doing when they spun up their agent. So there should be, I mean, that should be baked into the governance that says we don’t want, you know, 175 agents created by different people all doing the same thing. Where I get worried though is where they’re answering emails, where they’re answering customer service questions. You know, who reviewed the voice and the tone of those responses and who approved the messaging guardrails? When an agent says something wrong publicly, who’s accountable for that? If it’s a marketing message, is marketing responsible or is it IT? Nobody has the answers to this yet. And I don’t think anybody’s asking. We should be the ones who are asking. Neville Hobson: Yeah, it’s, what a chaotic landscape we live and work in. I think, I agree, Shel. I mean, communicators have a clearly significant role. I could conclude as we’re saying, hey, communicators, this is another thing you’ve got to be getting involved in now in this. This is how you prove your value. So add this to the 15 new things that you now have to get to deal with. Here’s number 60. Shel Holtz: Yeah, I was just blown away when I read this, that the Pentagon staff used Google’s agent designer on genai.mil to vibe code more than 100,000 AI agents in about five weeks. They hold IL-5 authorization. That means they can deal with sensitive, unclassified data. Their chief deputy for intelligence said at a symposium, I’m on team go fast. So if corporate communicators think this is a problem, they have time to think about the military, the actor we’d expect to be most cautious is already at 100,000 agents and accelerating. Now, Gartner in step two of the process they outlined, step two is to build a centralized agent inventory. And that was framed as a technical thing. It tells IT what’s running. But for communicators, we need to know what they’re all saying, what tone, what facts, what brand voice. Our job is to make sure the inventory captures the messaging dimension, not just the technical one. Otherwise you end up with 150,000 versions of your brand voice. And once we’re able to analyze what they’re doing, we’re able to go back and say, hey, you need to adapt, adjust that agent. So it does this instead of that. Neville Hobson: Well, interesting times ahead as always from everything we talk about here. I would say conclude, buckle up. That’s what I said. Shel Holtz: Absolutely. Also something else to buckle up for, we have an interview coming in June. We haven’t had an FIR interview in a while, but we have a returning guest. He hasn’t been on the show in something like 15, 16 years, but Pete Blackshaw is joining us based on some work he has spent a couple of years doing about the role of AI in customer service. it’s going to be a great conversation. I was just blown away by what I read in his post about this. So looking forward to that. Yeah, watch for that in June. Also, of course, coming in June is our next long-form episode. We are going to record that on Saturday, June 21st and make it available on Monday the I’m sorry, it’s going to be on Monday the 22nd. We’re going to record on Saturday the 20th. I think I got that right. Anyway. Neville Hobson: Yeah. Yeah. Looking forward. Yep. No, we’ll be recording actually on Saturday, yeah, the 20th, you’re right. And publishing on the 22nd, Shel Holtz: The 20th. There you go. Yeah, I can count squares on calendars. But watch for that. It’s coming. And of course, we will have our midweek episodes in between all that. We do hope that you will comment on anything you’ve heard that raised a thought from this episode or from any of the upcoming shorter midweek episodes. You know where to share them. Send them to us at [email protected]. Attach an audio file if you like. You can record that audio file right off of the FIR website, in which case you don’t even need to email us. We get that. There’s a tab that says send voicemail right there on the side of the page. You can leave comments on the post for this episode at FIRPodcastNetwork.com or wherever we share news about the latest episode dropping, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Threads. We’re everywhere. We’re everywhere except TikTok. right now, and maybe we’ll fix that if we start clipping. And that will be a wrap for this episode of For Immediate Release. The post FIR #515: Agents Everywhere appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

There’s a concept circulating in Platformer, the Reuters Institute, and Nieman Lab: the text-based social networks that defined the last 15 years of public communication may be in irreversible decline. Apptopia reports that Bluesky’s daily users are down 96% from January 2024; Threads has lost users in seven of the past eight months (down 61% from its October 2024 peak); and X has been “culturally altered.” At its peak, was Twitter less a replicable product category than a unique moment in media history? The mass audience has moved to short-form video, algorithmic feeds reward attention over the social graph, and platforms increasingly refuse to be referral engines. Text still thrives in newsletters, Reddit, Discord, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, and AI chat interfaces — what’s collapsing isn’t text, but giant algorithmic public feeds. Neville and Shel look at what this means for communicators: the promise of scale is giving way to relevance, trust, and consistency — a shift that requires a different approach to brand presence on social. Get details in this not-so-short midweek FIR episode. Links from this episode: Are the Twitter clones in trouble? Pew: Americans’ Social Media Use 2025 Pew: Social Media and News Fact Sheet Reuters: Mapping news creators and influencers in social and video networks The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, May 25. 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: Hi everybody, and welcome to For Immediate Release episode 514. I’m Neville Hobson. Shel: And I’m Shel Holtz. Communicators devote a fair amount of time to social media management. It’s no different where I work. We’re a smaller team in the construction industry, so we don’t have any dedicated social media resources. But whether it’s a company like mine, where it’s part of the job that somebody does, or a global brand like Wendy’s or Starbucks with a full-blown team, everyone’s trying to make an impact on social network users. The strategy behind those efforts may need an overhaul, though, to address the decline of text-based social networks. Platformer’s Casey Newton wrote about this recently, focusing on Threads, Bluesky, and X — but I think it’s fair to throw Facebook into the mix. Depending on whose numbers you believe, Threads has lost momentum, Bluesky never became the Twitter replacement that political journalists or media folks had hoped it would be, and X is, well, shall we say, culturally altered. Meta and Bluesky dispute some of this third-party data, so I don’t want to overstate the precision of the numbers, but we shouldn’t shrug off the larger point. This isn’t about whether Threads beats X or whether Bluesky can recover, but rather about whether that old Twitter model can be rebuilt at all. And increasingly, the answer looks like probably not. Twitter at its peak was a real-time public layer for news, commentary, expert reaction, and professional visibility. Journalists, politicians, academics, CEOs, and PR people were all there reacting to each other in public. That gave communicators something we had never really had before: a live dashboard of what influential people were saying, what stories were breaking, and how publics were interpreting events in real time. The problem is that this depended on a specific set of conditions — a text-first interface, a public follow graph, a tolerance for public argument, and a shared assumption that this was where you went to see what was going on. Even with a small subscriber base compared to Facebook and a lot of other networks, Twitter was where news broke, and it was frequently cited in the mainstream media’s reporting. Well, those conditions have changed. The mass audience has moved heavily toward video. TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts are now the primary discovery platforms for younger users in particular. News and commentary arrive as video, personality, remix, and clip. In fact, I was talking about this recently with someone I work with who said she doesn’t watch Saturday Night Live — she watches 10 or 15 of the clips that Saturday Night Live shares on YouTube so she can catch the funniest bits. At the same time, the logic of the feed has changed. The old social feed was built around who you followed. The new algorithmic feed is built around what holds attention. A post on early Twitter spread because of the social graph. A video on TikTok spreads because the system thinks it’ll keep people watching. Now that changes the incentives. It rewards performance, emotion, personality, and visual fluency. It’s also why the link-in-the-post model is fading. Social platforms don’t want to be referral engines. They want the content consumed inside the platform. You can’t conflate social engagement and site traffic anymore. For brands, this requires a pretty significant rethink. Today, social is less about sending people somewhere else and more about creating native moments of value right there, inside the feed. The implication for communicators is that we can’t just ask, “What should we post?” We have to ask, “What role does each of these platforms play in our communication ecosystem?” Some platforms are for discovery, some for reputation, some are mostly listening posts — environmental scanning, sentiment tracking, intelligence gathering. Some platforms may not be worth the effort at all anymore. We also need more human voices. The logo account is not adequate anymore. Trust attaches to people — experts, leaders, practitioners, analysts. That doesn’t mean every executive needs to be dancing on TikTok. In fact, please, no. But organizations do have to get better at helping credible people communicate in platform-native ways. The decline of the old public square forces us to build more durable relationships. What matters? Newsletters, podcasts, owned communities. LinkedIn still matters for professional audiences. So I’d resist the lazy conclusion that text is dying. Text is everywhere — in newsletters (which, by the way, is where I latched onto this story, in Casey Newton’s Platformer), in captions, in scripts, in search results. What’s dying is something more specific: the idea that a text-first social network can serve as the default global town square. Twitter may have been less a replicable product category than a unique moment in media history. For communicators, the job is no longer to master the town square. The job is to understand the map after that square has gone to seed. Neville, is this what you’re saying? Neville: It’s a lot. There’s a lot going on here to kind of zero in on a handful of potential responses, I suppose. But one thing does seem to be quite clear from all that you’ve outlined, which I believe is the case: Twitter probably was historically unique. And I think the issue, or an issue, is that everyone doesn’t think like that. They think it’s repeatable, it’s replicable. And it’s not. I think you could also see AI maybe accelerating the decline. Content abundance — so much of it. Authenticity is getting really difficult to judge. And everywhere is noisy. And that’s not what many people want. So I guess, to crystallize it in a sense — you know, we’ve got all these elements you mentioned. The paradox of Bluesky: it hasn’t grown. Threads has got scale, but it doesn’t really have a big identity. It’s kind of part of Meta. What does it all mean for communicators? We’ll come back to that, I’m sure, in a bit. But I wonder — the thought that keeps recurring in my mind from everything I’ve read about this is that the decline may not be about text at all. That’s not to say it’s because they’ve all migrated to YouTube and video platforms. I don’t believe that’s the case either. I think, as you pointed out, and that’s obvious to all of us, the text itself isn’t disappearing. People talk about the decline of text-based social networks. But the audience hasn’t vanished. They’re just dispersed. They’re elsewhere. They’re not in a central place. There is no public square — no global public square. No matter what the likes of Silicon Valley folks seem to think, there is no global public square. Or rather, there are places online that are accessible globally, but they’re not controlled by big platforms solely. Text isn’t disappearing. It thrives in the examples you mentioned — newsletters, Reddit, LinkedIn comments, Discords, WhatsApp, AI chat interfaces — probably 20 more examples you could give. So perhaps people still want text, but they don’t want giant algorithmic public feeds. I think that plays a big role in this. They don’t want the manipulation of algorithms to tell them, “This is what we think you want to read.” And that is still very strong on most big platforms today. They want to keep you on the site. They want to keep you engaged. They want you to keep doomscrolling, or whatever it might be. I think that shifts the conversation we should be having. It’s not about the decline of text — it’s that people don’t want giant algorithmic public feeds. What do they want? Well, they don’t know what they want, do they? They don’t. You mentioned LinkedIn — definitely the interesting exception. I think there are multiple reasons why it remains one of the stronger environments for text discussion. I guess I’ll put it as questions, basically. Is it because having something like this — that’s kind of affixed to your professional identity — changes behavior, or rather reinforces “corporate” behavior that is different to how it would be on Facebook or on TikTok or other video platforms? Accountability is higher, reputational stakes are visible, audiences are contextual rather than anonymous. It works, I think, partly because people behave differently when attached to their real professional identity. Hence — you know, I saw one today, someone complaining about Facebook-like posts being published on LinkedIn: “Please stop doing that. This is a professional place.” That kind of comment. So I suppose you could say a useful contrast — to this point about people behaving differently — is outrage-driven engagement everywhere else compared to reputation-aware participation on LinkedIn. I thought that was quite a good contrast to make. Outrage-driven engagement is very strong everywhere you look, but not on LinkedIn. People really don’t put up with that. So I think you have these elements that take part in all of this — that maybe smaller communities may be replacing mass audiences. And I think there’s a lot to be said in that. The smaller communities that would comprise, for example, niche communities, private groups, curated networks, newsletters, podcasts, creator ecosystems, if you like — much more than these algorithmically driven giant public feeds. I don’t follow much on the other traditional social networks. I prefer my own discovery on things like that. So maybe we’re moving from broadcast social media to relationship-based digital communities. And maybe this is just the start of that — which clearly has major implications for communicators and publishers. We can get into that, I suppose, in a bit. That broadly is what it looks like to me. I’ve read the Reuters Institute’s report, I’ve read Nieman’s report, which actually are much wider than just talking about the decline of text-based networks, but there’s very much in there. There was an interesting article in Fast Company which looked at Bluesky’s limitations. I thought that was intriguing — what they wrote. The contradiction, they said, was that journalists and intellectual communities (and they define what they mean by that) still love Bluesky, but broader mainstream adoption remains elusive. And that is absolutely true. Little blips here and there of this group or that group moving away from X. Good example in the media: Deutsche Welle, the German broadcaster, announced, I think last week or the week before, that they have multiple — maybe 20 or 30 — Twitter handles, and they’re all going to shut down, and they’re moving it all to Bluesky. And I think — brave. Reality: X is still the place where significant public announcements are made. Look at what’s happening, for instance, in Iran — in the Iran war with Israel and the US — the propaganda battle between the two is taking place on X, mostly. Trump, well, he’s got his Truth Social network, but I see people on X quoting Trump a lot. So governments, big corporations — but large groups tend to still be on X, in spite of what many, me included, would see as that being definitely a place not to be because of its toxicity. Deaf ears for that message, frankly, to people who are invested big in a place like that. But what does it all mean for communicators? Well, you’ve touched on a few things, and maybe that’s something that we could explore a bit. But broadly, that’s what I’m seeing. Shel: Well, I agree with you about the dispersion. I’m going to stick with the idea that the text-based social networks are in decline. You mentioned the German magazine that is sending all of their handles over to Bluesky. Neville: Well, no — they are the big broadcasting and media organization, not a magazine. Shel: Well, I’m sure Bluesky is going to be very happy about that. According to the Platformer article, Apptopia said that Bluesky has effectively collapsed as a competitive threat, with daily users down 96% from January of last year. That’s a pretty steep decline. If you look at Threads, which is turning three years old in July, Casey Newton writes that daily active users on the platform have declined in seven of the past eight months. After peaking in October 2024, just before the US presidential election, daily users are down 61%, and global monthly users have held up better at 388 million, but that’s still down from an estimated 400 million at the beginning of January of this year. So these are declining. Elon Musk took over Twitter and turned it into X, and people saw what he was doing with it. They talked about, “I’m going to Threads,” or “I’m going to Bluesky.” A lot of them were saying they were going to Bluesky, and they ended up being the left-leaning people who couldn’t tolerate the rise of hate speech and rage-baiting on X. So they went to Bluesky and effectively turned it into a left-leaning echo chamber, with left-leaning people arguing among themselves. Meanwhile, one of the people Casey quoted in Platformer said on X that the extreme right is pulling everybody else further to the right because there’s nobody from the left there to argue with them. So that’s what’s happening in the text-based social networks. They are losing monthly and daily active users at a pretty alarming rate. Where are they going? Well, the numbers for Instagram and TikTok and YouTube Shorts — the video platforms — are all on the rise. This is where people are going, and in particular, young people. I think one of the reasons LinkedIn is succeeding, in addition to the fact that it has a focus on business, is the fact that their algorithm, at least in part, focuses on who you follow. Whenever I log into LinkedIn, I see people that I know — not everybody who’s posted, but I do see people that I know. When I’m scrolling through Instagram, it’s a couple, but really, it’s trying to send me stuff it thinks I’m going to stick with rather than things from people I have connected with. So that makes me less interested in scrolling through Instagram. But I do find myself, when I see something — a video that’s in Reels and I tap it, it takes me over to Reels (this is on Facebook too, by the way) — I’ll find myself stuck there for a while as I’m looking at more of those short video clips. So they’re onto something in terms of what’s going to grab attention. But what does it mean for the public square? I think that — and we talked about that a lot in the early days of social media — you may remember the book Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. I loved that book. It was so optimistic about the public square and about the ability for people to connect with each other. And I just think that’s fading. That’s not what social media is about anymore. And I think the algorithms have driven a lot of that. Neville: I have a copy. Well, I think you’re right. Indeed, as far as Casey Newton’s piece goes, that same argument — Twitter traffic has collapsed effectively. Many other people are saying the same thing. The Reuters Institute talks about that. Nieman talks about that. Fast Company doesn’t quite say it in the same words, but talks about the tensions there. I totally agree with that. So I think, though, that it has more to do with the shifts in how people see public spaces to connect with other people. I think it reinforces some views you see about users turning their backs on social media. We’re seeing that a lot, and much of it generational, I’m sure. Commentary about fewer platforms and deeper relationships — I think they mean to say fewer platforms that interest people, or that matter to many people. Industry reporting is showing that short-form video is dominating attention, as you mentioned — TikTok, for instance, and YouTube Shorts, stuff like that. Great, I get all that. But I think much of it might depend on how you use these networks yourself. And I’m not a big fan of algorithmically driven content at all. And, you know, I use LinkedIn maybe not the same as you. Indeed, my whole approach to it is different to what it was even two years ago, where it was important to connect with others and have people like your content and share it widely and all that. Those things aren’t important to me anymore. What is important to me, using LinkedIn as an example, is to connect with a handful of people whose opinions I really do value. And they are literally a handful — maybe two handfuls. I don’t really care about, you know, stuff getting shared 50 times and all that. So I pay attention to some of the metrics, but not a lot. And I think, you know, Bluesky — I’m there since the beginning. Threads — I’m there since the beginning. And I’ve definitely noticed a change. I look at it this way, Shel: great, less noise, because there are fewer people in there now, which is wonderful — and new people. In fact, I use Bluesky in particular as a way to surface new people to connect with. Threads, that’s a different crowd entirely. And in fact, Threads is far more of a burgeoning community, let’s say, than other places are. But I think, you know, you kind of pause and look at the big picture and say, “Is this getting wider attention around, you know, for everyone?” Well, of course it’s not. It has very high attention amongst tech journalism, in the media and publishing industry — although both of their needs are different. Tech journalists, and I see this myself, actively discussing Bluesky, Threads, X fragmentation. You see a lot of commentary about that. We’ve just been talking about that. Media publishing industry — they’re concerned about traffic collapse and discovery. Comms professionals — attention is growing. And so our conversation today might be quite timely, especially among people who relied on Twitter professionally, says one bit of research that I pulled up. The general public — it’s very low. Yes, of course it is, because this is not mainstream. It will get there eventually, I suspect. Most users migrate without discussing the macro trend. They just move out of Twitter and go someplace else, or whatever it is. Academia and research are beginning to grow around Bluesky behavior and community structures elsewhere. So people feel the change, but they’re not talking about it in a way outside these niche areas. Insiders are analyzing the change. That’s what a lot of the discussion is now. But generally speaking, no one’s really fully named the change yet. Is it a decline of text? Is it a decline of social network interest? Is it — whatever, whatever, whatever you think it might be. So I think the question, or rather the focus, isn’t or shouldn’t be on whether Threads or Bluesky are failing or collapsing. That’s the wrong perspective. It’s more, as we’ve mentioned earlier: were Twitter and others like it unique historical moments that you cannot recreate? In which case, are we looking at, you know, swathes of people looking for a home to go to? No, I don’t think so. I think most have found a place. There is no longer a single place that’s a giant public square. There are multiple, and they’re all small. So are we going to see a kind of movement of thousands, maybe millions, of teeny niche communities? You could actually argue: what a nightmare for communicators. So that’s where your audience goes. But that’s what it looks like to me a bit, Shel, frankly. What I hear some people talk about, what I read — my own behavior, even — I’ve navigated myself to small communities. So I’m still a member of a number of LinkedIn groups, although, to be honest, most of them have really diminished in quality of content. A lot of people pimping their wares, full of consultants doing that kind of stuff. No value there at all. It’s almost like Facebook in that sense, where every other post you get interrupted by ads and stuff like that. So that’s going on too, by the way. So is it fatigue? I think it could well be generational. I mean, I’m not looking right now at any research that supports that opinion, but it seems to me that, you know, if you’ve got migrations to video channels that are typically the home of younger-oriented people — younger-oriented communicators, I’d say — that’s where it is. I take a look at TikTok now and again. I’ve been on TikTok forever and I don’t contribute. I watch. It’s not my cup of tea, the kind of stuff there. The new successor to Vine, called eVine — I’ve got an account. I haven’t yet posted anything, because I couldn’t figure out what I want to say there. But I’ve looked, and there’s lots of interesting stuff. So I’ll keep that kind of perspective. On those, I’m a consumer as opposed to a creator and a sharer. On others, I create, and most of that’s text-based content. I don’t believe that’s always because I’m a boomer — far from it. That’s my preference. But I frequent these other places as well. Is that typical? I have no idea. I don’t think it might be. But who knows? But I think this is definitely a conversation to have in terms of what it means for communicators more than anything. So, you know, audience building is going to become harder for communicators. That’s how I see it. Owned channels are becoming far more important. Trust matters more. We know that from all the conversations we’ve been having and what we can observe ourselves. Community matters more than reach. I believe that. Personality matters more than scale — I don’t see evidence of that, but maybe that is true. Consistency matters more than virality. I think that’s going to become increasingly more important, and that’s connected with trust. So the old social media promise was scale, right? The emerging model may be relevance and trust. Are we seeing an emerging model? I’m not sure, but that’s where the direction of travel looks like it’s going, it seems to me. Shel: Well, it starts with, I think, brands needing to adopt the philosophy that you just articulated with your subscription to eVine — not posting anything because you haven’t figured out what to post there. I think a lot of people in social media create content, they reformat it appropriately for each channel, and throw the same piece of content into all those platforms. That won’t work anymore. I think you need to look at each platform, look at the people who are there, and figure out what you want to share that’s relevant, that will resonate, that will produce some kind of movement of the needle. And for those where you can’t answer that question, maybe it’s time to abandon those networks as a brand. As an individual, go where your people are. We’re not talking about what network you like personally. For people who love being on Bluesky, I’m not suggesting that you stop. Go wild. Have a great time on Bluesky. But is it a place to share the content that you’re sharing from your organization? Is there a way that you can craft content that’s going to work there? Maybe, maybe not, but it’s time to reevaluate that based on these trends. Neville: Yeah, I think so. I think so. I mean, I think things like human voice, the individual voice, the demonstration of judgment — making judgments about something, your own lived experience and the intentional participation you exhibit by being on a certain platform — I think are increasing. Not scaled. I mean, this is small beer compared to the scaling that used to be the important thing. But they’re all connected with what we’ve been talking about: trust, authenticity, oversight, the evolving role of communicators in AI-shaped environments, to quote a phrase. I mean, it’s all in there too. Whatever — we think communicators need to be paying close attention to this in a macro sense, and indeed maybe the micro sense without getting into the weeds or anything — just be aware. So I pay attention to a lot of this stuff. I may not read every Reuters Institute report or Nieman report — not all. I’ll read the executive summaries. It’s a bit like, you know, the TikTok clips — I’ll look at the clips to get interesting stuff out of it and reflect. Do I think this is something that people I’m connected with will be interested in knowing? And that drives a lot of what I write about on the blog, for instance, which is AI-heavy these days. I think this is important to pay attention to. Perhaps public social networking is in decline. Maybe it is. But the social behaviors in small groups are definitely not. And that’s the thing to keep in mind — those two contrasts. Shel: Yeah, and that requires a whole different approach than we’ve been taking — to this blasting this content out. And that will be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release. The post FIR #514: Was Twitter A One-And-Done Phenomenon? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.