For Immediate Release

When brands deliberately provoke outrage, is the backlash a crisis or a planned part of the marketing strategy? Reformation’s campaign featuring Olivia Jade Giannulli, whose family was embroiled in the college admissions scandal, raises questions about using controversy to sell products. The campaign’s charitable donation from each sale adds another layer to the discussion, but does generating attention justify the risk to a brand’s reputation? In this episode, Neville and Shel explore the differences between calculated provocation, taking a principled stand, and accidentally causing offense. Drawing on campaigns from Reformation, Nike, American Eagle, and others, we debate how to measure success beyond mentions and whether communicators should have the authority to stop a campaign when the reputational risks outweigh the likely benefits. Attention may be easy to count; the cost to trust is something else altogether. Links from this episode: Marketing Brew Article Brands can use scandal to their advantage — but it can easily go awry The Reformation / Olivia Jade campaign Celebrity Ads Keep Making People Angry. Is That the Point? Nothing Says ‘Sorry for the College Admissions Scandals’ Like Selling College Sweatshirts! From Sydney Sweeney to Olivia Jade: Why Fashion Brands Are Betting on Controversy Olivia Jade’s Reformation campaign pokes fun at college admissions scandal Olivia Jade Reformation campaign / college admissions scandal Rage bait and outrage as brand strategy The Outrage Economy: Why Companies Are Embracing Rage-Bait in High-Stakes Gamble Are brands betting on backlash? How controversy became the new brand strategy Ragebait is everywhere. Should marketers lean in? What happens when the ragebait marketing machine runs its course? Brands Are Paying to Make You Mad Research on whether bad publicity pays When Is Bad Publicity Good? Finding Your Company’s ‘Controversy Sweet Spot’ Any PR is good PR: A little online controversy is not bad for business Balenciaga’s controversial new campaign and the long history of ‘shockvertising’ Scandal-to-comeback arcs How celebrities work their way back into the spotlight after scandals Being on ‘The Traitors’ can rehabilitate a celebrity’s image. It can also ruin it. Lean in vs. apologize When the apology becomes the crisis So, you’re facing a boycott. But will it hurt you in the long run? Crisis or comedy: when should brands laugh it off? The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR is tentatively scheduled to drop on Monday, November 30. 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 534. I’m Neville Hobson. Shel Holtz: And I’m Shel Holtz. When a brand deliberately builds a campaign around a scandal, is that courageous? Or is it just rage bait masquerading as marketing with a charity twist? Marketing Brew’s Jennimai Nguyen tackled that question last month in a piece that’s been popping up in my feeds more than once. Let’s talk about it, because the case at the center of it is almost perfectly engineered to divide a room of communicators. Back in 2019, influencer Olivia Jade Giannulli was at the center of Operation Varsity Blues, the college admissions scandal. Her parents, Lori Loughlin and Mossimo Giannulli, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit fraud after she was admitted to the University of Southern California through a fake rowing recruitment. She dropped out, went quiet, and eventually came back as an influencer. Fast-forward to this fall. Reformation, the fashion brand that went public over the summer, made her the face of its “Good Sport” campaign. The hero product is a crewneck sweatshirt that just says “College.” The Instagram caption—and I’m paraphrasing only slightly—says she’s back on campus in a crew that suits her better than the other kind. Net proceeds from sales of this product go to YES Scholars, a nonprofit that helps underprivileged students get to college. People commenting on the campaign split pretty much the way you’d expect: half the audience calling it iconic and the other half calling it insensitive. The Marketing Brew piece doesn’t just describe the controversy. Nguyen gets Derek Rucker, a marketing professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School, to lay out a framework for thinking about when leveraging a scandal works and when it doesn’t. It boils down to three things. First, the old line that any publicity is good publicity. Rucker’s answer is—and I’m quoting him here—“definitively no.” Brands that court controversy can lose sales, lose audiences, and sometimes spend money cleaning up after the campaign. Second, intentional controversy is really a bet about math. Rucker’s example is Nike’s Colin Kaepernick campaign in 2018. We discussed that more than once at the time here on FIR. Nike wasn’t surprised by the backlash. They were expecting it, but they were betting that the audience that shared their values was bigger than the audience that didn’t. That is a strategy. He notes that it’s an easier bet for smaller brands because there’s less of an existing audience to alienate. Reformation, though, just IPO’d and wants to appeal to a broad swath of millennials and Gen Z. That makes the bet riskier. Third—and this is the part I find most interesting for anybody who deals with crises—you can tell whether the controversy was intentional by watching what the brand does next. Rucker points to two tells. One is the charitable donation attached to the product. Reformation did it with YES Scholars. American Eagle did it last year with the Sydney Sweeney jeans and Crisis Text Line. The other tell is the absence of an apology. Rucker’s line is that these brands aren’t going to apologize because they’re not sorry. They’re targeting a specific audience, and the people who were offended were never part of that target. Contrast that with Converse, which pulled its Karina campaign and issued a flat-out apology within days when people pointed out that the imagery evoked the Ku Klux Klan and lynching symbolism. That’s what unintentional controversy looks like. Rucker’s advice there is the opposite: apologize immediately, take it down, and explain to consumers what happened. I would add, beyond what Rucker said, explain what you’re going to do to make sure this doesn’t happen again. The framework is: intentional or not, and does the response match? Reformation’s silence isn’t a failure of crisis communications. It was their strategy from the get-go. Yet Rucker’s own closing thought is that, if he were starting a brand, he wouldn’t go this route because there are plenty of ways to stand out that don’t involve controversy. Neville, I’m curious where you land on this. Is Reformation being clever, or is this a brand that just told its most offended customers it doesn’t need them? Neville Hobson: It’s interesting. I don’t believe that Olivia Jade story was familiar to a lot of people here. I remember seeing news reports at the time. Isn’t that the issue that Felicity Huffman was involved with, and William H. Macy? Shel Holtz: Absolutely. Same one. Neville Hobson: Now it rings big bells, I must admit. My immediate thought, listening to what you were saying and reading some of the reports on all of these, is that controversy generates attention. We know that. But attention isn’t the same as trust, reputation, or commercial success. Communicators have a responsibility to challenge the strategy, not simply manage the fallout. I’m wondering whether, in these examples—notably American Eagle and Reformation—we’re confusing the ability to generate attention with the ability to build a brand. If everyone’s talking about the controversy but nobody is talking about the product, have they really succeeded? That’s the first thing that comes to mind. How would you measure the success? I guess this is really the crystallization of my thought here: How would you measure the success of a deliberately controversial campaign? Shel Holtz: I think it depends on what their goal for the campaign was. If it was building awareness of the brand, that’s pretty easy. You can measure sentiment: How many people supported this? How many didn’t? Into which camps did they fall? If you’re targeting millennials and Gen Z, and they’re more likely to think this was cool, especially given that the proceeds are going to a charity, then you can call it a success. If the goal was selling a ton of these shirts, that’s pretty easy, too. But the question is, when you release a new product or look at the other items in your product line, have you seen a lift there as well? I don’t think a communicator would have told Nike not to do the Colin Kaepernick ad. I think they said, “Look, you’re going to get backlash, but it’s from customers we’re not particularly interested in. We’re interested in the larger audience that’s going to support this and buy these shoes.” That’s what ended up happening. Nike suffered some backlash. I remember seeing shoes being burned in barbecues and things like that. But at the end of the day, Nike’s reputation is fine. Their profits are fine. They didn’t suffer at all. By and large, I think they’re seen as standing up for an important principle when they took the position they did. Neville Hobson: I’ve been reading recently that their financial situation is actually not particularly good. Nevertheless, I think this is not a good place to be doing this kind of activity. That’s my broad opinion. There’s a fundamental difference between deliberately challenging conventions, which some of these people do, and simply offending people. I don’t buy the argument that all these people we’ve offended don’t matter because they’re not our audience. That’s an unsustainable argument in my book. Even if the marketing team believes controversy will generate attention, which is clearly what they do in all these cases, did anyone actually ask whether the reputational hit is worth it? My question to you is: When does a provocative campaign like any of these cross the line from clever marketing into very poor professional judgment? Shel Holtz: There was a Newsweek piece on this. The expert they quoted said that provocation becomes a crisis at the moment consumers stop debating the ad and start criticizing the company. That’s when prolonged negativity undermines trust and erases the attention benefit. As long as they’re just talking about the ad, I think your reputation and the degree of trust you may have earned are probably fine. We can equate this to the very current political situation here in the U.S. I know we don’t like to take sides on the show because we don’t want to offend anybody in our audience. We want people on all sides of the political spectrum to listen because what we’re talking about is how to communicate effectively, and we don’t get into politics. Nevertheless, Vivek Ramaswamy lost his race to be governor by double digits, and he was only down by two points before he released a very controversial ad. This was the ad that featured his opponent’s estranged mother. She hadn’t seen her in 30 or 35 years. She had been removed from her mother’s care as a child because her stepfather had raped her. He was advised not to run this ad, but he felt it was beneficial to his campaign, so he did anyway. What I’ve been hearing is that it cost him 10 points in the race. To the point of this person quoted in Newsweek, the conversation shifted from the ad itself to the guy who decided to run it, and what kind of character is involved in somebody who would make that decision. I think that’s a useful distinction. When they stop debating the ad and start criticizing the company, that’s when you’ve got trouble. There was one other person quoted in that Newsweek article who draws the line between calculated provocation and a brand blunder. What you got with Reformation was calculated. What you got with Ramaswamy was a blunder. The former anticipates criticism as part of the plan. The latter happens when a brand fails to recognize cultural or historical associations. I think Reformation falls into the category of, “We were going to anticipate the criticism, and people are still talking about the ad, not the company.” Ramaswamy, meanwhile, went down to a resounding defeat in a red state because of a blunder where he didn’t anticipate the blowback. Neville Hobson: What troubles me about all this—and I hear what you say, Shel—is that I wouldn’t do stuff like this if I were running communication for one of these big brands. Some brands, as is obvious from this, knowingly accept alienating one audience to strengthen their relationship with another. I think that’s appalling business practice, personally. What troubles me is the possibility that we’re normalizing controversy as just another marketing technique, with reputation management reduced to cleaning up afterward. If a brand deliberately sets out to provoke people, it can’t then pretend to be surprised by the reaction. I wonder where communicators sit with this. Shouldn’t they have the authority to challenge or even stop a campaign when, in their professional judgment, the reputational risk outweighs the likely benefits? Shel Holtz: I think that’s the counsel communicators need to provide. There was an older study—it’s 15 years old—from Stanford and Wharton that found negative publicity actually boosted sales, but only for relatively unknown products or brands, because it stimulated awareness of them. It hurt more established brands. Reformation’s not unknown. This data would suggest that it probably wasn’t a good strategy for them, but so far it doesn’t look like it’s hurting them much. Neville Hobson: It just seems not to be the way you should behave, in my humble opinion. My final thought on it is that controversy may buy attention. We’ve got evidence that it obviously does in these examples. But that doesn’t necessarily earn trust at all. If anything, it will damage it, in my view. Communicators need to understand the difference, and they should understand it better than anyone else. It seems to me to be another marketing technique that is not a good thing at all. Shel Holtz: I’m inclined to agree. A campaign like this probably wouldn’t even pop into my mind if I were assigned the task of promoting this particular shirt. Reformation never responded to a request for an interview, and they haven’t confirmed that the controversy was part of their strategy. That was Rucker’s belief. There are so many different approaches you can take to marketing a product and a brand that I wouldn’t go down this road for fear of the damage it could do to trust. But I come back to the Colin Kaepernick example from Nike. I think that was more than just courting controversy or using rage bait, which was somebody’s word of the year this year. What happened there went beyond using controversy and scandal to sell products. Nike was taking a stand. They were putting a stake in the ground and saying, “This is what we believe in.” This was at a time when brands were doing that. We’ve talked before on the show about brands stepping back from taking positions on public issues, despite the Edelman Trust Barometer saying that people want brands to address societal issues and take stands. I think the political climate has led them to dial that way back, but that’s what Nike was doing at the time. I don’t think they were rage baiting or trying to gin up controversy. They were trying to say, “This is what we stand for. We stand with Colin.” They knew from the research they’d done about their brand, demographics, and market that the vast majority would stand with them, which is pretty much what happened. It’s a calculation. If it were an issue central to the organization, its culture, its marketplace, and the like, I might say, “We could do an ad that puts out our position on this issue and lets everyone know where we stand.” Do the research and know that 80% of your market isn’t on the other side of it. But just rage baiting, just ginning up controversy? I wouldn’t recommend that. I find it fascinating that it’s becoming more or less a standard marketing practice. There’s a piece in Campaign that quotes Rosie Brown, head of strategy at a marketing company with a great name: Kill Boring Dead. She says controversy is now planned. Brands treat backlash as a campaign event with KPIs rather than a crisis. Her distinction is that backlash on a campaign is survivable; backlash on your identity isn’t. That’s another way to look at this. If you’re willing to take backlash on your brand, that’s fine. But if your identity is tainted, that can be very serious in terms of the damage it causes. Neville Hobson: I think it’s a great shame that we’ve got someone who says stuff like that. But if that’s the landscape we’re in, then it’s part of what you see with social networks, where they all went down the toilet—notably Twitter, or X—and they think it’s fine. I suppose you could argue that not all controversy is equal. Deliberate provocation, which is what nearly all the examples we discussed today involve; taking a principled stand, which I’d agree perhaps applies to what you said about Nike; and accidental offense are all different situations. But what seems to be gaining acceptance in some quarters, particularly in the marketing arena, is that deliberate provocation is okay as long as you’re able to assess the benefit of the attention you’ll get, much of which may well be hostile to you, and the potential for damage to your brand. I personally can’t imagine anyone being able to demonstrate, with a clear ethical conscience, that this is good business practice. Shel Holtz: Just one more data point I pulled up: Novig, the brand that used the Sydney Sweeney controversy with its ad, saw brand mentions surge 900% after that ad aired. The company’s founder, Jacob Fortinsky, told Front Office Sports that the controversy “forces us into the national discourse.” Again, was that their goal? If that was their goal, they succeeded. Why that would be their goal, I don’t know. Maybe they looked long term and said people would remember their name long after the controversy had receded into the background. But I agree with you. It’s a sad thing to see controversy and rage baiting being used to sell stuff. I think we’re going to see more of it, not less. Neville Hobson: I’m sure you’re right. We might as well just say the end justifies the means, right? Shel Holtz: Yeah. Neville Hobson: That’s very sad. Shel Holtz: It is. And that will be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release. The post FIR #534: Is A Scandal-Based Marketing Campaign Worth the Risk? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

In this long-form October 2026 episode of For Immediate Release, Neville and Shel report on FGS Global’s research, “Winning the Debate on AI.” More than 7,000 people across seven countries rate AI as the least trusted technology in widespread use, yet 37% became more positive after hearing about its benefits. Shel looks at Microsoft’s move of communications into its corporate, external, and legal affairs group, and its plan to put employees out front telling the company’s story. Neville examines OpenAI’s Locked Chats and the gap between the name and what the feature delivers. Shel reports on Fresh’s finding that 28% of employees meet company news through an AI summary first, and on how to write content that survives it. Neville asks what a Northern Ireland council’s return to a printed newsletter says about channels and measurement. Shel closes with the Wharton 2026 AI Adoption Report, in which managers and the employees they manage describe two very different workplaces. In his Tech Report, Dan York reports on the critical PHP vulnerabilities fixed in the October 21 security release. The two remote code execution flaws affect any server hosting a PHP application, which is why WordPress and other platforms urged immediate updates. Dan covers why the release was coordinated, the role AI plays in the story, and the xkcd comic that captures how much of the internet depends on a few critical components. He then turns to Freedom House’s Freedom on the Net 2026 report, “Seismic Shifts on the Global Internet,” and to the French government’s pressure on Meta, TikTok, and other platforms as protests spread this weekend. He closes with two fediverse stories: the Social Web Foundation’s Fediverse Multimedia Grants, funded by a $200,000 Interledger Foundation grant, and what’s coming in Mastodon 5.0, including a redesigned composer and navigation. We’d love to hear from you: comment on LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, or WhatsApp, email [email protected] with or without an audio file attached (or use the voicemail button on the FIR website to record a comment directly from the web). Links from this episode: New research: Winning the debate on AI Radar Pulse: Winning the debate on AI Microsoft Rethinks Communications As Employees Take On Storytelling Role Using locked chats in ChatGPT OpenAI Adds Locked Chat Feature to ChatGPT to Hide Sensitive Convos Behind PIN Codes AI summaries overtake workplace communications, Fresh says AI Research Summaries ‘Exaggerate Findings,’ Study Warns Ruwiki explains: Why AI summaries need more context Council to spend £30,000 on print title amid low views of digital newsletter Council goes back to printed newsletter as no appetite found for digital edition 2026 AI Adoption Report Links from Dan York’s Tech Report Security advisory: Critical remote code execution vulnerabilities, update now Critical PHP Security Release Dependency [HEADLINE NEEDED] Seismic Shifts on the Global Internet France puts Meta, TikTok, other platforms on notice over riot content as “Acte II” protests loom Interledger Foundation awards $200,000 to Social Web Foundation to support decentralized social media Fediverse Multimedia Grants 5.0: Laying the foundation 5.0: A closer look The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR is tentatively scheduled to drop on Monday, November 30. 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 533 for October 2026. I’m Neville Hobson in Somerset, England. Shel Holtz: And I’m Shel Holtz in Concord, California. Neville Hobson: This month we have our usual six great stories to share with you, plus, as usual, Dan York’s Tech Report. But first, let’s begin with a recap of the episodes we’ve published over the past month and some listener comments. In the long-form Episode 529 for September, published on the 28th of September, our lead story reported on a Press Gazette investigation that found dozens of experts quoted in the mainstream media who don’t actually exist. And PR agencies are unwittingly sharing them with the press. This poses a credibility issue for the agencies and the media, we said, requiring a layer of verification unlike anything we faced before. Other stories include a crisis communication handbook for boards from the CIPR and the UK Institute of Directors. And we’ve got a handful of comments here, don’t we, Shel? Shel Holtz: Yeah, we have a couple. Philippe Borremans, our friend, said, “Thanks for covering the CIPR and Institute of Directors handbook. It was a great collaboration with colleagues, and I think the final result is really worth a look.” And Jane Wilson said, “Love the line, ‘You can’t communicate your way out of a crisis you behaved your way into.’ I use a similar line: you can’t communicate out of a crisis while the fire is still burning. There needs to be operational behavior, resolution, or a plan to resolve. For comms to do our jobs. And I agree wholeheartedly, it’s a governance issue.” And Neville, you had a reply to Jane. You wrote, “Deepwater Horizon is such a powerful illustration of this point. No amount of carefully crafted messaging could change the reality that oil kept pouring into the Gulf, and Hayward’s remark just compounded an already disastrous situation. It’s a reminder that what leaders say matters enormously, but what the organization actually does matters even more. Which brings us right back to governance and accountability, long before anyone starts drafting a holding statement.” Neville Hobson: Good comments Jane made, I thought. So in FIR 530, on the fifth of October, we discussed a Financial Times report claiming that the volume of AI slop appearing as thought leadership on LinkedIn has led to a surge in interest in human ghostwriters. And this is the one that attracted quite a few comments, right, Shel? Shel Holtz: This attracted 14 comments. This one really seemed to strike a nerve with people. It’s too much to read all of the comments as they were written, but we do have a summary. Chris Norton kicked things off. He was hosting a GEO/AEO event the week after he shared his post, and has been talking with SEOs and copywriters. One of them ran a 300-person SEO and copywriting agency and just closed it because the market vanished. Chris still believes people want taste and human authenticity in 2026. We’ll accept some automation, he says, but we’d still rather talk to a human at the co-op checkout than pack our own bags. And Neville, you replied that the scarce commodity may no longer be words at all, but judgment, taste, and genuine perspective, and that those become more valuable as AI makes competent content effortless. Dennis Howlett uses Claude to draft his FOIAs and his posts. He trained it on the Diginomica library for style, then edits everything, often rewriting. He runs it through Grammarly, then passes it back to Claude for a legal check. It makes him more efficient. Jeff DeCanya says it definitely matters. Working with a human ghostwriter isn’t the same as feeding a prompt to an algorithm. Neville, you called that the strongest argument on the other side, since the human process involves challenge, interpretation, and a real relationship with the subject. Mac Worsham offered a useful test for any byline: could the named author explain the prompt and why each point is there? If so, the drafting tool matters less than critics fear. If not, a human ghostwriter wouldn’t fix it either. He also commented on a different post. Neville, you posted and I posted, and he commented on both of our posts sharing the episode. He said the line about not being able to communicate your way out of a crisis you behaved your way into is maybe the most powerful sentence in the profession right now. That’s actually from the previous episode; I don’t know why he left it on this one, but well. It treats crisis communication as governance and moves the question upstream, to the gap between what an organization says and what it does. He sees the fake expert story, that previous story, as the same lesson from the other side. Back to this episode. Sherilyn Starkey wondered whether calligraphers had the same debate when Gutenberg unveiled movable type, asking whether it had really done the thinking. Authenticity, she says, has always had a technology problem. Megan Thomas says ghostwriting for leaders who give zero input always feels wrong to her, and she sees no difference between that and using AI with no input or care. She’s fine with AI used responsibly and with appropriate human attention, and she loves that authentic comms are back in demand, “ums,” “ahs,” and typos included. Rita Zonia says AI helps enormously with the mechanics of writing, but tends to stay skin-deep on its own. She finds it amusing that a lot of organizations thought they could decimate comms teams and let AI pick up the work, only to discover the tool is only as good as its operator. So great comms people are making a comeback. Experienced writers and ghostwriters know how to get beneath what someone says, ask the extra questions, and spot the little odd comment that’s actually the story. Finding what’s worth saying, and saying it authentically and succinctly, is still a very human skill. Sharon O’Day has seen tools that generate a podcast from your news articles or presentations, with vendors pitching materials in your CEO’s voice. Philosophically, she says, that’s no different from ghostwriting text, and yet it gives her what the kids call “the ick.” Catherine Atkinson, replying to Sharon, said she’s doing that kind of writing now, with many years of experience in writing voice from journalism and screenwriting. What she’s seeing is a rush to fix big problems. And Joe, who has a name that’s interesting to pronounce. It’s S-Z-N-K-O-W-S-K-I. So, “Znowski,” I’m going to guess. I apologize, Joe. Joe has been ghostwriting since 2008 and says the desire for authenticity is boomeranging back to where it was before ChatGPT. That puts ghostwriters in a great spot, but only if they’re willing to do the hard work and fun work of interviewing, research, and collaboration. And Melissa Edwards found it all encouraging for communicators. A lot of comments from that episode. Neville Hobson: Terrific. That’s really terrific, getting that qualitative insight into people’s different views. Okay, so “Factual Accuracy Isn’t a Comms Strategy” was the theme of our discussion in FIR 531 on the 12th of October. We considered research suggesting that using familiar language can help accurate information compete with misinformation. But we asked, where’s the line between persuasion and manipulation? In FIR 532 on the 19th of October, we asked, does a seat at the executive leadership table give communicators genuine influence, or does influence come from being the trusted advisor a CEO turns to? We revisited this perennial debate about communicators having a seat at the top table, with some different perspectives. And now you’re up to date on FIR episodes. Shel Holtz: One more episode to bring you up to date on, and that is Circle of Fellows, the monthly panel conversation, usually moderated by yours truly, sometimes by Brad Whitworth. It is a panel of four IABC Fellows from the International Association of Business Communicators. This was part two of our discussion about artificial intelligence and communication leaders’ moment. Adrian Cropley was back for this episode, along with Mary Hills, Robin McCasland, and Cyrus Mavalwalla. The next episode of Circle of Fellows is titled “Lead, Communicate, and Connect.” We’ll be talking about the communicator’s role in creating workplaces where people feel seen and appreciation becomes part of how we lead, communicate, and connect. Zora Artis, John Clemens, Catherine DuCharme, and Jennifer Waugh will join me for this conversation. It is scheduled for 6 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday, October 29th. And one last note: we had a lot of comments on a couple of our episodes over the past month. We love those comments. We love having other perspectives brought into the show, and we would be very grateful for your comment. There are lots of ways to do that. Every comment we got over the last month came through LinkedIn, from people who left their comments on the posts where we share the announcement of a new episode’s availability. So that seems to be the easiest and most popular way to comment, and we encourage you to do that. We also share on Facebook, on Threads, and on WhatsApp, and I check those too for comments, so you can comment there. You can send us email at [email protected]. You can attach an audio file to that. We would love to play your voice speaking your comment out loud. You can do that through your own recording mechanism and attach it to that email. You can also use the tool we have on our website: go to the site and click the button that says “Send voicemail” and record your comment. Or leave your comment in the show notes. And you can comment on absolutely anything you want, including any of the six topics that we are going to be discussing today. And Neville, those are going to start right now with you. Neville Hobson: That’s true. So I’ve been reading an interesting new research report from FGS Global, a strategic communication consultancy, called “Winning the Debate on AI.” It explores public attitudes towards artificial intelligence based on a survey of more than 7,000 people across seven countries, including the UK and the US, alongside interviews with political, regulatory, and business leaders. What caught my attention was a striking contradiction. AI is being adopted at remarkable speed, yet public sentiment towards it remains surprisingly negative. For example, 71% of people surveyed said they’d used AI in the previous six months, yet when asked how positively they viewed different technologies, AI came at the bottom of the list, even below social media. But here’s where it gets interesting. When people were presented with AI’s potential benefits, 37% said their views became more positive. FGS sees this as evidence that public opinion remains open to persuasion and that organizations have an opportunity to shape the debate. That sounds like good news for communicators, but it raises a question I’ve been thinking about: is AI’s reputation problem really something we can solve through better communication? Or does the technology industry need to change some of its behavior before people have good reason to trust it? There are a few things I think are worth exploring here. Are people skeptical about AI because they don’t understand its benefits, or because they have legitimate concerns about how it’s being developed and deployed? Where’s the line between helping people understand AI and trying to persuade them to accept something they might reasonably distrust? And what should communicators be doing? Promoting AI’s benefits, or helping their organization build the transparency, accountability, and safeguards that earn public confidence? One other finding struck me. When researchers asked about AI’s benefits, everyday convenience resonated much more strongly than sweeping promises about economic growth. Perhaps that’s telling us something quite simple. People don’t necessarily want to hear about how AI will transform the global economy. They want to know how it will improve their lives and what safeguards are in place when things go wrong. Which brings me back to the title of the report, “Winning the Debate on AI.” I don’t think the real challenge is winning the debate at all. I think it’s earning the trust that makes persuasion unnecessary. How do you see it, Shel? Shel Holtz: Yeah, I couldn’t agree with you more on that. There is a tremendous amount of persuasion that needs to be happening. I think that the industry needs an association. I have not seen the equivalent in artificial intelligence, among the frontier labs for example, of the pharmaceutical association or the oil and gas association. I used to interact regularly with the Toy Manufacturers Association when I worked at Mattel. They represented the industry. They had the investment, of course; they got all of the money from the organizations that belonged to the association, which were all of the big companies. They conducted the research. They identified the issues. They worked with PR agencies or had their own in-house communicators, or both. They framed the approach that was going to be taken and fed that back out to the member organizations, who were all in lockstep then about how they were going to wield this influence and build this trust, rather than each one doing its own thing. Right now you have Dario Amodei coming out and saying, “Yeah, 10% chance this could kill us all.” Well, you have Google taking a completely different approach, and OpenAI saying other things. In fact, OpenAI saying conflicting things. And God knows what’s coming out of xAI. It’s a hodgepodge. There’s no coordinated messaging, there’s no common understanding or common agreement among these companies about what the issues and challenges are. The information that’s in this report would be invaluable if there was a coordinated effort in the industry. Knowing that people are interested in “what’s in it for me,” well, that’s not rocket science. That shouldn’t be a shock to people. But “what’s in it for me” covers a lot of ground, everything from “it can make my life easier when I want to book dinner and a movie as a date night” to “this could cure my lung cancer or prevent me from getting it.” So, talking about this in realistic terms. But right now what you have is this combination of so many different issues associated with AI coming at people from so many different directions. You have the concerns about the future of civilization. You have the concerns about what this means to work. You have the concerns about the data centers, everything from “my electric bills are going up” to “it’s creating health hazards.” You have the concerns about its impact on the economy and what happens if the AI bubble bursts, and there are a lot of people who are reading and hearing about that. There are so many different issues coming at people from so many different directions, and there isn’t a coordinated effort to address them. It’s being dealt with almost entirely defensively. “Here comes another one, let’s react.” And you don’t build trust that way. No matter how hard they try, there really needs to be a different approach to building and gaining that trust. And by the way, you do that through action. You do need communication so that people know that you’ve taken these actions, but communication alone is not going to address this. These organizations need to behave in a way that builds trust. And you’re seeing the beginnings of it with the data centers. No more nondisclosure agreements with the cities and counties where they’re getting the agreements to build them. They’re now going in and having town halls first, to hear the concerns of the local residents and come back with proposals to address them. You’re now seeing money pumped back into the community, so people’s kids are going to new schools and health clinics are opening because of the revenues coming from these data centers. They’re taking steps to address the concerns that people have about noise and water use, with closed-loop systems and the like. But all of this is in reaction to the ton of hate that was coming at them when it was learned what was going on behind closed doors, with no concern for all of these things. So they need to be proactive about these things, and they need to build and earn that trust. And they need communications to let people know that this is what they’re doing. Neville Hobson: Yeah, agreed. That’s well summarized, I think. It is a major, major issue, the misinformation that’s out there. Much of it is not deliberate; it’s well meaning. But you go on any social network and you’ll find any regular Joe with an opinion, and he will share it. I’ve lost count of how many people leaving such posts on LinkedIn where I’ve asked a question, “What’s your source?”, because they don’t cite a source for anything, and I don’t get answers to those questions. So you don’t pay any attention to those kinds of comments. But most people do. I think of a handful of people I know who are skeptics, very much so, about all this. They react constantly: “Look at what I just read,” and another one saying the world’s going to end tomorrow. They look alarmed about what they’re doing with ChatGPT, so they stop doing it even. I think it leads to misunderstanding, because not only do you not have enough information to clearly explain what’s going on, it’s conflicting, because some say different things. But I think the significant thing about earning trust is utter clarity in explaining what’s in it for you, and in our own organizations, what’s in it for all of us. It reminds me a bit of podcasting. Not in the early days, but things I’ve noticed over the years, particularly over the last couple of years, where I see people posting “here are the benefits of podcasting,” and they justify what they’re trying to talk about by saying the global take-up is X, and this guy Joe Rogan’s got three million listeners, look at what he’s getting out of it. That doesn’t relate at all to the real world for most people. So talking about how AI is going to help us all be economically beneficial in five years’ time just goes over the heads of most people. If you say it’ll enable you to get the best deals on your holiday, or it’ll help you understand something you’ve been trying to do… A good example as well, one that should interest most people, is the role AI played in the PHP issue that arose these past few days, where AI discovered the fault that had lain hidden in the code. No one knew, or people in the tech community certainly did nothing about it, for 22 years. Which, as an aside, raises the question: what the hell was the tech industry doing? They didn’t fix this. The answer I read from someone was that they believed the chances of anyone taking advantage of this were close to zero. Well, guess what? And I think that comes back to the owners of the AI tools, who should be doing more. OpenAI and Anthropic, in my opinion, instead of getting the headlines about “this latest cool thing we can do,” and we’ve got a story coming up about ChatGPT shortly, should talk more about what it means to the average Joe and the average company, and focus on something that they know people are concerned about. They do enough surveys themselves. So I think communicators, and again, let’s bring this back to reality for people: what do you need to do in your organization to help people understand all this? In the absence of any kind of handy toolkit or playbook you can get that makes sense to you, you have to understand this, promote the benefits, and help the organization build transparency and accountability. These are messages we’ve been talking about for quite a while on the podcast. And I think the point I made earlier holds: everyday convenience resonates much more strongly than sweeping promises about economic growth that people can’t relate to. Shel Holtz: Yeah, there are other things that I think communicators can help these organizations do, things that we have seen in other industries, like the computer industry. So let’s take, for example, OpenAI announcing that they have solved one of the twelve Millennium math problems. And this came as a complete surprise to the mathematics community. Now, these are people who have gotten PhDs, they have devoted their whole lives to mathematics, and many of them pick one of these challenges and spend their careers working on it. And suddenly here’s OpenAI announcing, “We solved it. It took two weeks.” And they did this without the involvement of the mathematics community. Now, if they had used their PR capabilities appropriately, they would have said, “Here’s what we’re working on.” And a good PR person would have said, “You should do this in concert with representatives from the mathematics profession, in the open, so that they are engaged with this.” They can, first of all, be involved in making sure that the process is a valid one. Even if it solves the problem, maybe it went about it a bad way, or there’s not sufficient documentation to prove that this actually is the solution. And then you figure out how mathematicians can use this, rather than end up where we are today, which is with mathematicians furious about this and also terrified that there’s going to be no need for them within the next couple of years. And everybody who’s heard this story, they’re not going, “The poor mathematicians.” They’re going, “My profession is next.” And that’s how you erode trust. If they had partnered with mathematicians and come out and said, “Here is how AI and humans work together, where each provides what they’re best at, to solving these problems and identifying new ones,” then everybody’s optimistic. That’s how it’s going to go for my profession too. And they had no clue about this, probably because they never consulted their communicators. Neville Hobson: Yeah. There are tons of things we could continue discussing on this, but that’s a foundational overview, let’s say, on what you need to do. You’ve got to build trust. So I’m sure we’ll be returning to this topic soon. Shel Holtz: No doubt. But for now, let’s turn away from AI altogether and talk about how Microsoft is rethinking the way it communicates. On September 24th, internal memos from Satya Nadella and Brad Smith, reported by GeekWire, moved the communication function out of marketing. It now sits in Brad Smith’s corporate, external, and legal affairs group. Okay, that makes sense to me. Brent Colburn is leading it on an interim basis. Frank Shaw, who has run Microsoft’s communications for, well, nearly 20 years, is leaving at the end of the year and moving into an advisory role in the meantime. The bigger piece here, though, is the strategy. Microsoft wants employees and executives out front, telling the company’s stories in their own voices, quote, “under a shared strategy and set of principles,” end quote. The press has called this “building in public.” Forbes, which is where I spotted this, frames it as a trade-off: more voices, less control. Now, so far nobody has published those principles. The way I see it, this is essentially a strategic narrative. I developed one of these where I work for pretty much the same purpose, so that our people, leaders, people out in client interviews, the marketing department developing proposals, all speak in their own voice and tell their own stories, but guided by a set of principles. But we haven’t heard anything about that yet for Microsoft, nor have we heard anything about the approval process or what training might be required before employees can post. Where are they going to post? How can they post? Can they do a podcast? Can they do TikToks? We haven’t even seen a timetable. So it’s hard to assess how this might work or might not work. Before we get to the pros and cons of this approach, I do want to make the point that this is hardly new. Some of you may remember Robert Scoble. In the early days of blogging, he was a Microsoft employee. He was writing as the Scobleizer. It was an early blog. In fact, in 2005, The Economist wrote about it, and I’m quoting here: “He has become a minor celebrity among geeks worldwide who read his blog religiously. Impressively, he has also succeeded where small armies of more conventional public relations types have been failing abjectly for years. He has made Microsoft, with its history of monopolistic bullying, appear marginally but noticeably less evil to the outside world, and especially to the independent software developers that are his core audience.” That was the Scobleizer in 2005. By 2006, roughly 3,000 Microsoft employees were blogging on the company’s developer network. Neville, you and I interviewed Robert in March of 2005. You can still hear that interview over on our archive site, and we covered his departure from Microsoft in 2006. One report said he was the third best-known employee at Microsoft, behind Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates at the time. So, what’s different this time around? A couple of things. First, this is a stated enterprise strategy that came from the CEO. Second is the home for it. It’s not sitting under marketing; it’s under the legal and policy side of the house. When we debated reporting lines on Episode 532, I joked that comms should report to legal, and that’s what Microsoft did, though I doubt they’d say it that way. Third, there are the platforms. Channel 9 and Microsoft blogs were owned; Microsoft controlled the stage. Today those voices live on X and LinkedIn, platforms Microsoft can’t control. And all of this is in the middle of an AI race where every competitor’s engineers are doing the same thing, and under real regulatory scrutiny. What are people saying about this? Named practitioner reaction is pretty thin so far. Mostly it’s just media coverage. GeekWire noted that Shaw’s shift surprised some people inside the company. The sharpest analysis I found was from ContentGrip, which says the communications job becomes one of designing a system of credible voices rather than being the voice. And real quickly, just some pros and cons. On the plus side is credibility. An engineer explaining her own work is more believable than a press release. It’s faster. It reaches more of the right people through fragmented channels that no media list covers. It gives you a listening post; Scoble used his blog as a free focus group. And in an age of AI-generated everything, verifiably human voices are going to carry some weight. On the minus side, there’s, well, a lot. There’s inconsistent messaging. There’s legal and regulatory exposure, especially for a public company facing antitrust attention. There are disclosure risks and leaks. There’s uneven participation: some employees are going to shine at this, and others are going to feel pressured into doing it. There’s a loss of control, which is part of the whole point, but it’s also the whole problem. And with the issues, we’re just scratching the surface. It’s not like things don’t happen like this all the time with organizational support or indifference. Where I work, we have people posting videos from construction sites to LinkedIn all the time. Are we upset by it? Hell no. We cross-post most of it to our official accounts. We love it. So if you’re doing this at your organization, the Microsoft story points to three things. Publish clear principles people can actually remember. Train and coach the people you’re asking to speak, because enthusiasm isn’t a skill. And build an escalation path and monitoring so someone can help fast when a post goes sideways. Neville Hobson: Yeah, there’s a lot here, Shel, I must say. A key point in my mind, when I hear this kind of story, is that the Scobleizer, and indeed IBM, did something similar to this, which is where we met Philippe Borremans, when he was at IBM involved in the blogging initiative. Shel Holtz: That’s right. Neville Hobson: Right. The landscape is utterly, utterly different to what it was then. There are more people, apart from anything else, and there’s more access to opinions and to anything other people say online. Back 20 years ago, you were still on dial-up for a large part. DSL might be your fastest choice. Mobile networks weren’t anything to speak of at all. So it was limited what people could do. But also the awareness and the desire weren’t fully formed yet. That’s emerged over the last two decades. Now everyone’s online, we’ve got AI on the scene, and attitudes are shifting away from the command-and-control behavior exhibited by companies 20 years ago, Microsoft being one of them: official spokespeople only, no one’s allowed to say anything publicly. That was the mantra in the ’90s, certainly. Now it’s different, so encourage it. It’s no small thing, though, for large enterprises to suddenly shift tactics and do this. But the trend, I’ll call it that, is clearly there to do this, and Microsoft may well be a great ongoing live case study on how this works. I can think of, for instance, when I was working at IBM a decade ago, involved in mobile app development, I was using tools that would help employees share content on social networks with pre-created messaging. That was so fake, in my humble opinion. Now you want it to be natural, and with it comes the inherent risk that they’re going to say something that, by mistake, is not really what you would like people to be talking about. It’s not about “you can only talk about certain things.” I think you’ve got to say, talk about what you want related to work. But you mentioned something really significant, which is you’ve got to have guidance and training from the very, very outset. And undoubtedly there are other things you could do to lessen what some people might see as pressure to do this. There’s no pressure. You don’t have to do this. You need to make that message very clear. Equally, if you don’t do it, there’s no penalty, but peer pressure will help improve that, I would imagine, if you do it right. We don’t have time to go into a lot of detail on this, but I think finding champions within the organization who can lead the charge, who stimulate people to do all this, would be great. But I think you’ve still got another issue, which I don’t know how you would solve, which is that much of what employees in a big company like Microsoft post is going to be just so much noise amongst all the other noise that’s out there. You’re competing for people’s attention. So I doubt you can expect to achieve mass conversion to people paying attention to what you say online in that kind of environment. So maybe you need to concentrate on small communities that you have a relationship with. But the idea, I think, is really good. And I think IBM is probably the best model, because at the time there wasn’t really anyone else doing it the way they did it. They published guidance, examples, manuals that were publicly accessible by anyone, and that helped drive awareness of what others could do. That was really quite something. It’d be interesting if Microsoft does something like that with this. But I think it’s a good step. I read the Forbes article. I didn’t think they were quite right with their title, by the way, which was “Rethinking Communication as Employees Take on a Storytelling Role.” That looked to me like there’s a keyword they put in the headline so it shows up. This is way, way beyond just storytelling. This is something where you are an extension of the organization in how you communicate externally and, indeed, even internally. So it’s a huge task, I think, and I wish them well. I think it’d be great to see how they get on with this. Shel Holtz: Yeah, I think this is a step beyond advocacy, because in employee advocacy programs you’re asking people to amplify a message that you have already distributed. And in this case, you’re telling people, go out there and tell your own stories and engage in your own conversations with people. There is nothing new about this. Not only did Microsoft do it before IBM, we had General Motors with a social media team engaging in the car blogs, and not about GM stuff, just becoming part of the community. Dell had a program that I think was on par with IBM’s. I remember speaking at one of their certification programs for the people who were going to become bloggers on behalf of Dell. There were a couple of hundred people in this program, and I think there were 11 of us speaking there. Christopher Barger was there. Richard Binhammer was at Dell at the time. Neville Hobson: I did similar with Dell in the UK. The same thing. It was a global thing they were trying to do. Shel Holtz: Right. But they trained people heavily. They trained people very deeply in all of this. Neville Hobson: Yeah. There are so many examples we could spend the rest of the show just talking about what others did. It’s not new, you’re absolutely right. But it needs revisiting again, because I think people have forgotten this. Shel Holtz: Well, this is why I raised the story. Here we go again, with somebody saying employees are authentic, their voices are authentic, it’s going to have more credibility than sending out a press release or putting something on our media site. I think that’s great. Why hasn’t it become the standard? It’s because too many organizations don’t take the time and trouble to do the training and to provide the resources to make it easy. They don’t think through what this means to employees who may feel pressured to participate. They don’t teach you where the regulatory risks are. Don’t mention another employee’s health problem in the United States. For God’s sake, that’s a HIPAA violation. So there are all kinds of risks here. You can mitigate them with the appropriate program before you just tell people, go out and blog, or go out and post on LinkedIn and X and whatever. Neville Hobson: Yeah, it’s good. So I mentioned earlier that we had a story about ChatGPT to mention. Here it comes. OpenAI has just introduced an interesting new feature for ChatGPT called Locked Chats. It lets you hide individual conversations from your normal chat history and protect access to them with a four-digit PIN. It’s being rolled out across ChatGPT’s consumer and business plans, including Enterprise. At first glance this seems like a useful addition. But here’s where it gets interesting. OpenAI is quite explicit that locking a conversation doesn’t encrypt it separately, doesn’t change how long the company retains it, and doesn’t override an organization’s compliance policies. In Enterprise and Edu workspaces, the content can still be available through authorized compliance systems. So a locked chat isn’t necessarily a confidential chat in the way some users might imagine. Consider what an employee might reasonably assume when they see a feature called Locked Chats. They might think the conversations are now completely private, even from their employer, or that sensitive corporate information becomes secure simply because the conversation requires a PIN. Neither assumption is necessarily correct. OpenAI’s own documentation makes some important distinctions. Locking isn’t encryption; the feature doesn’t create an end-to-end encrypted vault. Data retention doesn’t change; locked conversations remain subject to the same retention and model improvement settings. Organizational oversight remains; locked chats in Enterprise and Edu workspaces are still included in message logs available through OpenAI’s compliance platform. And forgetting the PIN has major consequences: resetting it permanently deletes the locked conversations and the protected content that you might have shared with ChatGPT. And this raises some questions for communicators. For example, are employees becoming increasingly comfortable discussing sensitive workplace matters with AI assistants, perhaps without fully understanding who can access that information? How clearly are organizations explaining the distinction between privacy, confidentiality, and security when they introduce AI tools? And is there a danger that features like this create a false sense of security, encouraging people to share information they perhaps shouldn’t be putting into an AI system in the first place? I think there’s a broader issue here about AI literacy, though. We often talk about teaching people how to use AI effectively, but perhaps we aren’t paying enough attention to helping them understand the implications of using it. And there’s another thought. As ChatGPT and similar systems have become more integrated into everyday work, employees may increasingly regard their AI conversations as personal spaces, even when they’re using company-provided tools. That could create some interesting tensions between individual expectations of privacy and an organization’s legitimate responsibilities for governance, security, and compliance. So is a feature like Locked Chats simply a welcome improvement to the user experience, or does it highlight a bigger challenge for organizations trying to establish sensible boundaries around AI at work? Shel Holtz: Well, I’m going to use it, because any extra degree of security is a good thing. But this is clearly a branding issue as far as I’m concerned. The word “locked” suggests more protection than it obviously provides, based on everything OpenAI has told us about it. I think that’s a pretty good example of how product naming shapes the expectations of the user, and of the gap between a help center disclosure and what people assume. Calling it “locked” is going to set an expectation for people who don’t pay attention to the fine print, and it’s going to be misleading. As a communicator, I probably would have advised a different name for it. I don’t know; I haven’t given any thought to what I would call it. That could be a listener exercise. Send us your ideas for what you would have called it. But yeah, I think it’s a poor branding choice. I think it sets a bad expectation. It is still up to the organization, when we’re talking about the use of something like this in the enterprise, to make sure employees understand what it is, what it can do, and what it can’t do. If we are involved in a lawsuit, in discovery, those chats are still going to be accessible. The fact that you locked it doesn’t mean it’s not going to end up in the court records and in the hands of the adversary in the lawsuit. So this becomes governance in the organization. It becomes part of the training, the ongoing training. This is why we talk about the fact that AI training in the organization is not a one-and-done thing. This technology continues to evolve and change dramatically, and it will be incumbent upon communicators, the trainers, and the IT department to work together to make sure that employees understand: this is the utility that you can get out of this feature, and this is what it will not do for you. Neville Hobson: Yeah. And I think also, I read in one article commenting on this that you can have guidelines written and published on a website accessible to all employees. No guarantee they’re going to read it. Well, yeah, that’s true, but you still have to do it. You should communicate it and make it available and help people understand all this. But you need to do more to help people understand the consequences. That’s the point that strikes me. Not how to use ChatGPT, but the consequences of this. So that, I think, is one way of addressing expectations of privacy that balances that out with organizations’ responsibility. These are communication issues. I think, like you, I’m going to give it a go when I see it in my copy of ChatGPT. It is rolling out, as I mentioned; I haven’t got it yet. Would I use it? I’m a bit different to everyone else employed in an organization, because my use of these tools has now changed in terms of workplace needs, so there’s not an awful lot that I would be alarmed about if it was accessible. That said, I don’t want it to be just open to anyone to look at if they don’t have a need to. So there’s that issue. But it comes down to, this is related to what we’ve been talking about earlier, too: building trust. And you think the employer needs to do more than they might think they need to do with the addition of a feature to this tool. Undoubtedly Claude, maybe Gemini, will come up with something like this as well. Shel Holtz: Of course. I was just going to say, Anthropic and Gemini will look at the criticism that’s coming out of what OpenAI did and come out with versions that address some of those, and they’ll be able to market that “ours doesn’t do this” or “ours is better because of that.” Neville Hobson: That’s right. So lots to consider on this from a communicator’s point of view and from a user’s point of view. Just be aware of the limitations. [Dan York’s Tech Report] Shel Holtz: Thanks for that report, Dan. It arrived just moments before we started recording, so we have not had a chance to listen to it. I know that it’s a little late because of your travels. I read your post that it took you about 30 hours to get home from the conference you were attending, and I’m very grateful that you still found time to record your report. I’m looking forward to hearing about it. I’m definitely interested in your take on that PHP vulnerability that we discussed briefly earlier, and interested in hearing about the features of Mastodon 5.0, since I still host the mastocom.org Mastodon instance. So I appreciate that. Internal communicators, this one’s for you. You craft a message. You know the kinds of messages you craft: benefits change, reorganization, safety policy. You consider the structure, the tone, what leadership wants to say, and how employees will react to it. And then your employees never read it, because instead they paste it into an AI tool and read what comes back. That’s not hypothetical. Fresh, an intranet company, surveyed a thousand professionals in the UK and the US, both communicators and employees. 88% of employees say they use AI to summarize workplace communications. 28% now encounter company news through AI first, before the intranet, before the leadership email, before word of mouth. Only 12% read internal communications in full. 95% of employees trust AI to capture the key points accurately. Yet 92% of internal communicators say those summaries distort emotional tone and intent. Both of these things can be true, because the employees can’t see what got left out. That’s the nature of a summary. And just a third of organizations have any formal monitoring or policy for how their content gets reinterpreted. So, how accurate are these summaries? Well, there’s research, although not about internal comms. There was a study in Royal Society Open Science that looked at almost 5,000 AI summaries of scientific abstracts and articles. The summaries were far more likely than the originals to overgeneralize, and the newer the model, the worse it got. Llama 3.3 was 39 times as likely to produce generalized conclusions. ChatGPT-4o was nine times as likely. In one example, “a diabetes drug was better than placebo” in the original became “effective and safe treatment” in the summary. The qualifiers just disappeared. The researchers told the bots to stay faithful to the source and not introduce inaccuracies, but they still produced about twice as many generalized conclusions. So “just tell the AI to be careful” isn’t a fix. Now, scientific abstracts aren’t an all-hands memo, but the failure is the same one we worry about: the conditions, the exceptions, and the caveats get dropped in the summaries. “We’re moving to the new system, with exceptions for field staff pending approval” might turn into “We’re moving to the new system.” A piece in Digital Journal points out that summarizing means choosing what to leave out, and a short answer is a starting point, not a substitute for the source. So what do we do? First, write content that survives the summary. David Bowman of Fresh, the UK organization that did that study, put it this way: “To be heard in 2026, organizations must design content to survive the summary.” In practice, that means lead with the point. Put what’s happening, who it affects, what they need to do, and by when in the very first few lines. I know you want to write in that feature style, with an example before you get into the news, to make it human. It doesn’t survive the summary. Write your own one-sentence bottom line. If you don’t supply the summary, the machine is going to do that. Keep qualifiers attached to the claim. Don’t bury “this only applies to this cohort of employees” in paragraph six. Label what’s decided and what isn’t. Cut, shorten. The way Bowman said it, subtraction is now a strategic necessity. Fewer messages means the important one is less likely to get mangled. And test it. Run your own announcement through whatever AI tool your employees use and see what comes back. You may not like it. Second, consider channels that don’t invite the paste-and-summarize habit. This might include live town halls, manager-led team conversations, and face-to-face with people who aren’t at a desk all day. Conversation carries the context and the tone that a summary strips out, and you can see in the room whether it landed. I’ll be honest, though, this isn’t a wall. Meetings get transcribed, and video can be summarized. The point isn’t to hide from AI. It’s to put the important stuff where a human explains it to another human. And then there’s governance. Only a third of organizations have any policy. Find out how your employees actually consume your content. Tell leaders that sending isn’t the same as being understood, and that the summary is now a channel they don’t control. The audience isn’t skimming anymore. They’re delegating the reading. Our job is to make the message hold up when the reading is done by the machine. Neville Hobson: Yeah, it’s an interesting scenario you’ve described, I think, Shel. One of the articles you shared, in IT Brief, I found quite interesting. A couple of quotes struck me. The report presents the issue less as a technical shift than as a behavioral one. That makes total sense to me. This is largely behavior, it seems to me. But the conclusion makes sense to me too. It underlines how quickly AI tools are moving from optional assistance to frontline filters for corporate information. 28% of employees now are seeing company news through AI before any original source. I don’t see that changing at all. And I think the reality is that this is how people like to share information. It gives them a sense of control, I suppose. It could be that they might reinterpret what the official news from a company is, maybe with a hint of skepticism about what they really mean. And you’ll even find some who’ll say, “This really means this.” And that kind of content will spread outside the organization. So it’s a complicated landscape, it seems to me, and I think there are no easy answers. Shel Holtz: No, I think it is important, though, for internal communicators to find a way to poll your population and find out the degree to which this is happening in your organization. Because I firmly believe that if you find out that some significant percentage of your employees are engaging with organizational content this way, and I’m not talking about best practices or things that are in the archives. I’m talking about the news that’s being presented, the information that leaders are sharing in their emails, the things that you’re sharing through your intranet that you think are important for all employees to understand. The new policy, right? The fact that there is a laptop swap program coming up and all employees need to go and fill in this information about their current company equipment. This is important, that employees get this. And if you find that a preponderance of employees in your organization are using the summaries, you need to restrategize your whole approach to communication. It may end up relying more on face-to-face. And I’m actually thinking about this as subject matter for a new book: that we are going to come to rely on managers like we have never relied on managers before to become the conveyors of this information directly to the members of their teams. We’ve been talking about this in internal communications for decades, but it is now a required part of the strategy, if in fact your ability to get the message across is being eroded by the summaries that employees are creating. It’s also going to change the approach you take to writing and where you put this stuff for people to get. So I think you need to ask your employees where they’re at with this, and keep doing that so that you’re ready. Even if they’re not doing it now, when they start doing it, which I think is probably inevitable. Neville, I do this with all the newsletters that I get on AI through Gmail. I have a skill set up in Claude. I subscribe to probably 20 AI-related emails. There is absolutely no way that I’m going to be able to read all of those every day. But my Gmail summary skill does a great job of telling me, “Here are the things that they’re all covering. The Neuron covered this, and TLDR covered that, and Casey Newton’s newsletter covered this other thing.” I can skim that in about two or three minutes, and it’s great. But am I getting the context? Am I getting the nuance? Am I missing something? Is it skewing some of that information as it creates a summary? Yeah, I read this knowing full well that that’s possible. But it’s better than not being able to read them at all. And I’m sure that there are employees who are tremendously busy on their jobs who feel the same way about reading the information that comes to them from the company. Neville Hobson: Yep, makes total sense, I agree. Okay, so here’s an interesting story, nothing to do with AI, utterly nothing, from Northern Ireland, that caught my eye. A local council is abandoning its digital newsletter for residents and going back to a printed magazine delivered through letterboxes. Lisburn and Castlereagh City Council says readership of its digital newsletter has collapsed. One edition in 2024 attracted around 1,650 views, but a more recent edition managed fewer than 120. So the council is spending £30,000, which I would say is probably about $38,000, on a trial printed magazine, which will go to 60,000 households. Now, I rather like the idea of print making a comeback. We’ve talked a number of times before about how traditional communication channels still have a place in an increasingly digital world. But what really interests me is why the digital newsletter failed so spectacularly. Was it the format? Was the content not sufficiently interesting or relevant to residents? Did people even know the newsletter existed? Was it promoted effectively? Or perhaps the council simply didn’t understand how its residents wanted to receive information. And there’s this. The council has an online registration form for its digital magazine. It asks residents for their name, address, postcode, and email address, together with consent to receive emails about accessing the publication. That raises another possibility: was a digital edition sufficiently easy to discover and access? We can’t tell from the registration form alone how residents actually received or found the newsletter, and the articles I’ve read don’t really talk any more about this. But it’s another reminder that the experience surrounding a publication can matter as much as the publication itself. We don’t know the answers, as I mentioned, and the reports I’ve seen don’t really explore them. There’s more, such as the question of measurement. The council knows its digital newsletter attracted very few views. But how will it know whether the printed magazine is any more successful? Delivering 60,000 copies doesn’t mean 60,000 households will read it. So there are a few questions worth exploring. For example, are organizations sometimes too quick to blame a communication channel when the real problem might be their content, their audience understanding, or the distribution strategy? Could returning to print actually be a sensible decision, particularly when communicating with an entire community rather than a self-selecting digital audience? And how should we measure success? Is it enough that people receive or read a publication? Or should we be looking for evidence that they understand something, take action, or engage more with the organization? And I think there’s a wider issue here as well. Digital isn’t automatically better simply because it’s digital, and print isn’t automatically outdated. What matters is reaching the right people with something that’s relevant to them, in a format they’re willing to engage with. So here’s a closing thought: a channel can deliver your message, but it can’t make people interested in it. Shel Holtz: I have so many thoughts about this, I’m not even sure where to start. In terms of the declining readership of the digital publication, did they ask people why they weren’t reading it? Did they survey their residents? They might have been able to make changes. Neville Hobson: We don’t know any of that. Shel Holtz: No, I understand we don’t, and it would be very helpful to know. If they asked, and people said, “We don’t care what information you provided or in what digital format, we’re not going to read this because we just don’t care,” that’s one thing. But if they came back and said, “You’re talking too much about this when I’m actually interested in that,” then you can make changes and probably increase your open rates. Did they do any other research, into the reasons that people may not be opening it? We don’t know. Was it going to their spam folder, for example? Was it reaching them at all? Did it have the appropriate kind of subject line that was going to entice people to open it? Did they do A/B testing on their subject lines? There are so many questions about why the digital version didn’t succeed. Will a print version succeed? Well, maybe. The councillors kept over and over again pointing to older residents, which is a reminder to segment your audiences. The debate about digital versus print is sometimes hiding the real question, which is, who are we trying to reach? Now, you and I are in our seventies, and we are digitally savvy. Our work lives involved all of this stuff. Neville Hobson: Digitally native. Shel Holtz: Yeah, we are. We’ve been working online since what, the 1980s? Neville Hobson: The ’80s. Shel Holtz: Yeah. So I don’t buy this “older people only read print.” I think that may have been true 30 years ago. But this is what these councillors seem to believe. And as long as that’s their belief, it does allow us to remember that segment, and who we are trying to reach, and who’s more likely to pay attention to what kind of content. But the question that I really have is, why in the world wouldn’t you do both? Accommodate the people who would rather get print and the people who would rather have digital, and let the people who are reading digital opt out of print so you can save a little money, for goodness’ sake. I graduated from college in 1976. I get a four-color magazine from my university four times a year that goes immediately into the recycling bin. It looks like it is well written, it looks like it is beautifully designed, and I simply don’t care. I just don’t have the time or interest. I have no connection anymore to my university beyond some of the people I went to school with there. I have no time to read the Atlantic Monthly that I pay money for. I’m not going to take the time to read this, so it goes straight into the bin. Wouldn’t they like to know that, and stop sending it to me and reduce the cost of their print run? So yeah, I think there are ways to manage this stuff. You know I’m a fan of print. You know what I think the advantages of print are, especially for the people who are going to take a minute to at least flip through it and go, “My goodness, I didn’t expect to find this article here.” That hardly ever happens online, because you get what you’re looking for, and print allows that serendipitous discovery of really interesting or important content. I wish I could send a print magazine to the homes of my employees. You know why? Not only would they flip through it, and you know what employees look for first when they’re flipping through a magazine: pictures of people that they know. But their families would get to see it and suddenly feel like they’re a little bit more a part of the company their husbands, wives, fathers, and mothers are working for. I think there’s tremendous value in the tactile nature of print. But does that mean it’s necessarily going to work in this instance, without the research to figure out what people want to read about, what people need to know about, how to ensure they’re going to pay attention to it? This all sounds to me like a research failure, and I would really need to know more about what research they did. They’re also going to need to do research to figure out if the print publication is working. They’re going to need to ask. Neville Hobson: Yeah, I agree. It’s a shame that there isn’t more information. I didn’t dig any further than that. In fact, the links to the two publications in Northern Ireland that had the story are in the show notes for this episode, so you can read more detail there. But not the answers to what did they do, why did they do this, why didn’t they do that, did they do research, et cetera. I’d also be keen to know of any listener in Northern Ireland who has any insight into this story. If you’d like to share your insight with us, we’d really like to know that. Shel Holtz: Yeah. And I’ll leave this report with one thought: what a great opportunity for human-led design. Because the one thing about print is that you can’t escape its notice. Even if it comes in the mail, you go through it quickly and you see it. And how good is the cover design, right? That becomes vital to people stopping and going, “Maybe I’ll flip through this.” It’s so easy to skip a subject line in a list of today’s email in your inbox. It’s harder to skip that print publication when you’re holding it in your hand and the cover is in your face. It had better be a good cover, or it’s going into the recycling bin. Neville Hobson: Your comment about your university magazine I found quite interesting. If you’ve been getting this thing for years, and each time you stick it in the recycling bin, don’t they email subscribers occasionally saying, “We’d like your views about the magazine, do you like it?” Or I guess not. Shel Holtz: No, no. I occasionally get one from the journalism department, and I’ll pay attention to that, first of all because it will report on people that I know, and second because I am very interested in what they are teaching journalists these days in university, especially since many of them are going to come into corporate communications. But the one from the university that talks about all the other departments that I don’t care about? Nope, don’t care. Well, some listeners may think that I have saved the most interesting item for last. The 2026 AI Adoption Report from Wharton Human-AI Research and GBK Collective was published on October 13. It’s the fourth annual edition. It is long, and it is full of data on ROI and agents, so I’m going to try to stick to just what matters to us as organizational communicators. They asked about 1,400 full-time employees at U.S. private-sector companies with more than a thousand employees. Those were the people who were surveyed in July. About a thousand were managers and above. This is the first year they also surveyed 409 entry- and mid-level employees, which is great, because that’s where it gets interesting. In the report’s own words, there is no group in this study where managers and the employees they manage describe the same working environment. I want to say that again: there is no group in this study where managers and employees were aligned. So, the numbers. 79% of managers and above say leadership has provided a clear long-term AI vision. Among entry- and mid-level employees, it’s 64%. 84% of managers say managers are empowered to lead AI change. Employees say 65%. And the biggest gap of all is training. 78% of managers say employees get adequate AI training. Only 56% of entry- and mid-level employees agree. There’s also a general alignment measure: 39% of managers describe an organization that clears four or five alignment factors for employees; for employees, it’s only 26%. Now, the report doesn’t have a section dedicated to communication, and probably should, but a gap where leaders believe they’ve explained the vision and provided training, and employees say they haven’t, is pretty clearly a communication problem. We have seen this pattern before. It’s the “we told them” syndrome. The sentiment numbers say the same. 84% of managers say their view of AI has improved over the past year. For entry- and mid-level employees, it’s 68%. For a positive impact on society, managers are at 76%, employees at 55%. And 46% of entry- and mid-level employees worry their own skills are declining from AI use. Now, that fascinates me. They fear that their own skills are declining because AI is doing the work. The report is careful to say, and this is a quote, “far from a backlash against technology,” but it’s not the same experience as the one that leaders are having. So let’s move on to the business results. Companies using AI in a way the researchers call “transformational” are far more likely to report strongly positive ROI: 67%, versus 19% for companies whose AI use isn’t described as transformational. Departments with strongly positive ROI were also more likely to have changed their management structure because of AI, 64% versus 47%, and they didn’t report more layoffs or hiring freezes. A few other correlations. Among organizations with a newly designated chief AI officer, 58% report strongly positive ROI, versus 8% with no such role. Those standardized on a single approved platform, 50% versus 9% for those still experimenting. Again, those are correlations and not causations. One more finding, on agents. Two-thirds of departments say they use AI agents, but only 17% let an AI agent finish a task without a person approving each step. Brian Smith of GBK says most companies are, quote, “paying for autonomy and then reviewing every action.” So what do we do with this? Well, and this is getting to be a litany: don’t assume your message has landed. Measure the gaps. Ask employees the same questions leaders get asked. Is the vision clear? Is the training adequate? Do you know what you’re allowed to do? If you find the same gap Wharton found, you have a case. Second, claim a role in AI training communication. Department leadership gets named for user training by 51% of respondents, the C-suite by 30%. Communication isn’t on the list. Communicators who can make the training findable, practical, and understandable will win. They’ll matter. Third, equip managers. There’s that message about managers again. They’re the channel employees actually trust, and the data suggests they’re more optimistic than the people they manage. Give them the real questions employees are asking, not just talking points. Fourth, be honest about jobs. 37% of managers say AI has led to staff reductions, and they expect fewer entry-level hires. Employees notice when you’re silent about that. And last, govern what you’re communicating. If your company is adopting agents and platforms, the communication plan for who’s accountable and what the rules are belongs right there with the technology plan. There’s a lot there, Neville. What jumped out at you? Neville Hobson: There is a lot, Shel. I haven’t read the report; it’s big. But I did pay attention to the key takeaways on the page they posted on the website describing the report. A couple of things from that jumped out at me, related to something you mentioned about the chief AI officer. If you look at the acronym, CAIO, I think it’s fabulous, absolutely fabulous. Shel Holtz: Ha! Ciao. Neville Hobson: So it’s interesting that someone with dedicated AI ownership, says Wharton… Well, they may say more about that in the report. I’d like to know what they mean by “dedicated AI ownership.” Is the person’s prime role this, nothing else on their plate they’ve got to pay attention to, or what? That would be helpful to know. But 58% of organizations with someone in that role report positive ROI. Again, it’s only 8% for a company that doesn’t have anyone with a dedicated role. Well, there’s good evidence of what you should be doing in an organization, if you’re able to. It may well be that you need to have someone with that role as part of something else he or she is doing as well, because you may not have the resources to have someone just dedicated to that. That would be better than not having anyone, I would say. The bit about agents, where they’re putting steps in place to check everything at each stage, sounds counterproductive, but it could well be that those doing that are going to say, “I told you so, these agents are dangerous,” if you look at what’s been written in the tech press over the last couple of weeks. I remember when we talked about this specific topic in one of our short episodes earlier in the year, about the growth of agents and how they’re going to take over various things in organizations. Largely that’s happening. But we’re now seeing a strong pushback based on some of the scare stories. For instance, I read one in the Wall Street Journal, I think it was, about AI agents gaining access to people’s bank accounts without permission. And you’re thinking, this plays into the reporting about AI taking control and “we’re all going to die.” It’s that kind of talk. So I think that makes it inevitable that you’re going to have big handbrakes on some of these things without oversight. But again, determining what’s best there is the CAIO’s job, I would say. From what I read about this, and hearing what you’ve explained, what Wharton calls “adaptive organizations,” there are some really good examples here of what adaptive organizations do differently from those who are not thinking about these developments. So I think there’s plenty here. I’m not sure I’ll have time to read the full report, but I see there’s an executive summary. I’ll download that and see what it says. But it’s interesting, Shel, that this survey has credibility, I think, and this kind of study is worth paying attention to, it seems to me. Shel Holtz: I dropped the whole report into Claude and asked it to extract and summarize the elements that would be relevant for communicators, and that’s how I crafted the report I just delivered. I’m glad you focused on the chief AI officer. I was really fascinated by this particular data point, for a number of reasons. We talk all the time about companies creating the “chief blank officer” role for trendy things. I think we just recently mentioned that there were companies that had chief metaverse officers there for 15 minutes. But in this case, I think it makes sense. There are a lot of companies that are hiring a senior AI person, probably sitting in the IT department. But are they speaking strategically to the organization about the non-IT parts of this? We have reported on data that said there are CEOs who have decided that AI is so important that they are becoming the leader of the AI effort. But they’re speaking to employees and to other stakeholder audiences about so many other topics that the AI stuff may get lost in there. If you send the message to your employees, and frankly to outside audiences who are interested as well, that this is such an important thing in our organization that we have elevated it to a board-level officer position, with all of the regulatory responsibility that goes along with a true officer position, then people pay attention. That person has credibility when they speak, and employees are going to listen, as opposed to hearing some of it from the CEO and some of it from HR and some of it from legal and some of it from IT, and “what do I make of all of this?” It’s easy for me to see why employees in an organization with a chief AI officer feel better about what’s happening and understand it more than in organizations that haven’t named one. Neville Hobson: Yeah, absolutely. I agree with you. Although I have to say, the acronym stuck in my mind. I can see that: “Hey, ciao, ciao, ciao.” Shel Holtz: Yeah, ciao. Well, you could always go with the U.S. government’s insistence now that we call it superintelligence, and that would make it a chief SI officer. Neville Hobson: Oh my God. Shel Holtz: It’s a whole other topic. Neville Hobson: Yeah. Let’s not talk about the midterms. Okay, that’s a big topic. So I think that’s a great report, Shel. I’m going to take a look at that executive summary to understand what they’re saying here. So thanks for sharing it. Shel Holtz: My pleasure. And that will draw to a close this episode of For Immediate Release, Episode 533, our long-form episode for October 2026. Our next long-form episode is scheduled to drop on Monday, November 30th. Neville, you and I will record that on Saturday, November 28th, right after Thanksgiving here in the U.S., anyway. Neville Hobson: Yep. Shel Holtz: So I look forward to talking to you then. But of course, we will be recording some shorter midweek episodes between now and then. I hope you will all subscribe. If you’re not already subscribed to the podcast, we’ve already let you know where to leave comments. Your ratings and reviews are of tremendous value to us, and we are immensely grateful for the time and effort that you take to do that as well. So until our next short midweek episode, that will be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release. The post FIR #533: The Two Distinct Realities of AI Adoption appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Most communicators long for that coveted seat at the table. What do those who have attained it have to say about it? What does it take to achieve it? And does it deliver the kind of influence top-level communicators want? Neville and Shel explore the data and share their own thoughts in this short midweek episode. Links from this episode: How communicators in the C-suite are staying at the table Inside the CCO Mindset The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR is tentatively scheduled to drop on Monday, October 26. 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 532 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz. Neville Hobson: And I’m Neville Hobson. Today’s topic is one we’ve discussed on FIR many times over the years, and one the communication profession has debated for as long as I can remember: the communicator’s seat at the top table. For decades, senior communicators have argued that communication deserves a place alongside finance, operations, legal, HR, and the other functions involved in shaping an organization’s direction. We’ve talked about becoming strategic advisors rather than simply the people who communicate decisions made elsewhere. But here’s something I’ve been thinking about: Maybe the question isn’t whether communicators deserve a seat at the table anymore. Maybe it’s what they contribute once they’re there—and what makes the CEO and other executives want them to stay. That question came to mind when I read a recent Axios article with the apt title “How Communicators in the C-Suite Are Staying at the Table,” by Simon Hernandez-Arthur. It draws on conversations with senior communication leaders and identifies four principles that seem to distinguish those who have become trusted strategic advisors. First, operate like a peer, not a provider. Don’t wait for instructions about what needs communicating. Participate in the decisions that determine what needs to be communicated in the first place. Second, think beyond the traditional boundaries of communication. Understand the business, its risks, the regulatory environment, and stakeholder expectations. Third, don’t confuse AI’s speed and analytical capabilities with the judgment that comes from experience. AI can help us see what’s happening, but it doesn’t necessarily tell us what to do about it. Fourth, invest in the next generation of communication leaders. If experience and judgment are becoming more valuable, we need to ensure younger practitioners have opportunities to develop them. What struck me is how closely these principles connect with a book I reviewed last December, Chief Communication Officers at Work, by my good friend Tabita Andersson. Tabita interviewed 23 CCOs from major organizations across different industries, exploring what their roles involve. What emerged was a picture of communication leadership much broader than managing messages, media relationships, or corporate reputation. These people help organizations interpret their environment, anticipate problems, challenge decisions, and navigate complex relationships. They bring the outside world into the organization and help leaders understand the consequences of what they do, not just what they say. In my review, I drew three conclusions: The CCO’s value lies in anticipation rather than amplification; clarity is a leadership behavior; and the role is expanding while becoming—perhaps surprisingly in the age of AI—more human. That’s the connection with the Axios article. For a long time, we’ve talked about earning a seat at the table. Perhaps the real measure of success is whether the communicator contributes something that would otherwise be missing from executive decision-making. There’s also the question of how representative these examples are. We’re hearing from highly accomplished leaders in major organizations. Is this how the profession operates more broadly, or are we describing an ideal many practitioners struggle to achieve? Have we finally moved beyond the old argument about earning a seat at the table, or are we giving the same argument a new name? What do you think, Shel? Shel Holtz: We’re giving the old argument a new name. No question. This is one of my favorite topics. I love talking about the seat at the table because every communicator wants it, but in any organization, there’s only the potential for one communicator to have it. Neville Hobson: I would question that. I’m not sure every communicator wants it. Shel Holtz: You have a valid point. Some communicators want to remain individual contributors and write articles. Some want to manage departments. But we all talk about the seat at the table as the ultimate goal for communications. Go to a conference, and you’ll hear in half the sessions that doing this or that will earn you that coveted seat. I had some issues with the Axios piece. It was almost entirely anecdotal and cited little, if any, data. Some of its sources have commercial interests: agencies and an AI-monitoring vendor. If you look at the data, Korn Ferry’s 2025 survey examined 78 Fortune 500 companies. It found that 47% had chief communication officers reporting to the CEO, up from 40% in 2023. Fifty-one percent sat on the executive committee. Among industrial organizations, including companies like mine, that drops to 36%. This year, Page’s Navigator Benchmark looked at 179 CCOs in 33 countries. It found that 65.9% said their scope had expanded, but 45.9% said resources hadn’t kept pace. Budgets fell for 31.1%, up from 24.8% last year. Page’s Candace Steele Flippin said the data show that access—reporting to the CEO—isn’t enough. What I mostly want to discuss is what Jim Lukaszewski says about this. Jim has spent years on the speaking circuit, written many books, and counseled CEOs, particularly on crises. He calls the table a myth. In a podcast from about 10 years ago, he said real decisions often happen after the group meeting, when the boss pulls one or two people aside. Jim’s advice is to “be the table.” Don’t wait to be seated. Build the skills and habits that earn the boss’s attention. Then you can bring that influence into any room, whether or not you’re the CCO sitting at that particular table. He also says one-on-one beats committee. Meaningful decisions often emerge from an advisor’s work with a leader, and the more people involved in the discussion, the lower the odds of a productive result. Leaders choose their advisors for expertise, insight, loyalty, and specialized knowledge. Advisors who offer only one functional skill, such as communications, tend to be consulted mainly about that function. If you want to be a senior advisor who influences decisions, with or without an executive committee seat, you need to expand your knowledge of how your business works and how business works generally. Finally, you need to start from the boss’s perspective. In his 2008 book, Why Should the Boss Listen to You?, Jim treats most business problems as management problems first. A communicator who thinks only like a department head rather than a business manager won’t be in the room. Do you need a seat at the table to influence decisions? I don’t know. I remember reading an article by Dean in Communication World, back when IABC published a printed member magazine. This must have been in the 1980s or ’90s, before I met him. He described the communicator as a hired gun: somebody brought into town after things had gone wrong to clean up the mess. Instead, you want to be there when the decision is being made, saying, “This is a bad decision. You can’t communicate it well. You should reconsider or revise it.” I don’t disagree with that. But if you want to be an executive committee member with an officer title and everything that goes with it—which is a whole different rabbit hole—you need broader knowledge and the ability to engage in discussions beyond the communication angle. Neville Hobson: I see that point in many articles, including Axios, and it comes across strongly in Tabita’s book. It raises a question for me: Does being at the table mean having influence? No. Those are different things. A fancy title with “officer” in it, an executive reporting line, or regular invitations to leadership meetings don’t necessarily confer influence. There’s a difference between being present when decisions are announced and being able to shape them before they’re made. How do we distinguish an influential CCO from someone with executive access who is still treated primarily as a service provider? Shel Holtz: That gets back to Jim’s point about wielding influence in whatever room you’re in, whichever meeting you’re attending, and whichever leader you’re speaking with. It doesn’t come simply from being in a room with a group of people. As Jim says, the more people in the room, the more your influence can be diluted by all those voices. If the CEO makes the final decision after the meeting, who gets the call for that last piece of advice or to explore implications the executive committee hasn’t considered? I want to be that person—the person they pick up the phone and call. That matters more to me than attending a weekly meeting where everyone’s opportunity to influence the discussion is limited. Neville Hobson: That’s interesting because a friend of mine is CCO at a large British public company. He has told me that meetings with the executive team are among his most significant opportunities to move conversations in the direction he wants them to go. He has influence in that setting. They listen to him. Being present when decisions are announced and shaping them beforehand are different things. If the executive team still treats you primarily as a service provider, that suggests they don’t see you as someone with influence. Shel Holtz: I don’t disagree with that at all. Neville Hobson: If you’re a CCO in that position, you have a problem. You may not be fulfilling the role as you should. You need the things you mentioned: knowledge of the business and the broader perspective described in the book you quoted. I can’t imagine someone going into those meetings without that background knowledge—being completely up to speed on the organization, its place in the landscape, and what’s happening elsewhere. Others, particularly the CEO, may have that perspective too. That brings us back to the Axios point: What can you add to the discussion that would be missing if you weren’t there? You need specific examples to assess that. But I’m not convinced that a private word in the CEO’s ear after a meeting is necessarily more significant than being in the meeting and talking to everyone. Shel Holtz: My point is that the decision often gets made after the executive committee meeting. The CEO is the person at the top who has to live with it, based on the input received. If they haven’t made up their mind and call for your perspective afterward, that’s great. But I’m equally happy to be called before the meeting. That has happened: “I’m going into a board meeting tomorrow or next week, and I’d like your perspective.” It’s about people seeking your counsel. But you’re right that we need a perspective broader than communication. The Medill CCO Monitor surveyed 125 senior communication leaders in February this year. Respondents ranked business and financial acumen, executive presence, and C-suite counsel ahead of communication craft among the skills they most needed to develop after advancing. Develop those skills, and you’re less likely to be seen only as a service provider. One respondent’s advice was to learn to tell senior leaders what they don’t want to hear, calmly and clearly. That means challenging decisions. If you can challenge a decision from a broader business perspective as well as a communication perspective, your counsel will be more valuable, and you’ll be more likely to be invited into those conversations. Neville Hobson: That makes sense. Some of the interviews in Tabita’s book suggest senior communicators increasingly operate across strategy, culture, governance, reputation, and other areas. That seems like a natural evolution at that level. Communication is your background, but the role embraces other parts of the organization you need to understand and discuss. One implication is that CCOs may need to challenge decisions that are commercially attractive but potentially harmful to trust. That’s another reason the group setting matters: You may need to challenge other executives, not only the CEO. But what happens when you do that and your advice is ignored? Shel Holtz: They end up being reported on this show in stories about how things went awry. Neville Hobson: We’ll get some names next time we discuss this! How far does the CCO’s responsibility extend? Should the modern CCO be the organization’s conscience? Shel Holtz: According to the Global Alliance’s Melbourne Mandate from more than a decade ago, yes. Being the corporate conscience was central to that model. The CEO–communicator partnership requires the courage to disagree when necessary. Corey duBrowa of Burson makes the point that communication leaders can fall short when they wait to be briefed instead of getting into the room where decisions are made. We can keep talking about a seat at the table, but that CEO–communicator partnership matters much more to me. And what does it mean to be a corporate officer? You may report to the CEO, sit on the executive committee, and be identified in the company’s Form 10-K, a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing. Do you need an officer title? We now have chief AI officers, chief storytelling officers, and all sorts of other titles. In many organizations, those aren’t necessarily corporate officer positions. They’re titles bestowed on people. There are so many of them. Neville Hobson: We talked about that a year or so ago—the proliferation of officer titles. Shel Holtz: I remember. Neville Hobson: There’s a counterargument worth considering. Is it realistic to expect a CCO to serve as an independent challenger when they’re employed by, report to, and depend on the CEO? Shouldn’t that responsibility belong to the entire executive team rather than being assigned disproportionately to the CCO? Shel Holtz: That’s an interesting question. It depends on what people perceive the CEO’s expectations to be, because that’s where their fortunes lie. It’s interesting that OpenAI hasn’t had a chief communications officer for nine months. Hannah Wong left in January, and the discussion about filling the role has included whether it should report to CEO Sam Altman, president Greg Brockman, or the chief marketing officer. Chief marketing officers are much more prevalent than chief communication officers. I can see organizations asking whether they need both on the executive committee or whether one should report to the other. Personally, I think it’s all communication: marketing, public relations, corporate communications, internal communications, investor relations, government relations, and community relations. It all has to align with the strategic narrative, presumably developed by the communication function. People will probably still be arguing about this long after you and I are gone. But some organizations don’t have CCOs because they say, “We have a CMO. The top communicator can report to them.” Neville Hobson: This is a big topic, and we won’t go down that rabbit hole today. But we’ve discussed why the CCO, or whoever the senior communicator is, shouldn’t report to marketing: The communicator’s role embraces everything the company does, while marketing has a more specific remit. Marketing has relatively little to do with investor relations or employee communication. I don’t think that makes the marketer the right person to oversee all communication. If anyone is going to have that responsibility, it seems to me it should be the communicator. Others would disagree. It’s one of those circular debates that won’t be resolved soon. There’s even talk of senior communicators reporting to HR. Shel Holtz: No, they should report to legal. Neville Hobson: I’ve seen people suggest that too. Returning to what communicators contribute once they’re at the table, one thing they do is make difficult decisions understandable. You don’t have to be a CCO to do that, although it helps to be fairly senior. We’ve seen how that can fail at prominent companies. Tesla comes to mind, where Elon Musk seems to be the person expected to handle communication. But could a communicator’s greatest contribution be explaining why a proposed decision is unwise before it becomes an organizational problem? That returns us to whether fellow executives believe the CCO has a perspective worth listening to. It’s complex—perhaps unnecessarily so—but that’s the reality. From what I recall, that kind of concern didn’t dominate the 23 interviews in Tabita’s book. The CCOs talked much more strategically about their roles, rather than focusing on who listens to whom. It’s a fascinating book. This certainly isn’t a concluding discussion. Shel Holtz: Good heavens, no. Neville Hobson: It’s another chapter, and we’ll no doubt return to it. Shel Holtz: I’d like to, as more data emerges and we hear more about it. I’ll conclude by saying that it depends on the culture of your organization and its leadership. As the saying goes, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” This is another situation where that holds true. And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release. The post FIR #532: Do You Really Want That “Seat at the Table”? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

When misinformation strikes, PR professionals swing into action, directing people to accurate information. But will people follow your links? One study found that people are far more likely to see what you have to say if the invitation sounds much like the language used to invite them to the original misinformation. Neville and Shel discuss the idea in this short midweek FIR episode. Links from this episode: A new study finds that to counter misinformation online, we need to copy its style Prebunking misinformation techniques in social media feeds: Results from an Instagram field study Video inoculation against election misinformation across 12 EU nations Confronting misinformation related to health and the environment: a systematic review The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR is tentatively scheduled to drop on Monday, October 26. 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. Welcome to For Immediate Release. This is episode 531. I’m Neville Hobson. Shel Holtz: And I’m Shel Holtz. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, you find a misinformation campaign online targeting your company, your products, your industry, or whatever. You immediately embark on an effort to combat it using all the strategies, tactics, and tools we’ve been trained to use. Is that a good idea? Researchers in Australia ran a dozen paired tests on Facebook. In each pair, they ran two ads carrying exactly the same accurate, consensus-based information. One was written the way PR people usually write this stuff: neutral, careful, and measured. The other was written in the style of the communities spreading the misinformation. It was warmer, more direct, and more personal. The styled ads won every time. All 12 pairs favored the styled version, and 11 of the 12 results were statistically significant. On a message about school education, the styled ad had a click-through rate of 6%. The neutral version—the one using traditional PR techniques—had a rate of 1.1%. That’s about five times as many clicks to get people to exactly the same facts. Now, “style” can sound like a euphemism for spin. Here’s what the researchers actually did: They built personas of people who engage with misinformation and matched their tone, directness, and emotional framing. One example in the article said, “You want to keep your little one safe. Wondering what vaccinations will mean for your baby?” That isn’t a lie or a scare tactic. It’s how a person talks. Even styles that weren’t a precise match for the audience beat the neutral version in most of the tests. I’m reading between the lines here—this is my interpretation, not a claim by the study’s authors—but it suggests that part of the problem isn’t just that we’re failing to speak the audience’s language. It’s that our language is so bland it barely registers. You may be thinking this contradicts what we’ve heard about prebunking, and you’d have a point. Other research I read, including work from Harvard’s Kennedy School that I encountered in Communications Psychology and a review of 32 studies in the Journal of Science Communication, mostly points the other way: Don’t imitate the manipulation; teach people to recognize it. The Harvard study is a good example. A 19-second Instagram Story ad shown to more than 375,000 users in the UK taught people to spot manipulation techniques. Afterward, 59.55% of those who saw the ad correctly identified the technique, compared with 38.21% in the control group. So, which is it? I’d say both. Here’s the line I would draw: Copy the warmth, familiarity, and directness, but don’t copy the fear, scapegoating, or fake urgency. The paper suggesting that we imitate the style of misinformation purveyors draws the same line in its ethics section: no impersonation, no amplifying fear, and no stigmatizing language. The review of 32 studies found no gold-standard intervention. Effects were small to medium and depended heavily on the specific myth. Think of these as tools in the same box rather than competing theories. I have one caveat: The misinformation study measured clicks, not changed minds. A click is a first step, but it isn’t proof of persuasion. That first step matters, though. If nobody clicks, nobody reads. Nobody gets the accurate information, and you have no hope of changing anybody’s mind. There’s plenty of adjacent work. The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health runs a creator program, and the World Health Organization has a network called FIDES. Both focus on getting trusted voices into the channels where people already are. Public health agencies have been working on this for a while. But I looked for a business doing what the study describes, and I couldn’t find one: a company countering a rumor, hoax, or false claim about itself or its products by deliberately adopting the style of the people spreading it. I couldn’t find a single example, despite the research showing stronger engagement. I’d argue that’s an invitation to experiment. Here’s what I would do. First, listen. Pay attention to how people talk about your company or industry when they’re worried, skeptical, wrong, or deliberately spreading misinformation. Don’t focus on your talking points. Focus on their words. Then test it. Run a simple A/B test with the same evidence in two versions: your standard statement and one written in your audience’s voice. That’s what the researchers did. Finally, measure beyond the click. Look at comments, shares, sentiment, and whether the rumor’s reach actually shrinks. Start with something low-stakes, such as an FAQ, an employee-facing rumor, or a customer-service reply. Somebody should be trying this. Why not us? Neville, communicators spend years learning to sound credible and measured. This research suggests that being measured might be part of why our corrections get ignored. How willing do you think companies would be to test a warmer, more direct voice? Would legal and leadership kill the idea before it had a chance? Neville Hobson: That’s a good question. I think the brave ones would do it. But listening to you, and having read the piece in The Conversation, another question comes to mind: Are we sometimes so concerned with making our information accurate and authoritative that we forget to make it relevant and worth engaging with? I’m circling around that thought because some of the conclusions drawn from this study seem questionable to me. If someone is going to use techniques associated with misinformation campaigns, something is missing. To clarify the distinction, misinformation is incorrect information shared without an intention to deceive. Disinformation is a deliberate attempt to mislead people or influence them to do something they otherwise might not do. Either way, techniques are used to attract attention. Are we seeing people bring in too much of those approaches? Some elements may be useful, but I’m thinking of an article I read—and I believe blogged about—on AI in warfare, particularly the war in Ukraine. I think it was published on Deutsche Welle’s English-language website. It discussed misinformation and then disinformation that others mirrored, perhaps unintentionally. I wonder whether people may bring in the whole package, knowingly or unknowingly, and conclude that it’s acceptable to exploit vulnerabilities or manufacture emotional responses that people identify with. Did I answer your question? I probably did, but here’s one for you: If we borrow the persuasive techniques of misinformation, how do we ensure we aren’t also borrowing the manipulative behaviors that make it effective? I haven’t looked for guidance on this, and agencies may already have it: “This is what misinformation looks like. Don’t do that. Here’s an example of what you should do.” If that doesn’t exist, there’s an opportunity to develop it because the ethical dimension matters. There’s also a danger that we celebrate winning the battle for attention without knowing whether we’ve made any progress in helping people understand the message or building trust. Those fundamental questions should be at the forefront. That connects to your question about why organizations should address this properly. If they don’t, they’re missing opportunities and failing to help the broader community understand what’s right and what’s wrong. Shel Holtz: I come at this from the perspective of wanting to get people to accurate information. Remember, the A/B test concerned what got people to click. Once they clicked, the information was the same in both versions. The warmer, friendlier language attracted more clicks than the typical bland PR language. The researchers in Australia included that ethics section addressing stigmatizing language and other concerns. But here’s what I kept thinking as I read it: In marketing, and to some extent in public relations and certainly in internal communications, we’ve embraced audience personas for years. We get to understand different groups within a larger audience based on their characteristics. We often boil those down into a fictional person who embodies them: “Mary is a 33-year-old single mother and administrative assistant.” Here’s what she’s likely to believe, what she pays attention to, where her skepticism lies, and so forth. That helps us craft messages for different groups within the audience to get the best possible results. Why aren’t we doing that when confronting misinformation? We wouldn’t need to use every persona. We’d focus on the groups attracted to the misinformation or being targeted by it. Instead, we tend to default to a crisis communication or issues management approach: “Here’s what they’re saying, and here’s the truth.” That isn’t attracting the clicks. Again, the study didn’t determine whether people changed their minds after clicking through, and I wish it had. I would have loved to know. But when you have about five times as many people clicking through with a more persona-based approach, it seems to me that’s something we would want to try. Neville Hobson: I agree. But what’s the real lesson? It certainly isn’t that communicators should behave like misinformation purveyors. It’s that factual accuracy alone isn’t a communication strategy. It often surprises me how we miss the essential element: understanding the people we’re trying to reach, speaking in language that resonates, and getting their attention without compromising our integrity. We also need to remember that getting someone to click isn’t the same as getting them to understand, believe, or trust. That’s a different part of the process. As you said, the click is a first step. I’ve seen things on LinkedIn and Facebook that others called out as disinformation rather than misinformation. One example came from a well-known brand. I’d like to think they didn’t realize what they were doing, but they were called out quite strongly on Facebook. It’s a minefield. It’s no surprise that people make mistakes, but the consequences can be greater than in the early days, when less of this was happening. We’re in a time when things happen that we couldn’t have imagined even a couple of years ago. Bad actors, including governments and other groups, manipulate brand messaging to confuse people or get them to click something that downloads malicious software. We’re seeing more of that. To my knowledge, there isn’t a playbook for this. If you want to emulate how the bad actors attract attention, how will you do it without adopting what they do? Shel Holtz: I think Philippe Borremans, whom we interviewed several months ago, is right: You can’t rely on a crisis manual that gives you a sequence of steps guaranteed to address the crisis. You need the scaffolding to manage a crisis in whatever form it takes. You need holding statements ready to be adjusted and published quickly because you have to respond quickly. You need prebunking in place, anticipating what bad actors might say about you and making the facts available beforehand. If you can get independent, third-party media sources to establish some of those points so you can refer to them later, even better. But how do you get people to look at that information once misinformation or disinformation has been published? That’s where this study comes in. We need to listen to how the people we’re trying to reach talk. They may not respond when we sound like PR people. They’re more likely to respond when we speak in a way that resonates, demonstrate that we care about their concerns, and share something they find relevant. That’s why listening matters. It isn’t just about identifying misinformation. It’s also about understanding how it’s being presented in a way that gets so many people to click and pay attention. We need to engage with that rather than simply push back. We have to listen and participate in the conversation using language that fits the people already having it. That isn’t what I see in many organizational or institutional responses to misinformation. Neville Hobson: Your point about prepared crisis messages is important. You should have those. But these situations are often so fluid that you also need to be capable of responding on the fly. You may have no prepared message for what somebody just did, and you need to address it in an original way. That requires the communicator to have the knowledge and confidence to do it. I was going to call it training, but perhaps preparation is a better word. Shel Holtz: I would say training too. Neville Hobson: Preparation leads to the point I wanted to make: This isn’t necessarily a new technique for countering misinformation. It’s a reminder that good communication has always begun with understanding the audience. That thought keeps coming back to me. I read an article about a supposedly new approach, and I think, “We’ve always been trying to understand the audience.” It’s a complex picture. You need to recognize that you may confront this almost daily, especially if you’re a prominent brand, individual, institution, or government. Even if you aren’t, some people will take a dig at you simply because they don’t like you. Some brands are experiencing that. You have to prepare. That’s where “what if” scenarios come in. Spend time working through them because I think this is only beginning. Shel Holtz: It’s going to get worse. And you’re right: This is nothing new. The new consideration is to apply what you’ve been doing all along—understanding your audience and speaking to people in ways that resonate—to your responses to misinformation. That’s something we haven’t been doing enough. Neville Hobson: Absolutely. Shel Holtz: And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release. The post FIR #531: Should You Mimic Your Detractors? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

The volume of AI slop appearing as thought leadership on LinkedIn has, according to the Financial Times, led to a surge in interest in human ghostwriters. In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel discuss whether this makes sense or if it’s just another case of people using AI poorly. Links from this episode: AI is creating ghostwriting jobs on LinkedIn Using AI to Write at Work Is Basically Fine — Unless You’re a Writer So AI helped write it. Who cares? FIR #526: Forget Anthropic’s AI Watermark. Can You Defend Every Sentence? The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR is tentatively scheduled to drop on Monday, October 26. 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 530 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz. Neville Hobson: And I’m Neville Hobson. AI was supposed to put ghostwriters out of business. Instead, according to the Financial Times, something rather different is happening. LinkedIn is awash with generic AI-generated posts, and the flood of polished but forgettable content is creating new demand for human ghostwriters who can help executives sound human again. There’s a nice irony in that, but it also raises a question I keep coming back to: If I use AI to help write a blog post, a LinkedIn update, or an article published under my name, is AI effectively my ghostwriter? Shel, you and I have touched on this territory before, most recently in FIR 526 in August, when we discussed Anthropic’s text watermarking. We argued that detecting whether AI was involved in writing something tells you remarkably little about who actually did the thinking. A more useful test is whether the author understands the argument, stands behind it, and can defend every sentence. I developed that argument afterward in a blog post titled “So AI Helped Write It. Who Cares?” My point wasn’t that authorship doesn’t matter. It does. But there’s an important distinction between asking AI to do your thinking for you and using it to help express thinking that is yours. Now, a Bloomberg Businessweek article adds another twist. It argues that, for many people at work, using AI to write is simply becoming normal. Writing isn’t necessarily their craft. It’s a means of communicating an idea, answering a customer, updating colleagues, or getting something done. The article introduces another tension. Some businesses actively expect employees to use AI for writing because it saves time. But it also describes the opposite problem at one company, where AI-generated documents became polished, lengthy, and difficult to read. The CEO concluded that AI was making writing quicker for the sender but slower for the recipient—a point we touched on in our last discussion—and asked employees for rougher versions containing their actual thinking instead. There’s a novel idea. That brings us back to ghostwriting. We accepted long ago that a CEO might put their name to words written by a communication professional, provided those words express what the CEO thinks. So, is AI-assisted writing fundamentally different? For me, this raises several questions. If the ideas, argument, and judgment are yours, does it matter whether you, a ghostwriter, or an AI produced the sentences? Where is the boundary between assistance and substitution—editing your thoughts versus generating thoughts for you? In an environment where producing polished prose is becoming almost effortless, will distinctive thinking become more valuable than distinctive writing? And would you feel differently upon discovering that someone’s LinkedIn post was written by a human ghostwriter rather than ChatGPT? If so, why? And perhaps more importantly, does it matter? Shel Holtz: Yes, it does matter. You have to consider the audience’s expectations. Those matter as much as the intentions of the person who drafted the speech, article, or whatever it might be. Think about the difference between an operational update, a CEO’s personal account of a career failure, and a condolence message to an employee. Those messages could be accurate, carefully reviewed, and approved. On the other hand, readers could reasonably expect a particular level of personal involvement from the person whose name appears on them. I think that makes a difference. But I’d like to step back for a minute and explore ghostwriting itself. I’ve known a couple of people who made their livings, or part of their livings, as ghostwriters. You knew the late Shel Israel, a very good friend of mine. Neville Hobson: Sure. Shel Holtz: He was a ghostwriter. He wrote books for people who didn’t know how to write, but he didn’t spend most of his time writing. His clients hired him because they liked his writing and his approach to getting to know them and their styles, so what he wrote sounded like them. How did he do that? Through a lot of interviews—hours and hours, dozens of hours, on the phone and in person. He challenged the generalities he heard from clients and drew out experiences they might not have thought mattered. As an experienced ghostwriter, he understood which experiences would lend color to the manuscript and what readers would care about. The Financial Times story opens up a more interesting possibility than simply saying humans write better. Perhaps the valuable service of ghostwriting was never just sitting there typing sentences. One person featured in the article said in a public response that AI remains integral to his business, but people still handle the conversations and relationships. Another person I know ghostwrites for an online service. Someone signs up and says, “I want to write a memoir. It’s only going to go to 10 people in my family, but I want somebody to write it.” The service matches that person with a writer. There’s a prescribed number of meetings, but they talk for hours. The writer takes notes and produces a first draft. If I take all those notes and everything I’ve learned about the subject, understand their writing or speaking style, and incorporate that into what I ask AI to produce or help me produce, am I still doing the lion’s share of the work as a ghostwriter? I think I am, especially if the person tasked with doing this isn’t a writer in the first place. We’ve talked before about people in organizations who might be assigned this work but can’t write their way out of a paper bag. Writing wasn’t what they studied, and it isn’t their area of expertise. If AI can help them use the material they’ve gathered by doing the work of a ghostwriter, I have less of a problem with it. Neville Hobson: I have a similar view. The FT article includes a good quote from Bernie Hogan, an associate professor at the Oxford Internet Institute. The journalist asked whether LinkedIn ghostwriters could help cut through AI slop. The part that caught my attention was his point that the message behind a post can still be sincere, even if you didn’t write it. He compares it to buying a greeting card: Someone else wrote the words, but the sentiment can still reflect what you mean. I agree with that. His further point is where the rubber meets the road. Because we can’t tell when a LinkedIn post is ghostwritten, is it authentic in readers’ eyes, even if it broadly reflects what the person posting it believes? That sums up the situation we’re in. I don’t think there will ever be agreement on the broad question of whether it’s wrong for someone else—or an AI—to write something you publish under your name. We’ve discussed the details many times: Is it your thinking? Did you contribute to it? Or did you give AI some material, ask it to write something, and post the result without further involvement? It isn’t a simple question. I keep coming back to this: Would you feel differently if you discovered that someone’s LinkedIn post was written by a human ghostwriter rather than ChatGPT? If so, why? I’d particularly like critics of AI-assisted writing to answer that. Shel Holtz: It would be interesting. I like the greeting-card analogy. The greeting was written by a copywriter at Hallmark, American Greetings, or somewhere else, but you don’t just grab the first card off the rack. People spend 15 or 20 minutes looking. Neville Hobson: You might. Shel Holtz: You might, but I’ve never seen anybody in the greeting-card aisle just grab a card and go. They pull one off the shelf, open it, read it, put it back, and try another. They’re looking for the one that expresses the sentiment they have. Then, when they get home, they write a little more. I would consider that the human in the loop. Human ghostwriting deserves the same scrutiny as AI ghostwriting. Someone assigned to write a LinkedIn post can manufacture the persona of the person they’re writing for. They can avoid the hard work, fabricate a profound message, or give someone credit for expertise they don’t have. An AI-assisted post grounded in a leader’s actual experience, with that experience shared as part of the process, could represent the person more faithfully than a human ghostwriter does. So, are we defending authentic communication, or are we defending an outsourcing arrangement we’re already familiar with? Neville Hobson: I think we’re defending authentic communication, but the definition of “authentic” seems to be a movable feast. I don’t believe we’ll resolve this argument in the near future. Where I land—and I think we discussed this in episode 526—is that you, as the human, need to be confident in your thinking and in how the text expresses it. If you are, you can comfortably continue what you’re doing. Apply that to a human ghostwriting a LinkedIn post for a CEO, senior manager, or someone else. The post will appear on that person’s profile under their name. That’s common practice; I know many people who do it. The question isn’t simply whether the manager or CEO is happy with it and praises you. Are you satisfied with it? Does it meet your standard for authenticity? You might outline your ideas, share them with your AI assistant, explain the assignment, and ask it to suggest the best way to tell the story. You might then ask for a proposed draft. It comes back, and you think, “This is a reasonable start. I can work with this.” You might edit it extensively and create something fresh, then pass it back to your AI assistant. It might suggest three changes. You could decide the second suggestion is useful and incorporate that. That process resembles what you might do with a human ghostwriter. So, my question is: What’s the difference? Does it matter? I’ve been accused of being terribly naïve for asking that, but I don’t believe it matters if you’ve satisfied those questions about authenticity, honesty, and confidence in what you’ve created with AI’s help. Others will disagree strongly. I still see absolutist comments on LinkedIn from people saying you can always tell when something was written by AI. I used to ask how they could tell, but I’ve stopped because the responses often suggest they don’t really know. I don’t believe you can reliably tell. I particularly enjoy examples where somebody submits a passage by Charles Dickens to an AI detector and it comes back as 98% AI-written. Or somebody tests an article they wrote for a magazine in 1995, and the detector says the same thing. What can you do with that? Let me ask you, Shel: Would you feel differently if you discovered someone’s LinkedIn post was written by a human rather than an AI? Shel Holtz: Generally, no, assuming they used the AI well. I’ll disagree with you on one thing, but only to an extent. You can sometimes recognize AI writing when it was given a weak prompt and defaults to a familiar approach. But that’s different from giving it detailed information about the person whose byline will appear, helping it understand their writing style and thinking, sharing other things they’ve written, and providing guidance on what the piece should say. You might even interview the person and share the transcript. We’ve had this conversation since the early days of blogs, when people debated whether communicators could acceptably ghostwrite for CEOs. I remember where we came down on it. If the CEO calls and says, “Write a thought-leadership post for me on this topic,” then hangs up and leaves you to invent it from scratch, that isn’t acceptable. If you go into the CEO’s office, interview them, and turn your notes into a post, that’s different. Bill Marriott used to record his thoughts and give the recording to his communicators. They didn’t transcribe it word for word because spoken remarks needed editing to work in writing. But the substance was his. Did he sit there and type it? Was every word one he had chosen? No, but it was his post. In that case, ghostwriting is perfectly acceptable. Today, AI can assist with that process. If we maintain the practices that make ghostwriting effective, authentic, and ethical, I have no problem with it. It doesn’t matter to me whether a human or AI helped produce the wording, as long as it reads well and reflects what the person would have said. That person also needs to approve it. We haven’t mentioned that yet. Neville Hobson: I agree. The process you described, using Shel Israel as an example—interviewing the subject, spending hours preparing, and understanding their thinking—would still apply. I particularly like the idea of using voice-recording tools that connect to Claude, ChatGPT, or another AI assistant. You could ask the CEO to do a brain dump on the topic, as unstructured as they feel comfortable making it. The recording uploads, you get a transcript, and AI can help interpret or organize it and suggest where you might take the story. That can save a tremendous amount of time compared with doing everything the traditional way. There’s a benefit to AI assistance, and I hope professional communicators make the most of those tools. Of course, some people will skim the output or post it as it is. We’re talking about people who bring their professional skills and judgment to the work. Based on the criteria you outlined, I wouldn’t feel differently about a post written with AI assistance. If those steps had been followed, I’d be comfortable with it. Yet I can think of half a dozen people who would strongly disagree. This seems to be a never-ending discussion. Shel Holtz: It is. One other thing we haven’t discussed is disclosure. I don’t think most ghostwriting requires disclosure. I don’t think Shel Israel’s name appeared on the books he ghostwrote. My friend Bill, who writes memoirs through the online service, doesn’t have his name on them either. Those memoirs have a small distribution: “This is my memoir for my children and grandchildren.” But you may remember an instance when a company wanted a PR agency to tweet on the CEO’s behalf while he was at a conference. The agency initially refused, saying, “We’re not you. We’re not going to pretend to be you.” They eventually agreed that roughly every fifth tweet would remind readers that the agency was tweeting on the CEO’s behalf. You have to think about where people might feel deceived and where the writing arrangement simply doesn’t matter. Neville Hobson: I agree. That’s our latest 50 cents’ worth of opinion on this topic. We’d like to hear your thoughts. If you’re a ghostwriter listening to this, we’d especially love to hear what you think. It’s an ongoing conversation. Shel Holtz: And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release. The post FIR #530: Has AI Created a Demand for Human Ghostwriters? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.