Employees at the Pentagon have spun up over 100,000 AI agents. In the private sector, we’re seeing reports of 10,000 or more agents being deployed by employees at a variety of companies. The problem is that most organizations lack governance to address agents, and the problems this explosion of agents operating on employees’ behalf can cause are innumerable. In the long-form FIR episode for May 2026, Neville and Shel delve into the rise of agents, the harms they could cause, what companies should do to ensure these agents deliver benefits rather than problems, and how communicators can take a leading role in addressing the issue.

Also in this episode:

Dan York outlines the big enhancements in WordPress 7.0

Links from this episode

Links from Dan Yorik’s Tech Report

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, June 22.

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

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

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

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

Raw Transcript

Neville Hobson: Hi everyone and welcome to the For Immediate Release podcast long-form episode 515 for May 2026. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz: And I’m Shel Holtz, and we have six really interesting reports to share with you today. And not all of them are about AI. I’m not saying most of them aren’t, but a couple are on other topics of interest to communicators. Also have a really excellent report from Dan York looking at the latest upgrade to WordPress, a massive upgrade, one of the most significant upgrades WordPress has seen in some time, and Dan’s report is fascinating as he talks about this. But we are going to start by filling you in on a new podcast on the FIR Podcast Network. We haven’t had a new show on the network in a while. You know, we started this as just FIR and we needed a place to house multiple FIR shows. Those who have been listening a long time may remember FIR book reviews and FIR speakers and speeches. And we had a number of these. And then we had some people say, hey, can my podcast live on your network? And we said, as long as it has something to do with communications, sure. So all of them have pretty much faded except a couple that Chip Griffin continues to crank out, but now we have a new one. And the reason we have a new one is because I’m doing it as a new podcast by me and my longtime friend and colleague, Steve Crescenzo. And it is called On the Same Page. It is an internal communications focused podcast. We’re recording it twice a month, about 20, 25 minutes per episode. And each episode focuses on an element of the strategic internal communications framework that I developed. It was several years ago. It was actually before I took a job in the private sector again. I’ll have been at the company I work for now nine years in October. So yeah, I developed this a long time ago. Then I wrote 28 blog posts about it. Somebody said, turn it into a book. So I did. And I have found a publisher for that book. So the podcast and the book are companion pieces and the first episode of On the Same Page is out now. You can find it on the FIR Podcast Network or wherever you get your podcasts. For me, that’s Pocket Casts. For you, it may be Apple Podcasts or any of the countless places that you can get podcasts these days, including Spotify. So we’re there. We’re on Spotify, as is this podcast For Immediate Release. And speaking of For Immediate Release, Neville, we’ve done a few episodes since the last long-form monthly episode.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, we have published quite a few, four in fact, over the past month. All of them have listener comments and that’s unusual, pleasantly so, every single episode with comments. So let’s run them down. So in the long-form, episode 511 for April, on the 27th of April, our lead story was the tale of law firm Sullivan & Cromwell and how in spite of AI policies, training programs and guardrails, a public document went out filled with AI-generated errors. No human in the loop, seems, as we explored what went wrong and what it means for organizations trying to operationalize AI responsibly. We also talked about new evidence that AI is not leveling the workplace, why AI is raising the bar for PR, the rise of slopaganda, and much more. Comments, Shel, on that one?

Shel Holtz: Yeah, a couple, and a couple of responses to the comments. We’ll start with Wayne Asplund who said, for what it’s worth, I have a way I tend to think about this. Simpler work, smarter decisions, better customer outcomes. You should be focused on all three when working with AI. If not, you’re reducing quality and raising risk. The obvious example is what you talk about. If your only care is speeding up work and you’re not focused on the customer outcome, which describes many people, magnify the risk and reduce quality. You reduce the smart side of things too, because you’re not engaging with the content. The model works for all sorts of AI activities. And Neville, you had a response to that. You said, simpler work, smarter decisions, better outcomes is a good test of whether AI is actually adding value or just accelerating activity. The law firm example feels like a case where the first of those dominated: speed and efficiency, but the other two didn’t hold. And that’s where things break down. I particularly like your point about engagement. If people aren’t really engaging with the content, then the smarter decisions part never really happens. It just looks like it does. The balance you described feels like something organizations need to make much more explicit, not just assume. And then we had Philip Weiss who loved the word slopaganda. My thoughts on this are from an earlier post, and he shared the post that he wrote called Slopaganda, the New Rules of Narrative Warfare, and the link to that will be in the show notes. And Wayne Asplund replied to Phillips saying, “some of the creative terms coming out at the moment. One newspaper I read stoked the fear of job losses by talking about the job- the job-pocalypse. And another article I saw used the term e-idiots.” Definitely going to pinch that one.

Neville Hobson: Ha Excellent. Great to have.

Shel Holtz: And by the way, the idiot’s comment reminds me of a T-shirt that I saw the other day that said any fool can use a computer, many do.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, that’s good. Yeah, it’s good when we see that kind of engagement, comment discussion taking place in the all on LinkedIn, of course, right?

Shel Holtz: yeah, yeah, although I think I got one or two of these actually off of Facebook this month. I can’t remember which ones, but.

Neville Hobson: cool. Excellent. OK. So our next show, we asked the question, when does AI stop supporting decisions and start shaping them? In episode 512, published on the 4th of May, we explored a provocative idea that AI is becoming the new executive influencer. Some research suggests leaders are already relying on AI for the majority of the decisions. But what does that really mean in practice? We have comments, right?

Shel Holtz: Yeah, Vincent Brunel left a comment saying, accountability question is the one that keeps me up at night when AI shapes the outcome, who actually owns the decision? The algorithm suggested it can’t become the new, I was just following orders. And Dean Landaish, I’ve known Dean, God, I can’t tell you how long through IABC. Having done lots of genealogy work with AI, its use for policy and decision guidance frightens me. Even with safeguards in place, AI systems will eventually tell you what you want to hear rather than facts or even even-handed evaluation. Like the social media algorithms, it eventually feeds you what it thinks you want based on patterns. Aside from writing progressively more restrictive prompts to stop this, I’ve had to go so far as erasing and dumping my user history. I wonder how many neophyte business users will build in proper safeguards to prevent the bias creep that AI builds over time.

Neville Hobson: And next, a Harvard Business Review article about redesigning marketing organizations for the agentic age provided context in FIR 513 on the 11th of May as we explored what happens when AI moves beyond generating content to orchestrating workflows and organizational systems themselves. We discussed examples of using Claude CoWork and AI agents in communication workflows. Work that once took hours now happens in minutes. Comments, right?

Shel Holtz: David Bradfield from up in Toronto. Great episode, Shel and Neville. The shift to the agentic age is less of a tech hurdle and more of an accountability crisis. If a communicator can’t hold an autonomous agent accountable to the brand’s ethical and strategic guardrails, the operating model isn’t just slow, it’s dangerous. I’ve just launched Avalere Advisory, which is very much aligned to the opportunities you cover. The narrative code only works if you have the right cultural upskilling and governance to match. Moving managers from task supervisors to agent auditors is key. I love the focus on the narrative code. It’s something we were building into my last corporate role for our CEO and other executives. It’s the backbone of the unified model communication teams need to succeed. And another comment from Vincent Bruneau who wrote a year ago, this was demos. Now it’s workflow design and organizational architecture. The speed of that shift is what makes the experimentation point so critical. The gap between those who are testing and those who are watching is widening fast.

Neville Hobson: And finally, was Twitter a unique moment in media history rather than a repeatable model? That’s a question we asked in episode 514 on the 18th of May when we explored the growing arguments that text-based social networks are entering irreversible decline, not because text itself is disappearing, but because giant algorithmic public feeds may no longer fit how people want to communicate online. And comments, One comment.

Shel Holtz: One comment from Mark Hillary, who says, of smaller rooms is a good analogy. I have my friends and family on various private WhatsApp groups. This now serves the same function that social media used to perform. As social media becomes more more aligned with entertainment rather than connectivity to a network, everything changes for people who want to communicate to a wide group of people.

Neville Hobson: Brilliant. So now you’re up to date on FIR episodes.

Shel Holtz: Yep, that’s right, and 515 will get underway in earnest here in just a minute, but first I do want to let you know that Circle of Fellows is coming up, the May episode this coming week. It’s the second of our special episodes with Brad Whitworth moderating a panel to discuss the remaining chapters of the book, The 7 Cs of The New Communication Compass. The book’s author and editor, Dianne Chase, is going to join Brad along with the remaining fellows who wrote chapters who weren’t part of the last episode. That includes Zora Artis, who wrote the Cohesion chapter, Cindy Schmieg, who authored the Collaboration chapter, and me. And I actually was the moderator last month. This month, Brad is doing it so I can be there to talk about the chapter I wrote on community. The panel is going to be live streamed at 5 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time this coming Thursday, May 28th. Participants of the live stream will be able to ask questions, share comments, observations and experiences and be part of the discussion. But if you can’t join us live, there is, of course, the audio podcast and the YouTube replay coming up after the episode has been recorded. So as I said, we’re going to jump into our first report dealing with copyright right after this. I have two reports today that have nothing to do with AI at all. I hope that’ll be refreshing, but let’s start with AI. According to the law firm Davis and Gilbert, 99% of public relations firms are now using AI. That’s a pretty dominant number and it could be a rounding error that would take you up to a hundred percent, I suppose, or maybe there was one company that said, uh-uh, not us. But the top use cases should come as no surprise. They’re using it to write content, take notes and summarize meetings, spark ideas and monitor media. In other words, AI is touching just about everything communicators produce. And while we’re busy adopting these tools, copyright laws have been piling up. Now the specifics I’m about to cover are based on US copyright law, but copyright is a thing in most of the developed world. So even though these cases may not apply in the UK or Europe, principles, at least some of them probably do. So let’s look at an update from the law firm Norton Rose Fulbright published in March that walks through six of the most important AI copyright cases working their way through the courts right now. First, there’s Thaler versus Perlmutter. The Supreme Court denied cert on March 2nd, which means the rule is now settled, at least for now. Purely AI-generated work cannot be copyrighted in the U.S. Period. If a human didn’t, and here’s some core language to keep in your mind, if a human didn’t make a meaningful creative contribution, you cannot and do not own it. In Bartz v. Anthropic, the court ruled last June that training on copyrighted books was fair use, but storing pirated copies was not. Anthropic settled for $1.5 billion, the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history. The fairness hearing happened just this past May 14th, like a week and a half ago. The judge didn’t rule from the bench, she took it under submission, but observers expect final approval any time now, and authors are looking at roughly $3,000 per work. And by the way, I have applied for that relief for several of the books I’ve written. And if I get it, Neville, you’ll get a piece of that three thousand for the How to Do Everything with Podcasting book.

Neville Hobson: ha ha! Twenty years after we wrote it. Yeah, okay. Wonderful. Wonderful.

Shel Holtz: That’s right. But yeah, it’ll still earn you 1500 bucks if this all goes through. Yeah, in Kadrey v. Meta, we saw the same fair use conclusion on training, but a different judge in the same district disagreed with the Bartz judge on market harm. He basically told the plaintiffs they brought the wrong argument and signaled that a future plaintiff who actually builds on

Neville Hobson: Excellent. Look forward to it.

Shel Holtz: An evidentiary case on market harm, showing that AI-trained models flood the market and depress demand for the original works, that could win. Then there’s Disney and Universal versus Midjourney, where the studios are alleging willful infringement of their characters, Elsa, Shrek, Darth Vader, the minions, and ask for statutory damages of up to $150,000 per copyrighted work, plus an injunction and disgorgement of Midjourney’s profits. Now, here’s where the story has often gotten more interesting. Since Norton Rose published their article pointed to the Disney OpenAI deal, the one where Disney was investing a billion dollars and licensing characters for OpenAI’s Sora video app as a sign of two things. First, that formal licensing was becoming the path forward. And second, that every signed deal strengthens the case against AI companies that didn’t license because it proves a licensing market exists, which is exactly the kind of market harm courts look for in fair use cases. Well, on March 24th, OpenAI announced it was shutting down Sora. The consumer app went dark on April 26th. The API goes dark in September. And Disney’s billion-dollar investment, the so-called bridge between Hollywood and AI never closed. According to Deadline, a Disney insider said simply, the deal is not moving forward. So one of the most cited pieces of evidence that an AI licensing market was emerging, it just evaporated. That makes the legal terrain more uncertain for communicators, not less. You might still be tempted to say that’s an interesting legal story, but it’s a problem for the AI companies and law firms. Not for me, not so fast. A PRSA panel reported in a recent piece on the PRSA site titled, copyright lawsuits pose a growing risk for communicators, quoted Samantha Rothaus, a partner at Davis+Gilbert, who made the point that for communicators, accuracy in AI-generated content isn’t just about looking smart. Inaccuracy, she said, can be misleading and deceptive, and that creates regulatory and legal risk. Another panelist, Michael Lasky, said he sees significant gaps in AI policies and governance within the PR field, and those gaps create significant risk. And Debevoise & Debevoise & Plimpton article from early March written by attorneys who advise marketing and communication clients lays out exactly where that risk lives for us, for communicators, not for the AI labs. And it lives in three places. One, ownership. If your team uses AI to generate a campaign asset, a logo concept, a hero image, an ad headline, and there’s no meaningful documented human contribution, you can’t copyright it. You don’t own it, and a competitor could pick it up tomorrow and use it. And there’s nothing you could do about it. Two, vicarious liability. Debevoise, and I know I’m not pronouncing that name right. It’s the name of a law firm. They flagged this and it’s worth understanding. If you’re using a third-party AI tool, and you are, and that vendor’s model was trained on infringing material, courts have already held in non AI cases, that the company using the tool can be liable too. The rule is roughly this. If you benefit financially from someone else’s infringement and you had the contractual ability to control how they were operating, you can be on the hook, even though you didn’t do the infringing yourself. So the AI provider’s training practices and your indemnification language are now your problem too. Have you read your AI vendor agreement? Do you know what’s indemnified? What’s excluded? And third is output infringement. If an AI tool produces something substantially similar to a copyrighted work, even unintentionally, even because of a sloppy prompt, and you publish it, you can be sued. One analyst made the point that images are especially exposed. Reverse image search trolls are already a cottage industry, and AI is just going to feed them. So what should communicators be doing? Three things, none of them particularly unusual. First and probably most important is to build an IP clearance step into your AI workflow, the same way you’d clear a stock photo image or a freelancer’s contribution. Document the human contribution to anything you actually need to own and read your vendor contracts with your legal team, specifically for training data sources and indemnification carve-outs. The legal landscape is going to keep shifting fast, as the Sora story demonstrates. Communicators who get ahead of it now are the ones who will be in a position to keep using these tools aggressively. Everyone else is going to be playing defense, and defense is a really bad place to communicate from.

Neville Hobson: quite a picture. So I think that actually makes it adds a significant dimension to what we’ve already been talking about, not just you and I, but many, many people we have on this podcast. On the example I mentioned in an episode recently, we talked about the law firm that submitted, it was actually a document to a court in a bankruptcy case. It was a corporate bankruptcy, with big numbers involved, riddled with errors because no one had checked it. So that’s been the focus: human in the loop has got to check it. It’s deeper than that, There’s your kind of, in a sense, your obvious level of foundation of the things you need to do to ensure that you’ve done everything you possibly can to ensure that what you produce using an AI assistant to help you. It doesn’t contain errors that can trip you up because you didn’t check it. Here we got something that makes that even worse sounding, frankly. What troubles me most is the statistic in the PRSA’s piece, quoting the law firms report they did that 99% of PR firms are using AI. And we already know from other reporting that, you know, many of those, I’m not going to say most because I don’t know, don’t have the governance in place to protect them. Do they have a human in the loop? I’m getting very cynical about hearing that phrase because I hear it like it’s a nice thing to say and there’s absolutely no substance behind it whatsoever because we’re seeing evidence and prominent examples. So there are others that aren’t so prominent, but they’re happening where they don’t have a human in So we’ve talked about this before. You had an idea a few episodes back that you need to have verification specialists. Maybe it had got to come to that because not everyone has the ability to verify. And even if you do, what’s the legal implication of that person? Is that the responsible person on behalf of your firm? What if they’re the intern doing that? It’s got to have someone with authority to do that kind of thing. So 99% using AI, the top reason. writing content, 79 percent. That really does make this sound very serious indeed, that you could run into deep trouble. Now, I know you said this is the examples you gave under US copyright law and copyright law is jurisdictional and it’s based on geographies. It hasn’t changed any in hundreds of years in that regard. So if you’re a global firm operating in 20 countries, you need to understand the copyright law in each of those 20 countries. So the risks are high, I would say. And you painted some dark picture there of here are the potential consequences if you don’t do this. But this needs to be part of your thinking. You mentioned as well, reverse copyright trolling to find stuff that could land you with a request of payment for the copyright infringement, stuff like that.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, the digital version of ambulance chasers.

Neville Hobson: AI-generated images. Right. But that’s part of the landscape, I guess. So it’s something to take seriously. I did note the concluding part from the PRSA story where they’re talking about this same law firm did a survey last autumn. Thirty-seven percent of PR companies they surveyed were developing their own closed proprietary AI systems specific to their clients. Will that protect them? I think it gives a false sense of security because I doubt it would. So you can’t think, I don’t need to use, you know, take your pick, Claude, Gemini, chat GPT or whatever. Even I create a bespoke version of the LLM, I’ll build something unique. If you haven’t got safeguards in for this, it won’t matter. You’re still going to run into trouble. So this is huge, I think. I can see lawyers everywhere rubbing their hands with glee because this needs legal input to this in each of those different jurisdictions of the copyright law.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I’ll give you two quick examples just from my own experience in recent days. And by the way, Chris Penn, this goes back a couple of months, but he did publish a post on LinkedIn that gave you a prompt to use in order to check your output for copyright violations. And he said, it may not catch absolutely everything, but if you’re sued, you could pull up the fact that you did that as a good faith effort to ensure that you weren’t violating copyright. It could stand in your favor in a lawsuit, but presumably most of the instances it would actually catch. But these two instances that I’ve experienced recently, was a search I was doing. I use AI for tech support all the time. I find it better than tech support. And I was trying to resolve something. I won’t get into what it was, but it said, if And the language it used was very specific, right? It said, if you’re losing sleep over this, stop. Google has said that they understand that this is a bug. They’re aware of it. All of us are experiencing the same thing. They’re working on it. It should be fixed in a day or two. So I was looking for more information on this. So I went to Reddit and I did a search and there I found exactly that same language in a post that somebody had left in the discussion for this particular software product. So it’s not that Google Gemini had taken that information and put it in its own words. It had actually taken those words from whoever wrote that post and shared it with me as a response to a prompt on Google Gemini. So yeah, if that were copyrighted, that would be copyright infringement right there. And if I quoted it, that would be problematic. The other I shared on LinkedIn, I thought this was a really interesting story about somebody who uploaded a photo, an image and said, is an AI-generated image that I created. I prompted the model to use the style of Monet. And there were thousands and thousands, according to the article, there were like 1.6 million people who said, this is AI garbage, it’s slop, it’s horrible. Here’s what’s wrong with the art, the lighting, the brushstrokes. And then it was revealed it was actually a real Monet. It was not an AI-generated. He just said it was. And I shared that on LinkedIn, got some interesting comments. But one of the comments I got said, all AI-generated art is theft, presumably because all AI-generated art was trained on real art, just like all AI-generated text responses is based on text that it pulled off of the net. But with people having that attitude and the person who shared that comment isn’t the only one I’ve heard say that. You know that there are people out there who are looking for this. As I said a minute ago, the ambulance chasers of the digital era are the ones who are out there looking for something actionable and then going out and finding somebody to represent in a lawsuit based on that. So copyright and AI, especially in this period we’re going through right now with AI backlash in general, I think you’re going to see this activity ramp up. And I don’t see any reason why corporate communications using AI can’t be caught up in some of these legal actions.

Neville Hobson: There is plenty to think about in that case. So moving on to our next topic, if you’ve been following how AI is reshaping search, and I’m sure many of you have, we’ve talked about this on FIR before, including our discussion a few months ago about GEO, Generative Engine Optimization. Then what Google announced at the developer conference recently in May is the next chapter. And it’s a significant one. Two pieces caught my attention amongst the many reporting about this. Sarah Perez’s writing in TechCrunch and a report in the New York Times by Tripp Mickle, Kate Conger, and Brian X. Chen. Both cover the same announcement, but from different angles. And together, they paint a picture that communicators really need to sit with. Here’s what Google announced. The search box, that iconic long slender bar that barely changed since 2001 is being overhauled for the first time in 25 years. It is getting bigger, more conversational, and more interactive. But that’s almost the least interesting part. What’s really changing is what happens after you type. Instead, or you even speak, actually, now, instead of a list of links as part of an AI overview, Google will increasingly serve you AI-generated interactive experiences, custom visuals, dynamically built mini-apps, and what they’re calling information agents that work in the background around the clock, tracking the web on your behalf and alerting you when something relevant changes. TechCrunch makes the point starkly. Searching the web will increasingly be done by AI agents rather than humans. People will focus on acting on the information those agents surface rather than clicking links themselves. The New York Times goes further with a quote from Richard Kramer, a financial analyst with Arete Research. He said, and I’m paraphrasing here, that Google is reducing everyone to raw data providers. The open web, said, is on the way out. Now think about what that means for communicators. We spend years adapting our content strategies, first for SEO, then for GEO, trying to get our content picked up and cited in AI-generated answers. But what’s the strategy when the answer isn’t a list of links, isn’t even a text summary with citations, but a dynamically generated interactive experience that never surfaces a source at all? That’s the question I want to dig into. We’ve moved from SEO to GEO, and now we may be moving into territory where there’s no citation game left to play. I’ve got some thoughts about that. But first, though, what do you think, this means for communicators? And what should they actually be doing differently right now?

Shel Holtz: Well, I think communicators need to adapt. We always have. So has the marketing world and the advertising world. When Google first came out, I mean, you know, first of all, I have to say, I think this idea that it’s the end of the open web is utter nonsense. If anybody can go build a website, then the web is open. The question is, can they be discovered? Well, depends on how well they play the game. It could be that they just want to notify their customers that this is where you come to do X, Y, and Z with this company that you have aligned with. So, you know, that could be easy. But, you know, if you want to be discovered more broadly, you’ll have to figure out how that gets done in this new world. There’s going to be a way. I do think some of the things that Google has introduced here are interesting. The agents… I don’t know, man. They just seem to me to be the AI version of Google Alerts. How many of the emails that I get every day are based on the alerts that I have set up for things related to the company I work for and the topics we discuss and the markets that we serve and things like that. I have all of these Google Alerts set up. I’ll be happy to make them agents now on Google, that’s just fine. I don’t see that that’s going to change my relationship with it all that much. It’s going to surface pretty much the same information. I do like the multimodal capabilities that they’ve introduced. You can now include multiple images and things like that in a search. But they’re not getting rid of those 10 links down at the bottom. You just have to scroll all the way past the AI overview, which is getting more sophisticated and occupying more of the page, but those 10 links are still going to be there. In fact, I was listening to the episode of Hardfork that dropped yesterday, and they interviewed Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google. And he said, people are always going to want to be able to click a link, especially based on the kind of search they’re running. He says, that’s what Google does. We’re never going to abandon the links, but they certainly have pushed them farther down the page. And we know that the AI overviews have led to a significant decrease in the number of clicks that people are enacting on a search results page. So that kind of traffic has dried up to a large degree. So, you know, even though you can still get to those links, I don’t think that solves the problem for people who want to be discovered on the web. We’re going to have to figure this out. I would continue to look at the AEO slash GEO approach to visibility and also keep your eye on what the search experts tell us as they gain experience with this revised version of Google.

Neville Hobson: Hmm. I’m not sure that the links and AI overviews are going to stay as they currently are. I’m certain they’re not. One of the, in fact, three of the articles I read that go into quite significant technical detail about this are based on people’s interpretation, a lot of what was announced at the Google Developer Conference. So there’s no clean answer yet where this is going. We don’t know yet. But there are a number of directions worth looking at from a communicator’s point of view, I believe. So I’d start with if it means that the citation game, as I might describe it, was fundamentally about being findable. So you are signed, your content is cited, it shows up in AI overviews. So getting your content into the results that humans would click on. But that’s not what’s going to happen here. If agents are doing the searching and humans are acting on what the agents find, the question shifts from how do we get found to how do we become part of the information environment that AI systems draw from? That’s a subtler form of presence. It’s less about individual pieces of content, they’re more about sustained authoritative voice over time. This won’t happen quickly. So if you’ve not done prep, for overviews, you’re behind the curve on this because when this lands and becomes clear how it’s going to work, I think it’ll attract huge interest, particularly thinking about, we have a, one of the topics we’re going to talk about is on this AI agents topic, that you’ve got AI agents out there while you’re fast asleep or traveling or doing something else when you come back to your computer the next day or the next hour or whatever it might be. It presents you with the answers to your question. And they are unlikely to include links. They will be, in the sense, for many people, the complete answer to your question. You won’t need to click anywhere. That will appeal to a lot of people. So this is doing all the donkey work, as we might say. I think it suggests that owned channels will matter a great deal, not less. So a search as a distribution channel is being restructured. Direct relationships with audiences like lists, communities, podcasts, trusted platform, et cetera, become more valuable precisely because they don’t depend on being surfaced by an algorithm or an agent. The communicators who’ve invested in direct audience relationships are going to be better positioned than those who relied on search-driven traffic. And I think you made the point that AI overviews started something which was lessening click-throughs. And that is going to get even worse with this from a website owner’s point of view. There’s no click. So that whole model will have to change. So I think that said, there’s some other issues here too of interested communicators. The human moment is still the moment that matters. Even if an agent does the searching, a human makes a decision. So the communication challenge shifts to the point of decision rather than the point of discovery. That’s a more interesting place to operate, closer to the outcome, closer to the relationship. One of the downsides to thinking about this is you are still, let’s say, the human in the verification loop. You’ve got to check all this stuff. Do you just believe what the agent’s surface is? We’re not at the stage yet where it’s a bit like, self-driving cars, know, you’re 99% sure it’s not going to crash and kill you. Well, you actually need 100%. You don’t need 99%. And this could be in that kind of area.

Shel Holtz: I’m not even 100% driving my own cars 100% safe.

Neville Hobson: Well, you got it. You’ve got to conduct that. So the uncomfortable conclusion that I take from what I looked into was that some of what communicators have been doing for years, content volume, keyword optimization, SEO-driven publishing may genuinely be losing its value. So the honest conversation with clients and employees is we need to redirect effort from producing content for search algorithms to building genuine authority and direct audience relationships. That takes time and you will not see the benefit of that for a while. In the meantime, you’ve got utter disruption to the existing model heading our way.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, we definitely need to do that. But I do need to reiterate that as they were making the announcements about the brand new updates to Google search at I.O., they did double down on including reference links. Here’s what I got. Even though Google is transforming search from a simple box of links into an agent driven conversational interface powered by Gemini 3.5 Flash, they are integrating reference links deeper into the experience. There’s going to be a split over how that’s done. If you’re getting AI overviews doing a regular search, they’ll still appear at the top of the standard results page and you’ll still get the blue links visible right below it. If you go into AI mode, click the AI mode button. It completely replaces the traditional results page. Within AI mode, websites are either explicitly cited as references within the AI response or they receive no visibility at all as there are no traditional link positions under.

Neville Hobson: Right. So that comes into the area of there’s no clean answer yet. So you’ve got the kind of vested interest vendor saying, well, the link’s going to be down here. I’ve not seen that prominently mentioned in any of the tech reports that I did read. Indeed, I’ve seen one that said this is not prominent at all. Where does that fit then? Or is it going to be parallel? If AI agents are going to be out there on your behalf doing all the search work, you don’t have to do anything. How does that fit? Is it going to be like, well, if I don’t want to use AI agents, I can still use the old search. Is that how it’s going to be? No one knows yet. So this will emerge, I’m pretty sure. And it may well be right that they’re scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll. There are all the links I’m used to seeing. I don’t think that’s actually how it’s going to be, matter what they said in the I.O. Developer Conference. We don’t know.

Shel Holtz: or contextual.

Neville Hobson: So you and I are actually doing what everyone else is doing, speculating what it all might be. But there’s some clear direction, such as what I mentioned just now, for communicators in particular to pay attention to here, that you could see wind of change is blowing here. And whether there’s still going to be links at the bottom of the page or there’s an AI overview somewhere else on the page, you need to pay attention to this, what’s changing. The AI agents are going to really change things here.

Shel Holtz: Well, here’s the thing, even if there are links contextually in the narrative of the AI overview or there are still blue links below, people aren’t clicking them anyway because they’re getting that AI overview answer. And we talked about this when they first released the Amazon Echo because they talked about the issue of one. Yeah, we talked about the idea that this is one true answer. It’s not 10 links. And if you don’t like those, you can scroll to the next 10.

Neville Hobson: There you go. Four years and years ago, yeah, yeah.

Shel Holtz: It’s one true answer and you don’t know where they drew it from.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. But I think it’s shifting, though, the behavior, how it works, the idea that you enter a search term, either speak it or whatever it might be, and on the fly, will create interactive visuals. It will do all sorts of things that search can’t do until now. And so you won’t get an AI overview that’s just text. It might have links to it. Whenever links to visual, it’ll have the content there and then, as I understand it from what I’ve read, but hey, it’s not clear yet. So I’m sure we’ll see voices of people that you pay attention, that I pay attention to with some sensible analysis. There’s not enough information to go on yet. The trick I’ve been thinking most about is how do I separate, I won’t call it slot because it’s not, it’s just someone’s opinion that’s not informed from the stuff that is informed. So I’ve got a handful of the latter, and probably scores of the former. I’m trying to ignore all that stuff. To me, this is like the first alarm bell. Alarm is the right word, the first alert bell that you are about to see as a communicator, a fundamental shift in how search works. And it’s going to be, I think it’s going to be pretty. It’s going to be chaotic. So you need to pay attention to this in the right way. And that’s where you need I guess really to find voices that are authority that you can trust to hear how they’re described.

Shel Holtz: Well, let’s switch gears and put AI behind us for a few minutes and talk about something entirely different. Ron Culp’s blog, Culpwrit, ran a guest post earlier this month by Anuj Agarwal with a title that’s hard to argue with, Why Podcast Placements Are the New Press Coverage? By the way, I met Ron when he was running comms at Sears when I was doing some internet consulting there. Ron is one of the senior dons of public relations these days, and I do pay attention to what’s on his blog. In his post, Agarwal isn’t talking about having a podcast. He’s talking about pitching your client, your executive, your subject matter expert as a guest on someone else’s podcast. That distinction matters because that’s where actual news is happening. And if you’re not doing this yet, you’re already behind. Now let’s start with the audience math because the case is overwhelming. According to Edison Research’s Infinite Dial 2026, which they released back in March, 80% of Americans 12 years old and older have now listened to or watched the podcast. 58% listened in the past month. That’s about 167 million Americans, an all-time record. 45% listened in the past week. And among 18 to 34 year olds, weekly podcast reach is now equivalent to broadcast television. I want you to let that sink in. I’m going to say that again. Among 18 to 34 year olds, weekly podcast reach is equivalent to broadcast television. For your client trying to reach younger adults and appearance on the right podcast has the same weekly reach as TV. Now compare that with what’s happening on the traditional media side. Pew Research found that newsroom employment in the US dropped 26% between 2008 and 2020, and that bleeding has continued ever since. Newspaper newsrooms alone are down 57% from 2008. There are just fewer journalists and fewer editorial slots, which means there’s been a shift around where people are finding their content. Your clients still want earned media that channels worth pitching have just expanded. So why is a podcast appearance more valuable than a traditional press hit? Four reasons, and they’re all important reasons. First is the time on stage. A press mention is a paragraph. Even a feature article gives you a few quotes wrapped around someone else’s narrative. A podcast guest appearance gives your client 30 to 60 minutes of uninterrupted access to an audience that chose to be there on a podcast that’s likely to be specialized as opposed to generalized. That’s not just longer, more time. It’s a fundamentally different kind of exposure. The audience hears how your client thinks, not just what they say. They hear the tone, the texture, the moments of pushback. And Nielsen research has shown that listeners trust long-form audio hosts more than they trust traditional advertising. And that trust transfers to the guests by association. Number two is durability. A press hit spikes for a day and then disappears. A podcast episode lives forever. It sits in someone’s back catalog. It shows up in search. It gets clipped and shared on LinkedIn six months later. That’s the long tail at work. And Neville, I don’t know if I’ve shared this with you, but I get emails from the host of our archive site. Remember, we switched sites at one point and we archive the old site where many, many, many episodes of FIR live and I’ll get emails saying your site has exceeded the allowed site traffic for the month and won’t be accessible until the first of the month. Who’s going and visiting this site that hasn’t been active in 11 or 12 years and listening to those old episodes of the show? 40% of podcasts

Neville Hobson: Hahaha AI agents, I would hazard a guess. Yeah.

Shel Holtz: No doubt. I don’t know if they’re listening to the episodes, but they could well be scraping that site. But 40 percent of podcast consumers now name YouTube as their primary podcast platform, which means a single guest appearance can produce both an audio asset and a video asset all from one hour of your client’s time. And that’s content you can repackage and repurpose for multiple channels. Here’s the third reason. And this is the one I really want you to hear, because most communicators miss it. A podcast appearance is increasingly how you earn traditional press coverage. Newsworthy things your client says on a podcast get picked up by the mainstream media. And now they’re not just quoting your client, they’re amplifying an extended quote in context and they’re sending readers back to the original episode. Look at Jamie Dimon. A couple of weeks ago, he gave a podcast-style interview at a Norway Sovereign Wealth Fund conference where he warned that the private credit market is worse than people think. That’s a quote, worse than people think. That single cent has generated coverage across Bloomberg, Reuters, Fortune, the Financial Times, and erased about $500 billion in alternative asset manager value the same day. The Jensen Huang interviews, a Stratechery, BG2, the All-In podcast, those generated Fortune and CNBC stories, and they do every single time. Howard Lutnick told the All-In host that, “‘Boeing executives follow me around like puppies,’ because of how he was structuring trade deals.” Fortune quoted that line word for word in a feature on the Trump administration’s trade strategy. The podcast appearance was the press strategy. That’s the model. You’ve got to, you’re not just earning a podcast placement, you’re earning the cascade of secondary coverage that flows from it. And finally, there’s depth of message. An interview lets a thought leader actually develop an argument. In a newspaper, quote, complex ideas get compressed into one sentence, usually the wrong sentence, often the safest sentence. On a podcast, your client gets to explain the why behind the what. That’s where credibility gets built and where the next sales conversation gets seeded. Now, the catch, most podcasts aren’t worth pitching. Agarwal makes this point bluntly, and he’s not wrong, of the millions of shows indexed across hosting platforms. A lot of them haven’t published in months, maybe years. They have audiences that are minuscule. They’ll book anyone with a pulse. Recommending a weak placement to your client costs them time and signals that you’re vetting is getting lazy. So here’s what to actually look for before your pitch. Publishing pattern, you know, at least two episodes a month consistently over the last six months? The guest history, scroll back through 20 or 30 episodes. Who were the guests that they booked? If your client doesn’t fit that pattern, walk away. Niche depth over raw audience size. I mean, a 600 listener show inside your client’s exact industry will outperform a 50,000 listener general business show on almost every metric that actually matters. The host social application. A host who promotes new episodes on LinkedIn extends your client’s appearance for free. And listen to one recent episode before pitching. If the host lets guests just monologue without pushback, the audience tunes out and your client gets nothing. And here’s what your client needs to bring to the conversation. Not talking points, a point of view. One counterintuitive take, one framework that actually gets used, one honest answer to a hard question. Hosts are really good at spotting the difference between a guest with something to say and a spokesperson reciting messaging. The appearances that earn return invitations, produce shareable clips, and get picked up in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal are built on original thinking. The PR pros who figure this out now, who develop a real podcast pitching practice the same way they developed a media relations practice 20 years ago, are going to look like wizards to their clients.

Neville Hobson: That’s quite a landscape you described there, Shel. I think I look at it in a way when I hear all these statistics being rattled off about how many people listening to podcasts, what’s up, my kind of eyes glaze completely because, you know, and then I hear about, you know, the Jamie Dimon of this world and these kind of, you know, CEOs of mega corporations and how they move markets with a phrase that gets picked up in the mainstream media. That doesn’t happen with, you know, as a matter of course for everyone. Amongst all the rubbish podcasts you outlined, where you’ve got minuscule audiences or not, I think about this, if I were advising someone to start a podcast and it was a business that’s a medium sized business, maybe a thousand employees in a not particularly exotic sounding industry, but they’re the market leader and they’ve got some interesting stories to tell. How is that relevant to them, knowing that the CEO of JP Morgan or whatever said something in the FT report, completely and utterly irrelevant and not likely to happen to them. So what would be of interest to a company like that who has, as I say, stories to tell, it’s worth doing something with them for a podcast for all the reasons you mentioned that how they get noticed and so forth. So that’s the trick, finding that relevance to convince them or to pitch them if you like on doing it. I mean, you’ve got some good stuff mentioned in this piece you’ve been discussing that are valid, absolutely would make a good way to pitch it. I did like the section in this piece where it talks about how to build the skill before a client formally asks. And totally. And it got me thinking, it says, identify 15 podcasts relevant to their audience and industry. It got me thinking immediately and this is where AI comes into play. Okay, so we can’t escape. This is about AI as well in this topic. Your example, where the experiments you’ve been doing, where you’ve been looking for podcasts in your industry that take guest speakers or all the criteria you’ve done and you’ve been sending out agents who’ve returned with amazing data. That is exactly how you would approach this. And you get your results fast and probably well, they’re probably definitely more accurate than if you do this manually yourself. So where the guidance talks to you about filter, filter these findings you get from shows that publish consistently and actively except guests, there’s your AI tool to do that for you. So you could apply that to this. And it would probably, again, depending which AI tool using, I would say it will give you things you didn’t know to ask even because you didn’t know, but it would find something. So AI would help you do this without doubt. But that’s not the main trust the story though. The thing you’ve outlined is very good. I agree. I just think you need to make it wholly relevant to your client who is not a Fortune 500 company, who is just a regular business, even with 20 employees, they still got a story to tell. If they’ve got a valid story to tell, there’s a chance that they’ll get noticed. And your goals might well be very different from that mega corporation example that you had, where it might be resistive temptation to listen to the sales guy to say, we want leads generated and I want to get 10 sales out of this. You might, but your goal might be different to that. Still got to be a measurable goal. So talking about our CEO will do a thought leadership piece. No, please don’t go there. You need a measurable goal. It could be leads, it could be something less esoteric than that, quite simple, raise awareness of something that you can measure. Now that then puts it in the area of something that you as a communicator know about measurable objectives. So I think scaling it back to reality is a way to do this, not just look at how many millions of people listen to podcasts, because that to me is a total eye glazing metric for most people.

Shel Holtz: Well, I think the point to be made from the number of people listening to podcasts is just that it’s a valid medium now as influential as TV. You know, if we had made this case 15 years ago, it would have been a tough sell. But the fact is that a lot of people have started to recognize the importance of being a guest on a podcast. I mean, this is something the Republicans figured out during the last presidential election cycle. So I think the scale is important, especially as you look at the numbers of diminishing opportunities in the mainstream press. In terms of Jamie Dimon, yeah, I mean, I made the point that he’s going to get on a general business podcast with 500,000 listeners, a million listeners and make news. But I also noted that for some CEOs, for some thought leaders is probably the podcast that has 600 listeners that’s in that niche area. Now, you mentioned the agent I created. It’s actually a skill. I created this in the Hermes agent platform that is configured when I launch it to go out into the podcast space and find the podcasts that meet these criteria that I listed there. But I’m able to enter the information about the person or the story or the thought leadership concept that I’m trying to pitch. So if, for example, I want to get a story out there with this guy that we have who works on all our airport projects. He is a design manager. He is really good. And he has some thought leadership ideas on construction work airside in active airports. Now, do I want to get that into the construction trades? No. What do I care if builders hear that? I want to get that into the airport trades. where the people who are hiring the builders will hear it and hear about his expertise and hear his thoughts and go, yeah, I think I want to talk to them about our next airport project. So yeah, I have the AI agent set up to go do that. It even does a first draft of the pitch based on what it knows about the host and the content of each of the podcasts it returns to me. But yeah, I have to go out there and make that pitch. I’ve got one going on right now based on a sustainability story. So it’s interesting finding the places where we want that story to go because everybody’s looking for more sustainable ways to build, but how does that affect our reputation? So I have to cue this skill in the Hermes platform to find ones that are going to be of high value for me. But I have no doubt that if my CEO gets on a podcast or that design manager gets on a podcast, and says something really interesting, it’s going to find its way into ENR, the engineering news record, which is the primary trade publication or building design and construction or any of the other trade publications out there. And that’s that trickle down. It’s not the scale of what Jamie Dimon can do, but it’s the same concept exactly just at that smaller, more niche scale.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I think that’s the key thing for me, certainly, is you’ve got to scale it relevantly to your client and their audience and market. The only other thing I’d add to that, Shel, is to let our listeners know, listen to episode 513, where you’ll hear Shel talk at length about the experiments he’s been doing with Claude CoWork, particularly, but also this example that you kind of touched on, as it were. It’s worth the listen.

Neville Hobson: Well, Dan, that was quite a report. I think an excellent assessment of what’s happening with WordPress. I know you’re a big, long time fan and user of WordPress. And so you did a good job in conveying the significant changes from WordPress 7. I think it’s worth emphasizing, and you did make the point, Dan, that a lot of the cool stuff that you talked about, AI-driven in particular, is only on the hosted WordPress, the WordPress.com service, not self-hosted WordPress. So no doubt that will be coming at some point, I would imagine. So

Shel Holtz: Yeah, the FIR site is on WordPress, but it’s the hosted version. And I’ve read about this. I upgraded it to 7 and went looking for these cool features and they weren’t there. that’s Dan’s report clarified that for me.

Neville Hobson: No, exactly, exactly. It’ll come, I’m sure. So thanks a lot, Dan. That was a really, really good report. So our next topic, going now back to the AI, the AI themes we’re following. Yeah, we can’t escape AI at all these days. We know that. But here’s the thing. There’s a Substack writer I follow called Ruben Hassid. He writes a newsletter called How to AI. And if you don’t know his work, He’s worth your time. There’ll be a link to that in the show notes. He publishes twice a week. He’s prolific. He’s sharp. And he has a gift for making uncomfortable ideas land without making you feel attacked by them. His latest piece is called You can’t Beat AI. And before you groan at the title, it’s not the piece you might expect. It’s not a doom narrative. It’s actually a remarkably clear-eyed analysis of what’s happening to the value of knowledge work and what to do about it. The core argument is this, AI is getting cheaper at a rate most people haven’t fully absorbed. We’re talking about a 6,000-fold reduction in the cost of AI intelligence over four years, he says. Not twice as cheap, 6,000 times cheaper. And crucially, not just cheaper, smarter too. So your salary is now being compared to a subscription, and the subscription is winning on price. The part in his newsletter that really got my attention was his argument about what this means for how we communicate our value. He makes the point that for decades, time spent was a proxy for quality. If something took six hours, that effort signaled something. It signaled expertise, diligence, craft. But now that production is cheap, now that a decent first draft, a market scan, a slide outline, a campaign proposal, can be generated in 30 seconds or less, time spent is a weak argument. He puts it simply, nobody cares that it took you all weekend. The better argument he says is, I understand the real problem. I knew what to ignore. I found the missing risk. I made the decision easier. I saved the team from doing the wrong thing beautifully. And that lands differently for communicators, I think, because most of us would say, Yes, of course, we’ve always sold judgment and strategic counsel. But here’s the uncomfortable follow-up question. Do our clients and employers actually pay for that? Or do they still at some level pay for the volume of deliverables, the press releases, the reports, the campaigns, and just assume the judgment comes with it? That’s what I want to explore, because if intelligence is becoming a commodity, communicators individually and as a profession, need to get much clearer and much more explicit about articulating what they offer that can’t be replicated for $20 a month. What do you think about all that, Shel?

Shel Holtz: Well, I think we’ve been talking about this issue of pricing in the AI era. Yeah, I mean, yeah, even well before AI, the hourly model has been questionable. I’ve shared this anecdote, I think probably five or six times on the show. But for those who haven’t heard it, when I was a consultant, Mark Schumann was visiting us. He worked for the same consulting firm I did at the time. And he was talking about value-add, which I opposed. I said, that should be baked into our hourly rate. And he said, okay, how does the hourly rate factor into the fact that I bring 35 years of experience to this job and I have a brainstorm in the shower that took me 20 seconds. I wouldn’t have had that brainstorm if not for that 30 years of experience, 35 years. But it still produces tremendous value to the client that may make them millions of dollars or save them hundreds of thousands of dollars. How do you value that 30 seconds it took to have that brainstorm? And I haven’t come up with a really good answer to that yet, except pricing based on outcomes. That said, I have to say that when I was an independent consultant, which I did for 21 years, I had some clients who wanted me on a retainer. And the retainer was so that they could call me when they had an issue. They didn’t want me to produce anything. They didn’t want me to write anything. They didn’t want me to create anything. They just wanted my counsel. They wanted an hour on the phone. So for X dollars, they got 10 hours a month and they could call and say, we’re going through this. What do we do? Or what’s your experience with that? I think you can still charge based on time for that. It’s the time you’re spending on the phone with them. So I don’t I don’t think charging. based on time vanishes, you just have to figure out what your formula is, where you can factor in how much time it took, where you can factor in what the overall value of it is. And then finally, what you can factor in as the ROI that the client has gotten from this, that you can come up with a formula to make a reasonable return for your effort. But the old model of saying, you know, he’s billed out at $375 an hour. It’s going to take 25 hours for this project. Here’s your price. And by the way, if there’s scope creep, we’re going to come back to you and tell you how many more hours that adds to the project. That’s not going to wash anymore. Not not under these circumstances. Especially by the way, I have to say, not when they can go to AI and ask the question before they come to you for that hour of phone time.

Neville Hobson: I think that’s a key. I mean, that’s the key thing. A client might say when you present the proposal, you just outlined, for instance, that they’ll say, you use AI. You’ve told us consistently how you’ve developed skills in how to use the tools that give you the results that you’re seeking. and you have expertise in that area. So if that’s the case, how come you’re me, you’re quoting me X hours at so much per hour at this price? So what’s your AI doing? better question might be, well, what are you doing in that case? So that’s something that we need to figure out. And I don’t think anyone has yet how to kind of Deflect that into the real questions that need to be answered, the real discussions that need to be going on, which is not that. That’s kind of an emotional based one. But the point you made, absolutely true. Anything you’re thinking of doing, the client’s already also looking at the AI tools they use to find an answer to that. They’ll be second guessing you even. In which case, that cannot sustain itself, that kind of model. It’s not going to suddenly vanish, I’m sure. And to your point too, I agree with you that some elements of service that you might provide that others will buy from you will probably still be time-based, such as the retainer model, for instance. Then again, I think your competition is the smart AI model, frankly. So that comes down to the, you you’re being… Your salary has been compared to a subscription now by the client in particular. So again, more change coming to communicators and not just communicate, but I’m focused on this. What does it mean to communicate? I’ve written about this a few times in my blog. I’ve had many conversations with people about this recently on how to counter the interference of AI. As one person put it to me, you can’t, it’s not interference. you’ve got to learn to live with it. You’ve got to learn to make the most of it, ally yourself with augmenting your ability and not just churning out stuff from a chat bot effectively and do what we’ve been discussing in previous episodes about hallucinations and setting out stuff riddled with errors because you didn’t check it. So your methodology has got to shift. And it doesn’t address the base question, which is how do we migrate as a general rule from time-based charging to value-based charging? I hear that question being asked a lot. I’m asking it too, and I don’t have an answer to that yet. So that requires some exploratory analytical conversation. And it may well turn out that there isn’t a single model that works for everyone, although there must be elements that will be consistent no matter what you do. And it requires significant input from your client or your employer to have that conversation that give you as the communicator, the kind of intelligent input you need from the business owner or your employer. What are they looking to achieve? What do they want exactly? And how can this help them achieve that? So we haven’t started any of that yet, other than asking the question. So we need to pay attention to this sooner.

Shel Holtz: yeah, we definitely do. But there’s one other factor to keep in mind here. And this is a phenomenon that I have been experiencing in addition to reading about it. And that is that for all of the productivity gains that we’re seeing from AI, and we are, mean, the time it takes my agent to go out and find those podcasts for me to do that would be hours with the agent. send it off. I go do something else and it delivers the results when it’s done, which is not hours and hours. It’s usually 15 or 20 minutes. But does this mean that I now have an extra day that I can take off because I have got all of my work done? No, I’m as busy as I ever was. I am filling those hours with work for my employer. I believe it is high value work and it’s either figuring out how to do something with the AI or managing those AI agents or creating the agents or skilling up the agents or it’s doing the things that AI can’t do. So yeah, I’m busier than I’ve ever been. And by the way, I know we’re not talking about the job-pocalypse here as we heard it referred to earlier. But increasingly, I know there are some things that AI can replace customer service agents being a great example. I think for most of the jobs out there, there’s elements of your job it can replace. It can’t replace the whole job. And for all of the companies I’ve seen announcing layoffs that are tied to AI, I have not heard one of them say, and these are the full-time agents that have replaced the full-time work that this person did. I think they’re just anticipating what they’re going to be able to do with AI. So I don’t think we’re going to see the job loss that we’ve been talking about because I think they’re going to realize that what we still need 70% of what this person does and he can devote more time and attention to that because the 30% that the AI can do, we’re going to let the AI do. So, the reason I point all this out. is that while companies may for a while think, who needs an agency? I can do all this with AI. They’re going to realize what they’re producing is slop, that they don’t have the time to put in the effort required to generate the right kinds of agents, the right kinds of skills, the right kinds of prompts. They don’t know how to assemble all of this together in a strategy. And they don’t want to take the time to work with AI to do it. my God, this is what agencies are for. I’m going to have an agency do it. So the agencies will take advantage of the AI, but I think there’s still going to be work for agencies to do. There just may be a valley as companies say, the AI can do all this for us before they realize, well, you know what? It really can’t.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I guess a short answer to this, there’s no single answer to how you do this. There’s no real way of proving value in an age of cheap intelligence, I suppose, to use that way of describing it. It’s going to get cheaper, according to Hassid, I agree, based on what he said in this, but also what I’m seeing others say. But there’s still a role. I think we need to be clear-eyed about what the future holds in this regard. And you’ve mentioned a good point, I think, about job losses and the way in which that’s currently playing out, where people are taking a big hammer to a tool that doesn’t require that at all to solve, where you’re just laying off people. You’ve got some leaders in some organizations who truly do not deserve to occupy those roles in those companies, the way they treat employees in this regard. But you’ve also got some very sensitive, empathetic people who don’t do it like that. So that’s the landscape we’ve got. In the meantime, I would say communicators need to think about this more. Even if you don’t know the answers, OK, compile all your questions then. Then do some research yourself even to find out what others say. Hey, I will help you do that. And at least get this on your radar before it’s too late.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, and it is definitely going to get cheaper for no other reason that the AI companies don’t want to be spending the money they’re spending on their infrastructure, especially the power requirements. So they are investing in finding solutions to this, not because they are all deep, sincere environmentalists, but because it’s costly to them and they’d rather not be spending that money. All right, well, we’re going to shift away from AI again for a moment. Here’s a phrase that was,

Neville Hobson: There you have it. I bet you we’re not. Go on then, go on, go on, go on.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, bet we are. Well, maybe not entirely. Here’s a phrase that wasn’t in my vocabulary three months ago, the clipping economy. And if you’re a communicator, you need to know what this is because it’s already changing how content about your client or your employer travels and whether you have any control over where it ends up. Here’s what’s happening. A piece from NPR featured a 24-year-old guy in Antwerp, Belgium named Emre Bayraktar. He was working three part-time jobs. He was cleaning cars. He had the night shift at a warehouse. He was making sandwiches at Subway. But in his spare time, he’d take long influencer interviews, edit them into short clips and post them. And one night he got a notification telling him that he’d earned $12 on one of his clips. Two weeks later, he’d earned $2,500. Today, he runs a network of 40,000 freelance clippers. 40,000 individuals like him who take long-form content and turn it into short term clips. He runs that network and that’s the model. Streamers, podcasters, brands, even political campaigns post bounties on marketplaces and anyone with a phone and a video editor can claim the bounty by chopping up the long-form content into vertical clips and posting them to TikTok, Reels, Shorts, X. You get paid per thousand views. NPR cited recent bounties at a dollar per thousand views for Major League Baseball clips, $25 per thousand views for an AI startup. Forbes reported that generating a million views through one of these clipping companies, a company literally called Clipping, founded by a guy named Anthony Fujiwara, cost somewhere between a hundred bucks and a thousand bucks. Fujiwara’s company did $7.7 million in sales in 10 months. MrBeast started his own clipping company called Vyro late last year. Ed Elson, who co-hosts the Prof G Markets podcast with Scott Galloway, calls this the clip economy. And his argument is that the clips are no longer promotion for the show, the clips are the show. The live streamer, Hassan Piker, pulls about 33,000 viewers for a typical live stream. His average clip pulls 700,000 views. The clip is 20 times bigger than the thing it was clipped from. And Adam Rosenberg from Digiday says clips used to be the byproduct. Now they’re the product. And yeah, I’ve got personal evidence. This is true. I think I mentioned just recently someone I work with told me she does not watch Saturday Night Live. She’ll watch 10, 12, 13 clips so that she can see the funny bits. So what does this mean for those of us who work in PR and corporate communications? Let’s answer three questions. First, do you need to watch for Clippers using your client’s content out of context? Yes, always. The streamer Tim “TimTheTatman” Betar, told Digiday that being clipped out of context is now the cost of putting anything long-form online. Clippers will pull the line that fits a narrative they want to push and let it travel. If your CEO does a 45 minute podcast and says something deliberately provocative at minute 31 to make a setup payoff at minute 33, you should assume someone is going to clip the provocative part and lead the payoff on the cutting room floor. So monitor for that. Set up alerts on your client’s name across TikTok, Reels, and Shorts the same way you set up Google Alerts 20 years ago. And have a response plan ready because by the time you find the clip, it may already have a million views. Second, should legal get involved? Sometimes, but think carefully before you reach for the cease and desist. Frank Poh, who runs a creator focused law firm called Poh Law, told Digiday that publicity rights are the live legal issues here, meaning your client’s image, voice and likeness being used to sell something without permission. If a clipper is making money off a clip of your CEO, and especially if the clip is being used to promote a product, you have an argument. You have a case, but if it’s a clipper just monetizing views on a clip that’s substantially accurate, you’re probably stuck with the Streisand effect. Going after a clipper with 200 followers can generate more press than the clip ever would. Pick your battles, save the legal response for clips that are deceptively edited, false or commercially exploitative, and let the rest go. Third, and this is the one I expect people are going to push back on, Should you pay clippers to amplify your clients content? Well, here’s the case for it. The Digiday piece pointed to a clip of John Hamm dancing in a club on the Apple TV show, Your Friends and Neighbors, that went so viral that Hamm got asked about it on The Tonight Show. That’s an enormous earned media outcome from a 30 second clip. Spencer Pratt, the former reality star now running for mayor of Los Angeles, is openly running paid clipping campaigns through the Whop platform, and disclosing it, which is the right way to do it. fintech, crypto, and AI companies are the heaviest users of clipping farms precisely because they operate in legal gray areas. Most clippers don’t disclose payment, which means almost every paid ClipYou commission is potentially a violation of the Federal Trade Commission rules. Here in the U.S., the U.K. Gambling Commission has already taken enforcement action. X has flagged the practice publicly. Instagram CEO Adam Masseri put out a video on April 30th saying the platform will crack down on re-uploaders. And if you go down this road, you disclose every payment every time, no exceptions, and you assume that the FTC is reading your contracts. The clip not going anywhere. The question isn’t whether your client gets clipped, it’s whether you have a strategy for when it happens.

Neville Hobson: Well, that’s quite a story, I had not heard about this either. The whole idea of clipping farms or as the NPR piece wove its story quite skillfully in an interesting way about the kid in Antwerp, how he started out and then the other examples in there of these people. There’s not really a flip, but a kind of an alert note. that the ones who are making the real money on this, they say, tend to be the middlemen clippers rather than the original creators. And that, think, is clearly a sign that this is ripe for intervention by regulators and others in companies who see this kind of behavior. So this may well be one of those things that is temporary in the context of that. The idea of clipping, though, isn’t. And so some big names are going to move into this soon, I would guess. But the thoughts occurring to me when listening to what you were saying was, how does this kind of start? How do you find companies to do this? You asked a question not rhetorically on should your employee or client get involved in this? It’s high risk, but potentially significant. return on that risk, think, like the example you mentioned of the John Hamm example. I heard about that. I heard about that without realizing it was because of a clip. So this probably is one of these natural evolutionary steps in the stage of where we are with online communication, online digital communication that is generational largely, isn’t it? If it’s what is it, Gen Z or even Gen Alphas, I suppose. sharing all this stuff to TikTok and other places. I’ve not seen it on Facebook, but again, I wasn’t knowing what to look for. I’d make a point of looking. How do you identify this stuff, particularly if they’re not disclosing anything? Does it look kind of like, that guy posted this really interesting clip, not knowing that he’s a clipper? Definitely, you need to be aware of this from a communicator’s point of view. you’ve looked into this more than I have. So it’s difficult to say more than that at this point. But I think this is a phenomenon. It’s growing. We’re going to see more of this before, in some way or form, it gets regulated. I don’t mean that from an official point of view. But I don’t see this as remaining unfettered for much longer.

Shel Holtz: No, not at all. I mean, figure the kid in Antwerp has what, 44,000 clippers working for him. Then there’s the Whop and the one that MrBeast started. So you’ve got to figure there’s tens of thousands of people out there creating these clips. How many can they create in a day? Probably hundreds, if not more. And they’re probably flooding the Internet. We just don’t see them because we’re not looking for things that are associated with the tags.

Neville Hobson: Incredible.

Shel Holtz: that they’re putting on them. you’ve got to figure that people are seeing clips and assuming that they’re something that was created because somebody was passionate about it or it came from the company or it came from the person whose image you’re seeing when that may not be true at all. Somebody else is making bank off of that without permission and may not even need the permission. But I got to tell you, the next time I get somebody at my company placed on a podcast, assuming there is a video, I will be clipping that podcast and sharing those clips both to raise awareness of what our spokesperson said, but also to drive views back to the podcast so they can see everything that she said. I’ll be doing that. In fact, for on the same page, the new podcast I started with Steve Crescenzo, I am using a service called Opus Clip. That’s what they do is clips. You upload video. And it creates clips with the closed caption type of, here’s what they’re saying in real time. And I’ve been sharing those on TikTok and Instagram and Facebook and not X because I’m not there. But we’ll see if it drives any more awareness of the show, but this is real and it’s big and it’s important.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. Yeah, I did like the concluding part of the NPR piece where they where someone said, suddenly I realized clips aren’t the promotional material for the content. Clips are the content. And that, to your point on your colleague you mentioned, who doesn’t watch Saturday Night Live, watches the clips so she could pick out the best bits to her, the best bits that she finds on TikTok without watching the show. I do that with some stuff and I never realized, hey, that’s clipping. I didn’t realize that. So that actually got me thinking a bit about something I was doing not long ago with a podcast. I was contracted to a company to produce podcasts. We did a little bit of that. And I remember thinking at the time that the clips are getting more traffic than the actual podcasts. Okay, I have learned from, I should have. paid more attention to that. So maybe we could try with FIR. I mean, I’m thinking one of the reasons we don’t do that, I’m sure from suddenly speaking, just from my point of view in in producing content is I didn’t have time to do it. I have no time to spend. So I would look for something that made it dead simple to just create five clips and I could look at each say absolutely spot on with the have to say Now I need to edit the front and the back. No, no, Just give me that content. Riverside offers that tool, as you know. And maybe there’s something we can do there. But that might be interesting.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I haven’t been terribly impressed with Riverside’s clips so far. That’s why I’m paying separately for Opus, which I think does a better job. And they do give you some editing tools that makes it really easy to clean them up quickly. I picked on the same page for this for two reasons. One is every other week. So I have plenty of time between episodes to do this. And the other is it’s brand new. So we’re trying to gin up awareness. So we’ll see how it goes. I don’t have any metrics on this yet, but I’m really curious to see how it pays off.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, definitely worth paying attention to. The Wall Street Journal ran a piece on the 15th of May in its CIO Journal section that I think deserves more attention from communicators than it’s likely to get because on the surface it looks like an IT story, but underneath it’s something more interesting than that. The headline is, Companies have a new AI problem. Too many agents. The reporter is Belle Lin and she spoke to technology leaders at companies including Lyft, Davita, GitLab and FICO about a phenomenon they’re calling AI agent sprawl. We’ve talked about AI agents quite a bit recently. So this really is relevant to those conversations. Here’s the situation. As agentic AI platforms have become easier to use, we’re talking tools that even non-technical employees can operate without involving IT. People across organizations are spinning up AI agents. at a remarkable rate. Agents that summarize emails, write briefs, analyze data, automate workflows, conduct research. One company told the journal its 3,500 employees are creating dozens of new agents every single day. Another has over 10,000 agents already deployed. And Gartner projects that within two years, so that’s before 2030, the average Fortune 500 enterprise will be running over 150,000 agents. So that’s the average enterprise multiply that by how many Fortune 500 enterprises around the big numbers. The IT problem is obvious as the journal costs cybersecurity duplication conflicting outputs, but only 13% of organizations believe they have adequate governance in place. That’s a striking gap. Now here’s where I think communicators need to lean into this. When you have agents operating across an organization. often invisibly, often without central oversight, summarizing information, drafting communications, automating decisions, who is responsible for the accuracy and consistency of what those agents produce. And when something goes wrong, when an agent produces conflicting results or surfaces inaccurate information that makes its way into a client communication or an internal briefing, who owns that? Who manages the narrative around it? We’ve talked about agentic AI on FI before, as I mentioned, mostly from the angle of what agents can do and why communicators should be paying attention. This story is the flip side of that conversation. It’s what happens when agent adoption outpaces the governance frameworks needed to manage it. And it’s a reminder that governance isn’t just a technology challenge, it’s a communication challenge. Somebody in these organizations need to be thinking about transparency, accountability, and trust. And that sounds a lot like a communicator’s job to me. So we talked about some really serious errors made by organizations by not having the human in the loop, as I mentioned earlier. This, in my view, fits into that conversation, except it’s now become much more urgent if you’ve got this scale emerging, which clearly it is emerging. And what do we do about it? So is it the communicator’s job? I kind of qualify my own question. Sounds like a communicator’s job, but is it? What do you think?

Shel Holtz: Well, partly. I mean, there’s definitely a role here for IT and definitely a role for the senior leadership of the organization. But we absolutely have a part to play here. So I think one of the problems is that a lot of organizations establish their governance, their guardrails, their policies in the early days of Gen.A.I. as they saw employees starting to use it, say, hey, we’d better have some rules, especially since we’re going to adopt it. So many companies that had Office 365 contracts suddenly had access to Copilot and wanted to make that available. So they came up with their governor’s policies before anybody was talking about agents. Well, I can’t say nobody was, I’m sure they were at the AI labs and…

Neville Hobson: Yeah, just one, don’t forget, the journal says only 13% of organizations believe they have adequate governance in place, which means what? 70%, 80%, something percent do not have it in place at all.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, that’s the thing. And I think those are the ones that may think that they do because they spent a lot of time, they worked with legal and HR and they came up with their governance and now we have agents and the governance doesn’t address them. It addresses prompting and it addresses things like don’t put sensitive information into a prompt in a public AI model, doesn’t say a word about agents. So I think one thing we need to look at is revisiting the governance policies that we have. And here’s where a communicator can come into. into play is look at your governance and then propose some enhancements in the great language that only we communicators are able to craft and send those to legal NHR and IT and say, you know, we need to update our governance. Here’s a proposed draft and at least get things kick started. But, you know, not all of the agents are ones where we need to be thinking about them. Although, I think there are some issues where we could get involved, but I work in a construction company. I have project engineers who are doing things like submittals and RFIs, stands for requests for information. And a lot of that, I think there’s potential for agent work. I’m not that interested. If you can be more productive in your job as a project engineer, more power to you. I think where there’s some process. One of the things to worry about is I don’t want every PE spinning up their own agent independently. If somebody comes up with a good agent to do this with, we should be sharing that throughout the organization so that there are consistent results and we don’t have to be worrying about any mistakes or misphrasing or anything that went into the creation of an agent, creating bad results over here on this project, but great results on this one where they knew what they were doing when they spun up their agent. So there should be, I mean, that should be baked into the governance that says we don’t want, you know, 175 agents created by different people all doing the same thing. Where I get worried though is where they’re answering emails, where they’re answering customer service questions. You know, who reviewed the voice and the tone of those responses and who approved the messaging guardrails? When an agent says something wrong publicly, who’s accountable for that? If it’s a marketing message, is marketing responsible or is it IT? Nobody has the answers to this yet. And I don’t think anybody’s asking. We should be the ones who are asking.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, it’s, what a chaotic landscape we live and work in. I think, I agree, Shel. I mean, communicators have a clearly significant role. I could conclude as we’re saying, hey, communicators, this is another thing you’ve got to be getting involved in now in this. This is how you prove your value. So add this to the 15 new things that you now have to get to deal with. Here’s number 60.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I was just blown away when I read this, that the Pentagon staff used Google’s agent designer on genai.mil to vibe code more than 100,000 AI agents in about five weeks. They hold IL-5 authorization. That means they can deal with sensitive, unclassified data. Their chief deputy for intelligence said at a symposium, I’m on team go fast. So if corporate communicators think this is a problem, they have time to think about the military, the actor we’d expect to be most cautious is already at 100,000 agents and accelerating. Now, Gartner in step two of the process they outlined, step two is to build a centralized agent inventory. And that was framed as a technical thing. It tells IT what’s running. But for communicators, we need to know what they’re all saying, what tone, what facts, what brand voice. Our job is to make sure the inventory captures the messaging dimension, not just the technical one. Otherwise you end up with 150,000 versions of your brand voice. And once we’re able to analyze what they’re doing, we’re able to go back and say, hey, you need to adapt, adjust that agent. So it does this instead of that.

Neville Hobson: Well, interesting times ahead as always from everything we talk about here. I would say conclude, buckle up. That’s what I said.

Shel Holtz: Absolutely. Also something else to buckle up for, we have an interview coming in June. We haven’t had an FIR interview in a while, but we have a returning guest. He hasn’t been on the show in something like 15, 16 years, but Pete Blackshaw is joining us based on some work he has spent a couple of years doing about the role of AI in customer service. it’s going to be a great conversation. I was just blown away by what I read in his post about this. So looking forward to that. Yeah, watch for that in June. Also, of course, coming in June is our next long-form episode. We are going to record that on Saturday, June 21st and make it available on Monday the I’m sorry, it’s going to be on Monday the 22nd. We’re going to record on Saturday the 20th. I think I got that right. Anyway.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. Yeah. Looking forward. Yep. No, we’ll be recording actually on Saturday, yeah, the 20th, you’re right. And publishing on the 22nd,

Shel Holtz: The 20th. There you go. Yeah, I can count squares on calendars. But watch for that. It’s coming. And of course, we will have our midweek episodes in between all that. We do hope that you will comment on anything you’ve heard that raised a thought from this episode or from any of the upcoming shorter midweek episodes. You know where to share them. Send them to us at [email protected]. Attach an audio file if you like. You can record that audio file right off of the FIR website, in which case you don’t even need to email us. We get that. There’s a tab that says send voicemail right there on the side of the page. You can leave comments on the post for this episode at FIRPodcastNetwork.com or wherever we share news about the latest episode dropping, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Threads. We’re everywhere. We’re everywhere except TikTok. right now, and maybe we’ll fix that if we start clipping. And that will be a wrap for this episode of For Immediate Release.

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