The history of public relations over the last 30 years is a litany of one failure after another — failures to recognize and embrace technologies that represented seismic shifts in how people and organizations communicate. The internet. The web. Social media. Smartphones. The video shift. And now, with AI, the industry seems poised to do it again. As many organizations explore how AI will reshape them, PR agencies still seem unable to figure out billing models to replace the now-useless hourly rate. In this short midweek episode, Neville looks at a post from Stephen Waddington that laments the industry’s intransigence, and Shel and Neville discuss what PR should be doing.

Links from this episode:

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

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

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

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

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

Raw Transcript

Shel Holtz: Hi everybody and welcome to episode number five hundred and eighteen of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.

Neville Hobson: And I’m Neville Hobson. So here’s a question I want to put to you right at the start, and I’d like you to sit with it as Shel and I work through this topic today. Public relations as a profession has faced two seismic technology shifts in the last 30 years. In fact, more than two, but I’m just going to mention these two. The internet arrived in 1995. Social media arrived around 2007. And in both cases, PR largely got it wrong. Not wrong in the sense of ignoring the technology. Wrong in the sense of fundamentally misreading what it meant. In 1995, we thought the internet was a publishing problem. In 2007, we thought social media was just another broadcast channel. And the disciplines that grew out of both—search, content marketing, influencer marketing—were largely built by people who weren’t us, people outside the profession who saw what we missed. So the question is: are we about to do it a third time? We’ll address that question in just a minute.

That’s the challenge Stephen Waddington lays down in a piece he’s just written for Influence, the member magazine of the CIPR, the Chartered Institute of Public Relations. Stephen is someone whose thinking I respect considerably. He’s been one of the sharper and more honest voices in UK PR for years. And this article comes off the back of a book he’s just co-edited, AI and Public Relations: A How-To Guide for Implementation and Management, published in May. And what he’s arguing in this piece is that this is no longer a theoretical debate, as job reductions are happening now. He gives specific examples. Three account executives doing media monitoring—that’s now one tool. A two-person intranet team—that’s now a fraction of the effort. The UK government has listed public relations professionals among the twenty occupations most exposed to large language models. We’re on the list. Early career employment in those sectors is also in relative decline.

Now, Waddington is not a pure pessimist. He sees a plausible optimistic path. The career pyramid becomes a diamond. Firms building roles around insight and risk management rather than billable hours. A rough near-term reduction of perhaps fifteen to twenty percent in entry-level positions, followed by net growth as scope expands and new roles emerge, the way digital did after 2000. He thinks in-house teams especially have an opportunity here. When AI absorbs the routine, it frees space for the work that corporate communication teams have always needed but rarely had capacity for. But he gives serious, genuine weight to the pessimistic case too. And this is where I think the article gets interesting. He references Martin Ford, author of The Rise of the Robots in 2015, and Ford’s argument that previous technology waves hit one tier of the workforce and the tier above absorbed the displaced.

This time Ford says there’s no tier above. The advisory work that absorbed previous shifts is itself the target. Waddington doesn’t fully accept that in his article, but he doesn’t dismiss it either. And then there’s the argument that I think should be keeping every agency head and comms director awake at night—the pipeline. He’s hearing a common response from firms right now: freeze your apprenticeship schemes, freeze your graduate intake, let AI cover the production work. And he calls that, bluntly, organizational self-harm. Because in five years, those organizations will have nobody who understands how the systems actually work, why they fail, and crucially when to override them. You cannot run an advisory profession without a pipeline. And you cannot build a pipeline if you spent five years dismantling the entry points. So that’s where I think we should start today’s conversation. Not with the technology, with the choices.

Because Waddington’s closing argument, and it’s what I find compelling, is that human agency still exists here. The technology isn’t making decisions. We are. The question is whether we’re making them wisely, or whether for the third time in thirty years, we’re about to hand the future of our profession to people who aren’t us. Shel, what’s your instinct on this?

Shel Holtz: Very much what yours and Stephen’s is. I have been saying for decades that the public relations industry is always, always, always late to the game when there is a new technology that is going to shape the way communicators do their jobs. We were late to the internet, for sure. We were late to the World Wide Web. My first book on communicating online—well, actually, my first book was on intranets, but the first one that got any attention was Public Relations on the Net—came out before the World Wide Web, before there was a graphical user interface. So there were plenty of opportunities for PR before the web, based on the capabilities of the internet. Then we missed the web, then we missed social media. In between we missed some other seismic shifts—mobile, being able to communicate with people based on the fact that they now had this computer in their pocket. We missed the pivot to visual communication, we missed the pivot to video communication. And now, yeah, we are poised to miss the pivot to AI. And that’s not to suggest that PR people aren’t using it. I think they are, but I think they’re using it at a very superficial level and are succumbing to a lot of the hype out there about things like job loss and “get rid of your entry-level people.” That’s all mundane drudge work that the partners and senior people don’t want to do—the account execs—so hand that all off to the AI and you don’t need to pay those people anymore.

And you’re exactly right. I was listening to a podcast over the weekend where they were talking about the same issue, but they were talking about it in the context of law firms. And they were making the point that the associates that are brought in out of law school do the drudge work that the partners don’t want to do. They write contracts, right? They do things like that. And now that the AI can do that, who needs them? Well, the question becomes: where do the future partners come from when the ones who are already at the partner level retire? There’ll be nobody to take those jobs. We are not rethinking the industry, and we’re not rethinking it from two perspectives. One of those perspectives is the agency. The other perspective is the in-house side of communications. They’re two sides of the same coin. But I think we need to split them apart and look at them in terms of how we need to reinvent the profession. You and I have talked about reinventing how we bill, how we price, because the hourly model makes no sense anymore. But what does an entry-level person do if the AI can handle a lot of that drudge work? And it can.

I mean, we’ve talked about on this show that I’ve set up a Hermes instance and it is out there. In fact, I haven’t checked my Telegram account yet, but there should be 10 links to recent news stories that are prime for me to news-check because I set up an agent to do that. I have an agent set up, a skill set up, that I can deploy anytime I want to. It is set up to analyze the websites of twenty-two of our competitors. And all I have to do is tell it what I want it to analyze. Do I want it to look at how they handle their project portfolios? Do I want it to look at how they handle their thought leadership? I can ask it any of those questions and it’ll come back and give me a very nice report. I could absolutely set it up to do media monitoring. I’m starting to question the need for my media monitoring service at work, although the agent that I have set up to do some of this certainly can’t get behind the paywall the way that the media monitoring service can, because they pay the licensing fee for all of those. So if the AI can assume all of this work, it’s not a question of saying we don’t need entry-level people. It’s a question of reimagining what entry-level people should be doing.

In terms of AI: What should they be doing with AI, and what new things can we be having them do that we haven’t thought of before, or that we always wished they could do if they didn’t have all of this drudge work that they had to spend their time on? It’s time for a reinvention, and I don’t see anybody talking about that. I haven’t seen a whole lot of ideas about where all this should go.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I’m with you on that a hundred percent. Exactly my sentiment as well, that you don’t see people talking about this in a truly serious way. I see on LinkedIn—if that’s any barometer, I don’t know if it is or not—but I see people mentioning this now and again and “we ought to do something about that.” But there’s no webinars, no seminars, no get-togethers on the topic of reinventing the agency, let’s say. It’s a topic I’ve written about myself, and value-based pricing versus time-based pricing. And it’s interesting how Stephen Waddington addresses that topic in his article. It’s quite a pointed observation he makes that’s worth pushing on. If you’re still selling time rather than value, he says, AI will break your model. That’s a direct challenge to the billable-hour structure that much of agency PR still runs on. So the firms getting this right are building around insight, outcome, and risk management instead. It’s worth asking how many firms are actually making that structural shift versus just talking about it. Not enough. Doesn’t mean to say they’re ignoring it. Far from it. I think it’s largely because they don’t know what to do. How do they address this? So there’s an opportunity for someone with some insights and answers to help educate firms like that. There’s a consulting opportunity, if you like.

Shel Holtz: I was thinking exactly the same thing. If somebody’s looking for a pivot in their career, that sounds like one to me.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, yeah. So we are at that place. Again, go back just three years, 2023, when we wrote our pieces about that CIPR survey, and twenty-five percent of the respondents said they’d never ever use AI. It was pretty absolute, the answers. Here we are, three years later, and I bet you that number’s down to five percent, if not less. I can’t imagine anyone—and it causes a very broad question, “would you use AI, yes or no?” It’s a bit like “should we stay in the EU, yes or no?” I mean the Brexit referendum—well, people, what a dumb question. But so that’s where we’re at. But I believe a lot of the landscape is now so polluted with everyone’s opinion that it’s very confusing to zero in on what are the issues I need to be thinking about in an organization. Plus, I see so many people—I saw one just this morning—someone’s got a PDF book on how to move your business to selling value, basically, not time. And it’s not how many hours you did, it’s what did you deliver to the client.

So it’s great, but it needs to be more authority than that, I think. And this is where the profession comes in—professional bodies like the CIPR, the PRSA in the US. The CIPR has done a good job in raising awareness about AI in the right way, in context related to public relations. They’ve had this AI panel for some time now with senior practitioners leading it. This book’s come out and it’s got a lot of support from practitioners in the UK and beyond. So maybe now is the time that this is going to get taken a bit more seriously than people do. I think though what Stephen worries about—and I think it’s not a misplaced worry—is the point that people are being laid off. Layoffs are happening all the time and most people believe it’s because AI is going to be more efficient and all that kind of stuff. And there must be some truth in some of that. But he also mentions something quite interesting in his article, because he says that most of the conversation about AI and jobs focuses on redundancy risks from above—leadership cutting roles. We’ve talked about that quite a bit. But Waddington notes a quieter pressure running in the opposite direction. Junior and mid-career practitioners are walking out of organizations they consider too far behind the curve.

So firms that move too slowly aren’t just at risk of getting the technology wrong, they’re at risk of losing the people who could help them get it right. The talent drain is bi-directional. Now that’s an interesting element to bring into this discussion, I think—that it’s those folks who are walking away. He doesn’t say, and I hadn’t found anything before we started recording, as to where they’re all going. Are they leaving the profession entirely, or are they just looking for a place that—in a sense they feel it’s worth going to this company because they’ve got it switched on, that they’re clued into this? So maybe that’s the state we’re in. Doesn’t answer the questions, mind you, and they’re coming thick and fast now, I think. I see, again, LinkedIn is a kind of barometer of sentiment, if you will—not in the analytics way, but the feeling you see expressed in some posts from some people who are worth reading about it. And that includes many of the people that I follow and that you would follow as well. So you’re seeing this, but it’s all very random. That’s the thing. And it requires something more than that. And voices like Stephen’s, yours when you were talking about this—we’ve missed about three, four, five times, that sort of thing. What’s going to make people really pay attention to this?

Shel Holtz: I hate to say it, but it’s the same thing that has always made the industry pay attention, and that’s when they suffer financial pain. The reason we have not embraced as an industry these technological changes is our billings were fine. We were doing just fine as an industry financially. So why should we make this risky change to something that we don’t quite understand and we’re not convinced is going to have all that much impact or will necessarily stick around all that long? That leaves an opening for other industries—advertising and marketing—to sneak in. It also leaves an opportunity for boutiques that specialize in this to start up and take money off the table that was there for the PR agencies that were already in business. And this seems to be a recurring pattern: if we’re not feeling the financial pain, we’re not gonna make any change. As soon as we start to feel that pain, as soon as we see our clients going to the boutiques and going to the marketing agencies, then we go, “we better change.” And then we’re behind the curve. So I think that’s the big issue and the big challenge—to be proactive rather than reactive when these technologies create these opportunities, or create the requirement, if we wait, that we must change because we’ve already seen these revenues go to somebody else.

One thing to keep in mind: absolutely there have been layoffs within the industry and they have been attributed to AI. It is important to keep in mind though—and this was reinforced in that very same podcast I was listening to that I mentioned earlier—that if you look at economic data, there’s no evidence of mass layoffs as a result of AI. The unemployment rate is pretty much where it was before all of this. The number of new jobs that are being reported, at least in the US, has actually been pretty strong. The jobs report the last month was quite encouraging. So we keep hearing about the mass layoffs and they may be coming. They may not.

Because frankly, what I see—and I don’t know if this is unique to the construction industry, I doubt it; I think it may be a bigger issue in the construction industry, but I think this is probably true of most jobs—is it’s not the job that gets replaced by AI, it’s tasks within the job. And then there are other tasks that the AI can’t do. The other thing is that there are things that we have wished that we could do, but haven’t had the time to do, from an internal comms standpoint and even, I suspect, a PR standpoint from inside the organization, the client side. I mean, I remember when I was in my first corporate job. This was with Arco. I was there from ’77 to ’83 with some brilliant communicators, but the company believed in it. So they funded the internal comms department. We had 25 employees in internal comms in five cities.

And each of us had beats, just like you were a newspaper reporter with a beat. I had two beats. I had Arco Petroleum Products, which was the gas stations and the merchandising of cans of motor oil and things like that, and Arco Marine, which was the oil tankers that transported oil mainly from Alaska down to the refineries along the West Coast. And I spent time—I mean, that was my job, was to go hang out, to spend time, to shadow somebody, to do a ride-along, to ride on a tanker, to spend a day at one of the gas stations and really get a sense, and to be able to report on this a little more intimately than just calling somebody and doing an interview over the phone. And in public relations, I think it’s important to remember that “relations” part of the public relations label. How do you build relations? Well, if AI really does take away a lot of that drudge work that we spend the time doing while we’re sitting at our desk, then we have time to get up from our desks and go out and hang out with the publics that we are dealing with and build those relations. And why wouldn’t we want to do that? AI can’t do that. AI can’t get up, get their car and go to where the public is. Maybe it’s a community relations organization, maybe it’s a division of your business. Maybe it’s a customer base that is gathering—well, let’s say it’s Ford Motor Company and there’s a car club that’s meeting. Whatever it may be, we have the opportunity now to become much more entwined with those publics.

And do a much better job of understanding them. Yeah, we still want to do the data, we still want to do the analytics, but there’s nothing like sitting with them and looking them in the eye and talking with them to build an understanding that’s going to help you communicate with them and help you build trust among them. That’s just one idea of what we can do with this freed-up time. And this is an important point—and I saw this in one of the reports that came out just last week, I think it was—the value that we get from saving an hour because AI can do it just leaks out of the bottom of the organization if we don’t know what we’re going to replace that hour with that has value. And we hear about all the savings of time that AI is going to give us. I haven’t heard a whole lot about how organizations are figuring out how to reallocate that time among those employees.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, yeah, neither me. No, I agree. And you do hear a lot of talk about the concept of that. I mean there’s lots in this topic, Shel, really, and you’ve thrown some bright light on some of the things we should be doing. I like the idea of going out to meet your publics, as it were. It’s winding the clock back, actually, to how we used to do all this back in the day, before all this tech was there.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, it really is.

Neville Hobson: We had to go out and find the sources and interview them face to face and, you know, meet down the pub or whatever. So maybe we need to examine what worked in the past and bring it to the fore again.

Shel Holtz: When I was a newspaper reporter, before I made the switch to corporate communications, I was with a local community daily newspaper, and I used to go hang out at the bar after work where all of the government workers hung out after work. Got to know them, got to listen in, got some pretty good stories out of that. But also I could pick up the phone and call some of these people because they knew me. I wasn’t just the reporter who called when I needed a quote or needed some information. I was the guy they just had a drink with.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, exactly. Lessons to learn there, I think. So yeah, lots of good ideas here. I think Stephen Waddington did a good job in literally describing the landscape and expressing some of his concerns. That’s prompted this conversation. So let’s hope this adds to the topics that people need to be talking about. So listeners, hope this is helpful.

Shel Holtz: And listeners, if your organization is actually making some changes and doing some pivots, we’d love to hear about it. And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #518: Is the PR Industry Blowing It Again? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.