FIR Interviews

Your brand is no longer defined solely by what you say about yourself. Increasingly, it is defined by the answers AI gives when someone asks about you.

That simple but profound shift lies at the heart of The Answer Economy, the forthcoming book by Pete Blackshaw, entrepreneur, founder of BrandRank.ai, and former Global Head of Digital and Social Media at Nestlé.

As AI assistants and agents become increasingly influential in how people discover information, evaluate products and make decisions, organisations face a new communications challenge. It’s no longer enough to tell your story well. Your organisation also needs to be accurately understood by the AI systems that increasingly act as intermediaries between brands and the people they serve.

In this FIR Interview, Pete joins Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz to discuss why AI should be viewed less as another marketing channel and more as an auditor of organisational credibility. Together, they explore why trust, transparency and evidence are becoming more important than marketing claims, how different AI models develop different perspectives on brands, why communicators need to think beyond traditional search optimisation, and what organisations can do today to prepare for an increasingly agent-driven future.

For communicators, the implications are profound. Success in the answer economy won’t depend on producing more content. It will depend on whether an organisation has earned the evidence, transparency and trust that AI systems increasingly use to evaluate every claim it makes.

Pete Blackshaw is founder and CEO of BrandRank.ai, an AI visibility and brand intelligence platform that helps organisations understand how AI answer engines evaluate brands.

A two-time technology entrepreneur, Pete previously founded PlanetFeedback, one of the earliest consumer feedback platforms, which was acquired by Nielsen, where he later served as a senior executive. He also established Procter & Gamble’s first interactive marketing team before spending nine years as Global Head of Digital and Social Media at Nestlé, leading the company’s worldwide digital transformation initiatives.

Throughout his career, Pete has focused on the intersection of consumer trust, digital communication and brand reputation. His forthcoming book, *The Answer Economy: How AI Agents Will Decide Your Brand’s Future*, published in September 2026, draws together more than two decades of experience helping organisations navigate the evolving relationship between consumers, brands and digital technology.

A transcript of this conversation follows, lightly edited for clarity and length.

Shel Holtz (00:04)

Neville Hobson (00:09)

Shel Holtz (00:11)

Pete Blackshaw (00:21)

Yeah.

Shel Holtz (00:38)

Pete Blackshaw (00:57)

The consumer meets trust meets digital. And both of the books that I’ve written kind of cover that. But in addition to being a startup founder, I’ve also worked in a large lot of the large, you know, multinational corporations, you know, many of whom I’m, you know, the types of companies I’m selling to. So I co founded P and G’s first interactive marketing team. Remember when we called it that back then? I

was a senior executive at Nielsen after I we sold my first startup to them. And then most significantly I spent nine years at in Switzerland as the global head of digital for Nestle. And ironically that kind of came in the wake of a a bit of a crisis that we all remember, you know, with Greenpeace, where they kind of recruited me in to kind of help to address all of that. And then I did a five year stint

Neville Hobson (02:18)

Pete Blackshaw (02:22)

Neville Hobson (02:39)

Pete Blackshaw (02:45)

Neville Hobson (03:09)

Pete Blackshaw (03:29)

Is accountability. You know, I often say that, you know, the big aha for me when I quit my last job to launch brand rank, my current startup, is that I was shortly after Chat GBT came out, kids were asleep, we were skiing, and I was just doing what I typically do, what I’m sure you guys do all the time, just exercising my curiosity. And then typing in things into ChatGBT like, can Nestle be trusted? Are Pampers diapers really sustainable?

And it dawned on me within seconds that this medium that is evolving is the world’s greatest BS detector. And and we started to see some of the platforms are really on the extreme side of that, like anthropic cloud, where you just can’t throw spinner slogans at them. They just kind of cut through it. And that was like the big unlock for me. It’s like, my gosh, this is not only gonna become a new purchase funnel.

This is going to become really tricky terrain for marketers that are used to controlling the message, managing the spin, maybe getting away with overflated claims. And and I was like, my gosh, I gotta measure this. Someone’s gonna have to create like a Nielsen ratings of what these answer engines say. And I really wanted to focus. I know there’s a lot of players that are out there doing.

you know, AEO or GEO, but I really wanted to focus on the hard issues, like, my gosh, are brands going to be held more accountable for sustainability? Are these very sophisticated LLMs going to just digest an entire supply chain and either say thumbs up or thumbs down? Are, you know, and and maybe and and maybe, just maybe, will brands finally be forced to do some of the things that you all three of us have been talking about across the four sessions.

Which is, are they finally gonna kind of start responding to feedback? Are they gonna start inviting questions? Are they gonna start acting more with empathy? Because remember, digital started there. Digital started, we called it interactive. And the whole promise was like, we’re gonna be able to answer questions for consumers. They’re gonna come to us. And I remember when I started interactive marketing at PNG, that was like the North Star. And then we kind of moved into targeted advertising at scale.

We got very programmatic, we got digital, we kind of forgot about the consumer in control. And now I think that’s really waking up. However, one of the things I say in my book is

Listen, we totally messed up search two point And I’ve talked to the folks that wrote books about that, like John Battel, or like, my gosh, that quickly became a tragedy of the commons. Nobody could tell the difference between organic and paid and and even when it moved to mobile. And we as an industry are gonna have to decide like, do we want to preserve this incredible gift to consumers? And the things that are good for consumers are also really good for business, where they’re getting, you know.

reliable, trusted, you know, answers that are just solving like everything for them. Or do we want to pollute the commons by moving too aggressively the paid advertising? Do we want to dance in the gray zone? And so the book is kind of a the answer economy is this true shift and we have got to get in front of it.

To make sure that it is nurtured in the right way. And the timing couldn’t have been better because just last week, you know, all the folks from OpenAI are running all over cons trying to grab ad dollars. And that’s that’s good. You need, you know, you need an advertising model, but marketers have a historic tendency of dancing in the gray zone. And I just think we need to really get in front of it. And that’s like the heart and soul of the answer economy. We are in a world where the brands that actually answer the questions win. It’s such a basic

pre-digital concept that now is kind of getting extra life. Brands that tell the truth win. Why? Because the answer engines kind of call your BS. you know, so so that’s kind of the heart of what I’m getting into. And I just think it’s a really important conversation. And I’m hoping that it dusts off some of these conversations that we had in the past that maybe just were too damn early.

Shel Holtz (08:06)

reward. So if a brand does this well enough, hasn’t it just learned to pass Claude rather than actually be trustworthy? I mean, how how would how would Claude or or you tell the difference between a brand with real substance and a brand with just a really great brand book of truth?

Pete Blackshaw (08:50)

In fact, the whole business model started on sustainability, you know, Nestle Canada. And I they kind of invited me in for Earth Day. And we really took a hard look at, okay, will Nestle be rewarded or punished? And the good news is that they were severely rewarded. But there are ways where you need to market. I and maybe not the word market is the wrong term. You need to make your the good work that you’re doing.

Discoverable. So for example, I have found that a lot of the companies that I’ve worked with are getting lower sustainability scores than they deserve. You know, if you look at their science and their commitments, it’s actually pretty damn good. However, they’re so backwards on digital strategy that they put all of their science in PDFs, which LLMs can’t read. And we call that content liquidity. So there’s it’s not about manipulation. It’s a lot of it is like about getting the credit that you’re due. Now, I say that.

I don’t want to sound naive with that because I realize there’s a whole industry that’s mushrooming around me that’s all about manipulation and gaming and whatever it takes to kind of get credit you probably don’t deserve. I’m not playing that game. I think there is so much upside for companies that are actually already doing good things, have products that actually work, have credible supply chains, treat their employees well, that aren’t getting the credit they deserve. And I like those.

Challenges and we’ve been able to significantly move the needle with a lot of big companies just by making sure that they load up their FAQs with their sustainability commitments that are already verified by third parties or by these LLMs are very biased towards trust signals. And so we’ve always known that quality seals, BBB, you know, fair trade,

Good housekeeping, those have always mattered, but they’re really important to the LLMs. Because if you think about what’s happening right now,

They’re in a arms race to be the single source of truth. And so they are very, very biased towards trust signals. There’s a lot of misinformation out in the marketplace that everybody goes to Reddit first. That’s not true at all. They go to the brand websites first because they know those are places where content is typically vetted, reviewed by lawyers. Brands kind of are close to their stuff and they look at that. And then if they don’t have what they want, then they’ll go to other sources.

So what marketers do, what we do is we focus on three simple metrics. And I try to, yeah, I think a lot of us in the industry are just throwing too much vernacular, too many metrics. And I try to keep it really simple. Visibility. Are you visible? So what’s the best podcast show that has to do with, you know, you know, public relations or crisis? I suspect you would probably show up. If not, then I may become your digital coach to make sure you do.

Neville Hobson (12:14)

Pete Blackshaw (12:15)

Nestle into Wikipedia and like 40% of the entry had to do with the company’s history with activist. And so it was like the gift that kept on punishing all the time. And so you know, A and and AI kind of compounds that it’s almost like you can’t. so that gets into misinformation, hallucination, and then what I call brand alignment, which is do the LLMs fundamentally agree with the promise that you’re putting out there on your website, your Amazon page, your TV ads?

And this is very, very humbling. Sometimes executives throw chairs at me, but that’s where the big unlock takes place. And the third area is readiness. Do you head out and market to algorithms? and then we focus on three buckets. You know, availability, do you even have available content that algorithms can read? clarity, do you speak in a consumer language? And right now, at least, they’re very biased towards conversational vernacular, which I think is good. And then the third one is depth, where

You have to have substance, the third party seals, the the validation. And so I think right now the criteria they’re using is good for the consumer, because I think it means a consumer’s more likely to get a good and a trusted response. And I think for the good actors out there that actually really that don’t BS and actually live up to their claims, I think they’re benefiting as well. but it’s gonna be very tricky environment where you’re gonna have lot of bad actors that don’t deserve to be at the top. They’re gonna

fight the bloody hell to get to the top. And there’s going to be a million vendors out there kind of say, we will get you to the top. And so it’ll be interesting. But that’s why I think we have to really think about like what this is our this is our moment right now. Like what type of digital space do we want? We messed up the previous ones. We’re 25 years into us. We still are like deluged with spam. My entire phone is loaded with artificial voices pitching me on stuff. None of them are real. And

So now we’ve got this chance to like really nurture something special. Can we do it? I don’t know.

Neville Hobson (14:42)

by not having a human in the loop. But what you’re suggesting, I think, is almost the reverse. AI is now putting organizations themselves in the loop, constantly evaluating whether their behavior matches their claims. Is that how you see it?

Pete Blackshaw (15:28)

those claims. And then we’ll come up with scores one to ten. And it’s absolutely fascinating. And this is the ultimate unlock in understanding how the algorithm thinks. Like, you know, and and again in the book I get into all these different segments, like how does Claude think? How does Grot think? I mean, you know, right now at least, Claude is like the student radical who just is like doesn’t believe the man is like

y they’re just not gonna believe marketing whatsoever. And so I did a brand alignment test on our dashboard with Amazon. I’ve got a dashboard with Amazon. I can send it to you afterwards where I had Amazon has this statement like Earth’s most consumer centric company and then you know blah blah blah. And then I had the LLMs interrogate it and you know who gave it the lowest score? It was Claude. Claude gave it like a four out of ten.

Shel Holtz (16:47)

Pete Blackshaw (16:51)

And what I’ve been telling brands lately is that, you know, you got to be really careful before you spend a ton of money on paid advertising, where, you know, people are just one question away from calling your BS. and then the other thing that I think is getting really tricky, and you’ll love this. One of the things that I’ve been doing lately is really telling.

Corporate communications teams, CEOs, boardrooms design for Clyde, because this is one platform that continues to grow and influence.

They act like a college radical and they are absolutely loved for better or worse by journalists, NGOs, determined detractors, yeah, financial analysts. And so I always say, like, if you can pass the Claude test, you’re probably in a good place. And I’ve actually done briefings with clients before earnings calls where I’ve literally looked at the data from like Claude, where they’re just like, no, we don’t believe it. We don’t believe it.

And they’ve almost become practice fodder to kind of figure out how do you really but the point is that yeah, we’re in this tricky environment where you got to be really accountable for what you say because these very, very smart algorithms are like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I don’t necessarily agree with you. And marketers have never lived with that type of accountability. I mean, it’s like Spin City, and I’m I’ve been part of that. And so I do think, yeah, the marketers that really have superior products can back their claims.

But they’re also gonna have to think about all these other areas that are gonna creep into the algorithmic judgment. Like I do think you talked about human in a loop, and you had a lot of CEOs. You know, you have Mark Pritchard was talking about that at Khan. I mean, I think everyone’s gonna be talking that, but these algorithms will kind of know whether you’ve completely sold everybody out to AI or whether you’ve kind of kept a blend. And I think some purchase behavior is gonna be based on that.

I mean, I could I could see I could see frustrated teenagers that are like already skeptical about AI creating shopping tools that say, I’m only gonna buy from companies that don’t go go too far on AI. It’s not difficult to hack, you know, on on one of the vibe coding tools.

Shel Holtz (19:32)

Pete Blackshaw (19:56)

Shel Holtz (20:01)

Pete Blackshaw (20:05)

but they’re still, you know, wowing consumers with, you know, you know, AI overviews. But yeah, they’re just gonna have to be really careful about how they they blend. But I think it’s, you know, it’s a fair point. But I do think that you know, when I talk about book of truth, it’s not just the marketing slogans, it’s like how the product’s made. It is literally, is it truly superior and can you verify that?

You know, yeah, how do you stack up versus competition? Who are the people behind the brand? What’s the supply chain behind the brand? They’re kind of looking for all those different ingredients, even even for the purpose of like Amazon. I mean, this stuff is so real. I just put out a note to my clients this morning. I put a little blurb on LinkedIn as well, but

Amazon Prime Day was really insightful. I didn’t go, I couldn’t, I didn’t go to con last year, but I did stay glued for four days straight on Prime Day. And it was probably the biggest conversational boost we’ve seen in the history of commerce. Almost every single, you know, now it’s like every product you look at is surrounded by questions. I mean, what the hell’s going on? And then a lot of the you know, I’ve saw a lot of advertising trying to work into that. But on that platform, you can go in there and say, is this product sustainable or should I buy sustainable products?

Or should I I mean in and it’ll really give you very, very deep perspective before they start shoving products your way. And that is an absolute game changer. And so and I do think like the smart retailers will want to make sure that that the consumer kind of gets what they need. So so I may be, you know, long way of saying I’m optimistic. Where where it can get scary, you know, is if where everything got out of whack.

before was it Google was a monopoly and they had like 90% market share screw they can do whatever they want. I do think because you’ve got genuine competition, there is this real effort to like provide maximum value to the consumer. And that’s why I say we’re in a moment. You know, the answer economy is a moment. Either we’re gonna screw it up like we did before, or we’re gonna kind of turn it into a true win-win for consumers and business alike. But it’ll take some work to do that right.

Neville Hobson (22:53)

What will that look like, do you think?

Pete Blackshaw (23:23)

The credentialing, the science. you know, Grok is almost like hard to predict. And they do lean on a lot of the former tweets that kind of fall into it. but they are a little bit, they’re definitely they almost like personify not the politics of Elon Musk, but definitely like the almost like the unpredictable side of him and what you see. It’s like a different personality.

Gemini still, you know, you know, it’s it’s you know, the the it depends on if you’re looking at Gemini AI overviews. I mean, they all have different thinking processes in terms of the way they synthesize data, but absolutely, and I would say the new, you know, just in the same way that like a PR term might you might say we gotta we’ve gotta figure out how to break through the New York Times, the Financial Times.

And so and so you gotta think the same way. It’s like they they they think differently, they source differently. And so this is I spent the whole weekend doing this fascinating source analysis where I looked at, you know, tens of thousands of prompts and then I analyzed the sources and they have different favorites. And just recently the New York Times is finally starting to to creep into open AI, which does start to impact the character of their output.

You know, Claude tends to look a little bit more seriously at consumer reports than Joe’s review site. And so you have to know this. I mean, this is like the new PR. This is like the new influencer management. If you do not know how these LLMs think, if you don’t know what their brand archetype is, if you don’t know what they eat for breakfast from a content perspective, you’re not on top of what your client needs, in my view.

Shel Holtz (25:42)

Pete Blackshaw (25:44)

Know if they have to have different messages, but they need to be very attentive to how they are filtered. I do think all the LLMs, like for example, in my analysis this weekend, they all pay a lot of attention to your brand website. Far more than I think the media has let on. And I know because I’ve just run like a million audits and I see this all the time. And so

Brands have a lot of leverage in influencing the story, especially when there’s bad information out there and the brand website or the own media is in a position to kind of correct the record. And we’ve done some really interesting work around crisis or recalls where some brands have been able to actually train the LLMs within 12, 24 hours based on getting that right information in there. But but yeah, I mean you’ve got

So I don’t think brands need to overcustomized. I think they need to be very, you know. I mean, if I were, you know, if I were heading corporate communications today, I would probably say, yeah, there’s some that I would focus on the ones that are most critical. You know, and the the ones that are most critical often have also tend to be the most loved by other influencers.

that we care about, like journalists and NGOs and the like. And so, so that’s where I would kind of put the focus on in that. Now, now that said, they’re all going to be introducing, with the exception of Claude, advertising models. And so those will be micro opportunities to influence. And we saw, you know, a lot of that, you know, OpenAI is already doing a lot of that. And there’s gonna be, you’re gonna have they’re gonna have to study like, you know,

Is it appropriate to advertise? I do have a strong point of view there that if you have high vulnerability, you shouldn’t advertise. If you have low vulnerability but low visibility, I’d say, yeah, spend all the money you want on advertising. But brands are gonna have to be really sensitive about they’re gonna have to learn the art of not making things worse. And I don’t think brands, I mean, again, going back to the conversations that we’ve had for 20 years, brands don’t know how to manage conversations. I mean, they’re like, I mean, they’re like.

Most brands are maybe are barely there on like the first question. But in the answer economy, I have this term that I use in the book called ask through, not click-through. Click through is like if I can just get that one click. You and I know we’re we’re using these tools all the time. It’s a sequence of questions. You go in there with a health query, and it’s like multiple. And every single additional question that’s satisfied that gets you further down the sail.

Or further down the path of happiness. And like brands don’t know how to do that at all. and so, but the the second you submit to these ad models where you’re sitting right in the middle of the prompt, you almost have to figure that you always have to know that stuff. So this is gonna be really tricky. It’s not gonna be one of those push a button kind of get media. You know, there’s gonna be a whole accountability that comes with it when you’re kind of in the answer stream.

Neville Hobson (29:05)

and you describe the models like Claude or like Grok, etc., almost as having editorial personalities or or value systems. But that’s fascinating, I think, because I’ve sometimes questioned that myself, because organizations, brand managers have spent years trying to create one consistent narrative about their brand or or their organization. So I think

The question I had originally was worded are we, in other words of question. I think it’s more like we are as opposed to are we, which is entering a world where communicators have to understand not just audiences, but different AI worldviews. And I think it’s it it is interesting. my experience in this is not deliberate trying to get an answer to this, but I use myself usually a mixture between Claude and Chat GPT. So I I alternate between the two.

Claude is more rounded and rich because I fed it with so much information about who I am, a lot more than ChatGPT has. That I I I’m okay with I’m literally asking vague questions a lot of the time, and it never disappoints my experience so far. Chat GPT needs a little bit more nurturing in that regard, although it does surprise me at times with the depth of answers I get to some things when I’m doing research. So I guess I I

confuse myself even because I have no idea what the answer to this is. But I think it is something communicators should think about. Those who haven’t settled on one, you know, notwithstanding the topic Shawn and I’ve talked about recently where, you know, shadow AI is is growing like crazy in companies as people use their own thing, ignore what the what the company says. So it what what would you what would your advice be to communicators in this earth? Yeah.

Pete Blackshaw (31:25)

marketing, right? That’s always been at the core of like issues management and communication and and you know, you have to know your influencer, you have to know their hot buttons, you have to know their biases, you gotta know you know, how they evolve and there is a lot of evolution and and again this is where I think we may find a year from now that hey, you know.

They’re patty cakes with brands because they want the ad dollars. Who knows? I don’t know. But but yeah, and so and brands need to think this through. And I didn’t want you to think you made the comment about dead end. I I obsess with the nuances of the platforms, but I’m not convinced brands need to over tailor the message to different…

I again I think there’s a few where they gotta be really careful about the BS factor, like anthropic, where it’s just they just gotta make sure that their claims can hold water with these judges and these filters that are processing their their information. And I think I really think brands are just they’re not ready. In fact, what I’ve concluded is that across all the major, you know, Fortune 1000 companies, they’re only like 20% AI ready.

I mean, the most obvious thing is, you know, and sometimes companies get, you know, annoyed with me. And I have been doing this all the way back from my plan of feedback days, but like most companies cannot answer questions. I mean, you can go go to your after this podcast, go to your favorite brands and like type in a really basic question, like, how do I use the product? What’s in the product? Is it sustainable? But 90% of the time they’re gonna slap you in the face with a pop-up ad. They’re not gonna, they’re either gonna fire a blank.

Or they’re gonna answer something completely differently. Like brands don’t know how to do this. In the last 25 years of digital, the most basic human need of interactivity, I want to question brands can’t do it, including the big ones. They get all the awards and spend all the money. It’s crazy. And there’s a lot of people on the inside that are like, hey, that doesn’t matter, that doesn’t pay out. Or consumer services was always considered a non-strategic call cost center.

But again, I’m sort of saying the answer economy, that’s the new purchase funnel. Like this is the new skill that we need to learn. So it’s not only how to influence the algorithms, it’s almost like how do we fundamentally change our mindset where we’re more receivers of intent. And then we have to use that as the new engagement. You know, to some extent, when someone casts Amazon’s CEO had a great quote that everybody in marketing should put on their forehead, where he basically said it was so beautifully simple.

Neville Hobson (33:59)

Pete Blackshaw (34:12)

Where if you can’t convert that. And so I think brands need to understand that, like, you know, inviting the consumer to ask a question, making the website more receptive to questions, not only wins with the consumer, but it builds your database to feed LLMs. You know, because where brands are underrepresented in all the LLMs, if they that book of truth is partly an inventory issue. It’s like you have to have enough.

Scenarios, you know, how to use the product, what’s it made of, blah, blah, blah, to even start to market the algorithms. And brands don’t do that. They you’re lucky if you see maybe 20 FAQs. And of course, brands could be problem solvers for like a million things if you do it right. Tech companies are very good. So I’m I I want to be careful here. Tech companies, I think, are very good. Apple has a fantastic and have for many years, pre-AI, have just

Bent over backwards to make content available when you have a challenge. And that’s why almost every app Apple question you ask through an LLM is like pretty much right. Same thing with Microsoft. I think tech companies have always been good at having a lot of FAQs and knowledge. Bigger brands that spend the big bucks on the Super Bowl are really, really, I gotta be careful what I say, have opportunities.

Shel Holtz (36:08)

Pete, in in chapter nine, see, I I actually went through the book, y you argue that the next big comms crisis isn’t going to be a social media firestorm, but an AI generated answer, a brand can’t correct. because the infrastructure for rebuttal was never built. This is really interesting. I was just on a panel in Covington, Kentucky, by the way. If I’d known you were in Cincinnati, I’d have given you a call. where

Pete Blackshaw (36:33)

Shel Holtz (36:37)

Pete Blackshaw (36:55)

One of the big issues that I’ve had with a lot of our top clients is about kind of crisis and governance, which is that

You know, winning with answers is a governance issue. And it’s a big reason why I’m been really hesitant to

you know, suggests that this is all about SEO 2.0 or this is something that the search manager deals with. I mean, and you know, if your brand is as strong as your answers, a lot of people are implicated. And I think where companies really struggle in crisis is figuring out who owns it and who’s accountable.

And I do think, you know, I do make a pretty strong pitch in the book that brands have really got need to get in front of this. And, you know, there is a there’s an accountability. Like the they’re they’re bullshit detectors, who’s accountable? they’re kind of saying your products aren’t made the way you claim. Who’s accountable? there’s there’s all sorts of legal liability issues, and I think we are just in the very early stages. At some point you’ll need to interview my

My co-founder Hank Hudipol, who’s doing some really breakthrough breakthrough work around hallucination and accuracy. But you’ve got states that are now filing laws that if if the answer comes out wrong, even through an LLM, you are liable. Think about that in the health zone, right? And so so who so who is responsible? Is that the marketing team? Is that so there’s a you know, I think brands need to start thinking now, and I’m having a lot of leadership meetings and summits on this topic, they’ve really got to figure out the governance area here. And, you know, and it’s one reason why we’re trying to keep the metrics relatively simple so they really have a clear eye into what’s going on. It’s a big reason why we put almost I’d say vulnerabilities is kind of at the top of the list. But let me tell you what you get if you have governance. So without naming names, yeah, we work with some brands that have had

Very, very severe crisis issues where misinformation is even from the government is kind of stirring up the pot in terms of, you know, how the answer engines. And you’ve just you’ve got to get RD to the table, you gotta get legal compliance, marketing, even the CEO, you know, they need to kind of play a critical role. And the good news is there is I’ve done a lot of boardroom discussions and

There’s a lot of heightened sensitivity when a CEO says, My daughter just typed in this and they say we’re this. And they’re like, Why the hell is that? And who’s responsible? So But yeah, these these issues are really, really tricky, and a lot of stakeholders need to come together. And and that is and I think it’ll probably be a little bit blurry in terms of who owns it. Like right now, brands have these AI

Heads of AI. I don’t know if those jobs will last very long. Sometimes you know are they gatekeepers, are they enablers? Are they just, you know, I mean AI is now kind of part of everything. So I think who owns what will be a bit fluid for the coming years.

Neville Hobson (40:17)

Pete Blackshaw (40:24)

Neville Hobson (40:51)

Pete Blackshaw (40:58)

Let’s just put this in perspective. We’re still only what a little over three years into this. I mean, we’re up to like five billion prompts a day, and this stuff started three years ago. So yeah, companies are always gonna be slow. But the good news with this, I do feel like

There’s a feeling of a sense of urgency. Like there it’s it’s a bit of an shit moment. Like we’ve got to figure this out. And so and then, you know, how do you, you know, how do you really capitalize on this? And even it’s funny, like launching a startup, the one thing you dread is like, my gosh, it’s gonna take forever to get to get a vendor number. And we’ve had some companies that typically take like three years to get a little small startup in Cincinnati a vendor number to literally three weeks. So I do think there’s

There’s a memo, there’s a bell that’s ringing inside the organization. It’s like, shit, the purchase funnel has changed. we are really accountable. Every stock analyst is now digging up dirt on us. Or good news, through these tools, we’ve got to act. Then they’re like, Well, who owns this? Is it wait? It’s digital, right? No, well, wait, maybe it’s RD because they’ve got the most substance, you know, to kind of put to the table, but we don’t really think about them as marketing.

Neville Hobson (41:55)

Pete Blackshaw (42:22)

And, you know, we’ve been working with a few companies that I won’t name where the CEOs have made a massive difference and in kind of leading, you know, organizations where nobody’s really accountable for doing it to like getting organized around it.

Neville Hobson (43:08)

and are providing leadership and are doing all these things. Then another survey has completely conflicting information to them. So I mean you just gotta go visit LinkedIn and you’ll see conflicts all over the place, including everyone’s got an e book they want to sell you. That’s that’s the kind of magic, magic bullet handbook.

Pete Blackshaw (43:52)

classify it. Yeah, I’ve I’ve read all those studies too and you know, and and my view is like a lot of this is it’s is it an AI strategy or it’s something you should have been doing a while ago? So I posted something last week, you know, and you know, almost as a little bit of a counterpoint to the con lions, because I was kind of like, why don’t they ever give love or rewards or recognition to brands that just answer the boring question?

Neville Hobson (44:05)

Pete Blackshaw (44:22)

Neville Hobson (44:34)

Pete Blackshaw (44:49)

It’s like Patagonia. They’re everywhere. They’re everywhere. Now, I don’t, I doubt they even use the word AI there. You know, but they have been absolutely committed to driving radical transparency in their products, flooding their content with meaningful content. and they have been training the LLMs for years. Sephora, a brand in beauty that’s always been very

Neville Hobson (44:59)

Pete Blackshaw (45:26)

Everybody that goes on my website could be my last customer. So let’s just give them the love of knowledge, of guidance, whatever they want. They are being disproportionately benefited. In fact, one of the things that I have found is that and I work with a lot of big companies that own massive budget. I’ve consistently found that, you know, for big companies, market share under indexes, over, you know, over indexes answer share.

Which means that the younger companies are actually they’re kind of winning on answer share, partly just because they’re it’s not like that they’re trying to spike the system. They’re just wired to answering questions. And so this is where the the the thesis of the book is really simple. I’m almost trying to say this without all the buzzwords and the tech gobbledygook. It’s sort of like if you treat the consumer, you know, if you kind of

Create a bit of a Wikipedia to kind of help the consumer answer every question, you will win big time in the AI world. I have seen that correlation left and right. Instead, most brands make it really complicated. We need an AI strategy. We need an AI strategy for the AI strategy we need. They create all these damn layers. And then you go to their website and they still can’t answer a question. And so this is why it’s almost like forcing the question. It’s like, you know.

The answer economy, not the AI world, the answer economy. And so we’ll see if I’m successful or not.

Shel Holtz (47:24)

in the front end of Chat GPT. God knows I spend as much time in Claude Cowork as I as I spend in Claude. what is this shift toward agents, assuming all of the LLMs move in this direction, what does that do to this whole concept?

Pete Blackshaw (48:12)

Delegating the agents, or there are other areas where we’re just gonna wanna be more in control of it. And so, but I don’t think what I’ve said earlier.

impacts any of that. I would say that i in an agentic world, brands still need to catalog their truth and make it marketable and make it visible. And and and you could almost argue that it’s going to be more important to get your act together on marketing the algorithms. Cause here’s one of the things that’s going to be really, really tricky for brands, especially in like these industries that I’ve worked in, like consumer goods and

Food is the algorithms have a very strong bias towards store brands and private label. Now it’s not because they’re tilting the scale in their favor. It’s just that in an agentic world, think about what consumers are going to do. They’re almost going to be brand agnostic. And they say, give me good product at a good price for my family of four, right?

And they’re they might even set a spec, like it’s gotta have X percent product performance. And then the algorithms are gonna do their homework and they’re come back and they say Kirkland. And then they’re gonna be saying Kirkland, Walmart equate. Because you’re gonna find that these store brands where where the and retailers are getting really good at volunteering what their products do, even their green scores, where you know, if you if we overdelegate to agents, I do think brands are in for a really rude awakening that a lot of the

Neville Hobson (49:54)

Pete Blackshaw (50:13)

They’re gonna have to really think about, you know, how to do that the right way. Now we may see different things evolve. Like I’ve talked a lot about the word rep website. I’m probably gonna write a column that suggests that maybe we need a new name called, you know, like a an inventory locker that’s kind of like very, very agent, agent, agent friendly. But but yeah, I think I think brands, yeah, everybody’s waxing poet have got agents, but I keep reminding brands like careful what you ask for on this one.

because you are not prepared and you are going to be really, really surprised at what these agents are recommending. And you’re going to probably lose even more control. So brands are going to have to really think about that one carefully.

Neville Hobson (51:24)

Pete Blackshaw (51:38)

I mean, here’s one of the things that’s happening. You’ve got two very interesting trends going on. You’ve got the answer economy, you got the creator economy. Everybody at con was gaga about the creator economy. And there’s no question the creator economy is creating massive reach. But hey, one of the interesting things about the creator economy, they do not index in answer engines. Maybe a little bit meta because they’ve got tick to they’ve got, you know, Instagram and but generally, you know, the creators are not getting the love from the answer engines. And why is that?

I think they’re very hesitant. There tends to be a lot of hyperbole and a exaggeration among the crater economy about what the products do. And I think and and sometimes they’re paid, but they’re not disclosed. And so it’s just it’s just it’s a it’s a less it’s a complicated area for the algorithms to kind of take seriously. And so I just think, you know, all these things are gonna have to be really, really carefully thought, you know, thought through, you know, as pr as brands try to

Neville Hobson (52:35)

Pete Blackshaw (53:00)

Trust is the currency of advertising in all relationships. And I think AI is just gonna magnify that in a big way. So brands are probably gonna have to really double down in that particular area.

Shel Holtz (53:43)

Pete Blackshaw (53:47)

No different. I mean, every B2B supplier is using Chat GBT to vet other suppliers to vet. If anything, I think B2B is gonna get a massive turbocharge. I do think AI systems are, you know, you know, I I have to worry about that too. It’s like I got RFPs with other, you know, big companies, and you know, they’re kind of using AI to basically kind of, you know, do their research on us versus competition, but

No, I think it’s it’s kinda shy. I mean, I and I’ve done scorecards. I’ve done I have all sorts of indexes that I’ve created, including a B to B one on what are the best vendors across all these different areas, who shows up, who doesn’t. And now there may be certain my guess isn’t on the B to B side, Claude will again probably be the one that is most most focused on. Actually I th I think copilot isn’t bad either, but

But yeah, there probably will be some favorites that the procurement officers use as they’re trying to figure out who’s the right vendor that’s that’s that’s out there. But zero difference in my view.

Neville Hobson (54:55)

Pete Blackshaw (55:03)

If you go to a corporate site, you know, Nestle.com, I think they’ve done a really, really good job. They even have a section called Ask Nestle, which I love, and have encouraged them to kind of take to the next level. But all that probably is more valuable than it was a year ago. And I would I wouldn’t, you know, and I think some of those things are underfunded. some of them are afterthoughts. Some of those are like, that’s the brochure, but that is really.

powerful. And I also think corporate communications in particular has a lot of leverage to lead because it’s really hard to get like fifty brands within the franchise to kind of like get their act together. And I do think the book of truth may be best developed at the corporate level. But then again, it has to be tomorrow’s definition of corporate communications. I think if you ask brands, they’d say corporate communications is is backwards. They slow things down.

They’re naysayers. They’re not a progressive force in the organization. They’re overly conservative. And if I were heading corporate communications, I would be, no, no, no, no, no. We can actually, we are the lever to win in the answer economy. We have always been sensitive about substance, you know, you know, doing what we say, checking off the compliance boxes. Those, those are all the things that really matter to the LLMs. So yeah, if I were giving that that.

Neville Hobson (56:44)

Pete Blackshaw (57:10)

Shel Holtz (57:30)

Neville Hobson (57:31)

Pete Blackshaw (57:48)

I don’t know. Fair You you do I was surprised you didn’t ask, so Pete did you use AI to help write your book? You know.

Shel Holtz (58:02)

Neville Hobson (58:04)

but but you did. In fact, you got a really good page in the in the galleys that I saw explain yeah. Yeah, i that is super what you wrote, really, really and truly. It a it adds

Pete Blackshaw (58:08)

I love that. And I

did well the funny thing is like I’ve been listening, I mean, you know, sometimes I’ll take a chapter, throw it in a clod and say, Tell I’m fully shit. You know, it’s like but it was all me, but it did help me navigate. And I have this term that I use called dog walk journalism. I’ll take my dog on a walk and I’ll bark out my random thoughts. And AI is wonderful at connecting the first thought with the last thought and kind of giving you a starting point. But but I did have this really intense editor, her name was Angela Morrison.

And she was actually the editor, the partner to William Sapphire, who wrote the column on language. So she was really good. She had this really intense long island draw. And she’s Pete, don’t take it personally, but I am totally blunt. But my gosh, she like took me to town on indefinite pronouns. I thought I felt like I had never learned writing, but that was like the great, it was like a great human in the loop epiphany because she was hitting things that even the LLMs

Neville Hobson (58:59)

Shel Holtz (59:04)

Pete Blackshaw (59:12)

Shel Holtz (59:19)

Neville Hobson (59:20)

Shel Holtz (59:21)

Pete Blackshaw (59:24)

Shel Holtz (59:53)

Pete Blackshaw (59:56)

Neville Hobson (1:00:16)

Yeah, likewise. That was good. Appreciate it.

Shel Holtz (1:00:22)

Pete Blackshaw (1:00:23)

The post AI, trust and the answer economy – Pete Blackshaw on the future of brand credibility appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

In this FIR Interview, Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz speak with crisis and risk communication specialist Philippe Borremans about his new Crisis Communication 2026 Trend Report, based on a survey of senior crisis and communication leaders.

The conversation explores how crisis communication is evolving in an era defined by polycrisis, declining trust, and accelerating AI-driven risk – and why many organisations remain dangerously underprepared despite growing awareness of these threats.

Drawing on real-world examples, including recent AI-amplified reputation crises, Philippe outlines where organisations are falling short and what communicators can do now to close the gap between awareness and action.

Philippe Borremans is a leading authority on AI-driven crisis, risk, and emergency communication with over 25 years of experience spanning 30+ countries. As the author of Mastering Crisis Communication with ChatGPT: A Practical Guide, he bridges the critical gap between emerging technologies and high-stakes communication management.

A trusted advisor to global organisations including the World Health Organisation, the European Council, and multinational corporations, Philippe brings deep expertise in public health emergencies, corporate crisis communication, and AI-enhanced communication strategies.

He is the creator of the Universal Adaptive Crisis Communication framework (UACC), designed to manage complex, overlapping crises. He publishes Wag The Dog, a weekly newsletter tracking industry innovations and trends.

Follow Philippe on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philippeborremans/

Relevant links

https://www.riskcomms.com/

Shel Holtz

Neville Hobson

Shel Holtz

Philippe Borremans

Shel Holtz

Philippe Borremans

In fact, moved away from Belgium, lived four years in Morocco, working in public relations on a more, a bit more strategic level. And since then I’ve been specializing in risk, crisis and emergency comms. So that’s actually the only thing I do. It’s mainly around all the things that could happen to either a private sector organization, a government or a public organization.

Shel Holtz

And that same analysis said that one of the biggest risks that AI introduces is an inherent bias toward negative information. What happened with Campbell’s is that coverage spread really fast across social media and traditional news outlets when this email surfaced. That created a flood of new content that AI systems were happy to start ingesting ⁓ and reinforcing. So when people started searching for 3D printed meat and questions about whether Campbell’s uses real meat, AI didn’t correct those perceptions. It surfaced fragments of context. It pulled language from the company’s own website that referenced mechanically separated chicken. I don’t want to know what that means. And all of this muddied perceptions instead of clarifying things. What should communicators be doing? What didn’t Campbell’s do to protect itself from this? It really is a new reality about how information is gathered up and then shared back out?

Philippe Borremans

Neville Hobson

Philippe Borremans

Shel Holtz

Philippe Borremans

So that was for AI. Another one, which I was really afraid of and unfortunately confirmed is exercising. Do organizations actually exercise their plans? They all have a plan somewhere, but we know it’s just a plan and it’s the first thing that goes out of the window when something really happens. But do we exercise? Do we do crisis simulations, tabletops, large scale simulations and only 26.5 % of the respondents here test at least annually? 9.8 reported they never tested and then you’ve got the whole middle who test from time to time when they feel like it probably. Public sector was a bit different than private sector but still that is worrying because I know from experience having worked in this field now for the last 15 years

Good crisis communication or risk communication or emergency communication is about… It’s a muscle, right? If you don’t exercise it, whatever your plan is, it will not work. You need much more an agile approach, which comes from training and simulation exercises, than a rigid protocol plan. You need a plan, I’m not saying you don’t need it, but what will get you through a crisis is your agile approach because things change all the time. And that is only possible to get there, it’s only possible through exercising and we see that it’s not the case. Another one linked to AI. Everybody in the survey said, and it was really on top of when I asked about the biggest risks, AI, going wrong, AI risks related to AI. So fakes and what have you, deep fakes, etc. But only 3.9 % said that they had a tested gen AI crisis protocol. And 27.5 said they had no protocol and no plans in place to face an AI generated crisis. So it’s right on top there. Everybody’s afraid of it. Nobody’s planning for it. Again, an interesting insight I found.

Neville Hobson

Philippe Borremans

Neville Hobson

Philippe Borremans

So already there, I’m very cautious about using trust as the…you know, the mantra or the silver bullet. But once we understand what we’re talking about and agree on it, to me, it’s very simple. It all starts with and ends with completely and completely understanding your different audiences. We always talk about stakeholders. Sure, they are important. But from a communications point of view, from trust building, and I think

At least that’s my analysis from the Edelman Trust Barometer report as well. They talk about segmented audiences finally, we, I hope now finally most communication professionals understand that the general public doesn’t exist. We need to segment our audiences. And it’s understanding those through and through. Knowing what their context is. Knowing what their definition of trust is, what their relation is with your organization. Only then can you start building plans looking at how you would approach this in the context of a crisis. That’s what I think about this.

Shel Holtz

Philippe Borremans

manage or on a global scale. But I think it’s much more about the profession as communicators. First of all, understanding the environment. Not a lot of communicators truly understand polycrisis and permacrisis concepts and how it actually translates into communications. It’s thrown out there and geopolitics and what have you, but how does that translate to your day-to-day work for your organization? So that’s already, I think, a gap. And then once you understand that, what can you actually do to minimize that impact from a communications point of view? We only have so much that we can actually work on. That means we need to work with other departments as well and probably with industry associations, cetera, et cetera. We are not the, you know, we cannot solve everything. But if we actually already start knowing what we can do in our corner and understanding the global environment now, which is not easy. Then already we can take the first steps. I’m always amazed when I work with clients, they all have media and social media monitoring platforms. And they actually think that for them, that’s intel, that’s the insights they need. Most of the time I tell them, well, yes, you need that part, but you have nothing around predictive analytics. You have nothing on horizon scanning. You have nothing on. So there’s huge gaps in there. And that’s actually the new things that you need in a world which is changing all the time.

Shel Holtz

Philippe Borremans

Shel Holtz

Philippe Borremans

Neville Hobson

Philippe Borremans

Neville Hobson

Philippe Borremans

Neville Hobson

Philippe Borremans

Cybersecurity is interesting as well because there’s a lot of pressure to integrate that now into crisis management teams simply and not because people think that’s the best way to do it, because it’s becoming the law within the EU. It needs to be integrated. It’s the law. You have no choice. So there’s a couple of things moving, but it’s more on the pressure of law and ISO quality norms and what have you, than actually understanding, yes, we all need to sit around the same table and let us all do our own jobs that we’re good in. We can translate stuff. You do the operational stuff.

Shel Holtz

Philippe Borremans

Unfortunately, if it’s about online mis-dis and malinformation, there’s only two techniques that work. And even then, those two alone will just create a small protective layer because it’s very difficult to take online. But pre-banking and inoculation are the only techniques that work for the moment. Other ones, is, and they’re being talked about like, let’s increase media literacy. Well, that’s first of all, up to up. I mean, it’s not our responsibility. I think as communicators, we have other things to do. It’s probably the responsibility of the government, institution, Ministry of Education, but then we’re off for the next three decades.

Neville Hobson

Philippe Borremans

I’m making it very simple now. Something is brewing, things are getting organized, we could have something coming towards us, which could be deep fake and what have you and what have you. So first listening so that you have your alert system done in place. Then on the defense side, it’s actually also having what I call a truth bank. That’s a database or an Excel sheet, whatever. I can’t believe I said Excel sheet, a database where you have actual proof that your communication assets are yours, authentic and come from you. Because we are getting into an area where at one point in time, will, an organization will be questioned. Yes, you can say that press release is yours, but is it actually yours? You can say that that video of your CEO is actually true, but how can you prove that? We call me in an area as far as that. So you actually need to do it.

And you know, I’m a big defender and also user of blockchain technology. It’s very simple today. You can actually, you know, actually prove without irrefutable doubt that some pieces of communication are yours. Example of a bank in Belgium. Already years, every single press release they send out is stamped through a blockchain system so that they can actually prove it’s theirs. And they started to do that more than five years ago because they had fake press releases going out. And that wasn’t even AI driven. That was just someone who got very creative.

So first listening, then protecting your assets, making sure that you can prove it yours, and then countering. But countering depends on the situation. If it’s a rage farming attack, for instance, it’s no use in going against the originators, the people, the bad actors. That’s no use at all. You need to focus on the…

Neville Hobson

Philippe Borremans

So a very practical example, imagine that a retail company decides to make unisex uniforms. Men and women dress the same. We don’t make a difference. You could think, wow, gay, why not? Taken out of context, that means that it could be translated by bad actors in, look, they don’t want women to be women anymore. look, the whole woke context, they would reframe that and then target that message. It’s just out of context, but target that message proactively to communities online who are much more conservative, who have a much more conservative worldview. They would then be triggered by rage, start to spread it, and then actually you have that whole system. That’s rage farming. And why did we come to rage farming? Lost my…

Neville Hobson

Philippe Borremans

Shel Holtz

Philippe Borremans

But then how do you translate that into actual practical things in operational stuff? How do you upskill your team, your communications team today? Right. So that they can actually face all these these new issues. How do you change and adapt your crisis communication, preparedness planning? How do you integrate that? Those are the kind of practical questions that probably don’t trickle down. And of course, if down there you have more junior people, they maybe wouldn’t know the best way to go about it. That’s my feeling.

Neville Hobson

Philippe Borremans

I have a a small micro simulation platform that I coded myself. I do workshops with that. It’s an half an hour exercise. It’s a lunch and learn time, right? Get people around the table with a sandwich and say, okay, what is the crisis that we’re going to role play today? Half an hour, you get feedback. Fine. You can do that every single week. People find it fun, but it trains the muscle because it’s based on real scenarios and it’s real feedback and etc. Tabletop exercises. You have many different forms and formats. They can range from one hour to three hours. They can be functional exercises. They can be completely invented exercises. And let’s not forget, mean, communications people have no experience at all.

They’re actually simulation kits you can pay for and they’re not expensive and download, read through the manual and go through the motions. That also trains you maybe as a non-specialized communicator on what it actually means to manage and to do good simulations. But the most important thing is it doesn’t have to be the big thing. You can do micro simulations on a very regular basis, make it fun. You can do tabletop exercises every quarter, hopefully with an executive team, but put it in the agenda. And if you are in certain industries, I would actually say, well, you need a full scale simulation exercise every year if you’re in the petrochemical and what have you industry.

The point is you can actually position this not as a cost center exactly as a corporate insurance does. We know based on research and facts that organizations who train their plan first of all get through a crisis much quicker but rebuild after a crisis much quicker and that’s where the money goes. If it takes you two years to rebuild that’s a lot of money. If you can shorten that by half or even more. That is the actual game you do. And that comes from training, training and training. There is a reason why I was in the Navy. There’s a reason why the the captain of the ship, you know, did fire exercises every single day. And after the, you know, the 52nd, you go like, why are we doing this stupid thing? But actually, when you have a fire, you know why.

Shel Holtz

Philippe Borremans

And that’s why I’m a strong believer in working much more, again, you need plans, you need protocols, fully agree, but you actually need an agile communications team. We know things go very fast, they come from every single corner. You need that mindset. You need that agility muscle in there. And then teams are actually ready to take what comes and move at the moment.

And I do see a link. Another thing which is very difficult for communicators from my generation because we were trained like that, at least I was at PR school, I was trained that you do not communicate until you have all the facts. It took me a couple of years to switch that. When I work for the UN agencies during the pandemic and other epidemics, you actually need to communicate without having all the facts. And it’s very uncomfortable. It’s very contra training. But that’s what everybody in communications today should have that skill, because most of the time you will not have all the facts, and the facts will change day after day after day after day. So you need that muscle again, that agility. That’s the most important thing I think today.

Neville Hobson

Shel Holtz

Philippe Borremans

What if this tomorrow happens? What would we actually do? What would it mean for our audiences, for our executives, for our stakeholders? And how do we translate that? Not in a big plan and a long, you know, SOP, but simple steps. And most of the time it will not be a, you know, a communications team of 25 people. It will be one, two, maybe just split up the rows.

What do we do if tomorrow there’s a deep fake popping up? How will we do the triage? Because you don’t have to react to everything. And if we decide to react, who are the first people that we need to inform? Sometimes it’s getting really the very basics in place. It’s already much more than 90 % of the other people that are actually not looking at this for the moment.

Neville Hobson

Philippe Borremans

Shel Holtz

Neville Hobson

Philippe Borremans

Neville Hobson

Philippe Borremans

Shel Holtz

Philippe Borremans

Shel Holtz

Neville Hobson

The post AI risk, trust, and preparedness in a polycrisis era appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

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

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

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

Non-users experience something very different.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Relevant Links

Shel Holtz

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

Neville Hobson

And I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz

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

Josh Bernoff

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

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

Shel Holtz

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

Josh Bernoff

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

Shel Holtz

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

Josh Bernoff

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

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

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

Shel Holtz

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

Josh Bernoff

Okay, great.

Neville Hobson

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

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

Josh Bernoff

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

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

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

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

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

Shel Holtz

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

Josh Bernoff

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

Shel Holtz

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

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

Shel Holtz

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

Josh Bernoff

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

Josh Bernoff

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

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

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

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

Shel Holtz

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

Josh Bernoff

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

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

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

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

Neville Hobson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Josh Bernoff

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shel Holtz

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

Josh Bernoff

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

Shel Holtz

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

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

Josh Bernoff

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

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

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

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

Neville Hobson

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

Josh Bernoff

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

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

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

Josh Bernoff

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

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

Neville Hobson

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

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

Josh Bernoff

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

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

Shel Holtz

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

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

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

Josh Bernoff

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

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

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

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

Neville Hobson

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

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

Josh Bernoff

Absolutely.

Neville Hobson

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

Josh Bernoff

Sociopathic, but yes.

Shel Holtz

Both things can be true.

Neville Hobson

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

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

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

Josh Bernoff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shel Holtz

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

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

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

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

Josh Bernoff

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

Shel Holtz

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

Josh Bernoff

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

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

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

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

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

Neville Hobson

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

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

Josh Bernoff

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

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

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

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

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

Shel Holtz

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

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

Josh Bernoff

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

Shel Holtz

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

Josh Bernoff

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

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

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

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

Neville Hobson

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

Josh Bernoff

Well, thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

Shel Holtz

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

Josh Bernoff

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

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

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

Shel Holtz

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

Josh Bernoff

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

Shel Holtz

Josh, how can our listeners find you?

Josh Bernoff

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

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

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

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

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

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

GEO – generative engine optimisation – is suddenly everywhere. Is it the new SEO, a passing fad, or simply good communication practice in disguise?

In this FIR Interview, Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson talk with Stephanie Grober, Marketing & PR Director at Horowitz Agency in New York, about why GEO matters, the competing narratives surrounding it, and how communicators should prepare for the impact of generative search.

What we discussed

Stephanie Grober is the Marketing & Public Relations Director at Horowitz Agency, an integrated marketing and public relations agency with offices in Los Angeles, New York City, and Vancouver (B.C.). Her team works with law firm clients ranging from BigLaw to boutiques, designing and executing content and communications strategies that generate bottom-line growth in measurable ways.

Leveraging deep relationships with the press, she delivers high-quality earned media placements for clients and utilizes her extensive marketing background to amplify these results through a multi-channel approach.

Stephanie joined Horowitz Agency in 2021 after serving as Marketing and Communications Manager for a Top 50 accounting firm in New York City.

Relevant Links

https://searchengineland.com/what-is-generative-engine-optimization-geo-444418

Shel Holtz (00:01.989)

Stephanie Grober (00:19.33)

Shel Holtz (00:27.471)

Stephanie Grober (00:40.748)

Shel Holtz (01:13.837)

Stephanie Grober (01:22.7)

And what are those sources? Well, a lot of them are authoritative sources from top publications where you may have a PR professional working with you to get you quoted. So it all circles back to PR, makes it a very exciting time for PR professionals. Those who have already engaged the services of PR consultants or may have PR services happening in-house are a little bit ahead of the curve right now because they’re already going to be appearing in the authoritative sources that AI likes.

@nevillehobson (02:50.272)

Although to be fair, he did talk about what the, the most effective thing to do isn’t to argue about or worry about acronyms or initialisms or whatever. It’s about, building trust, creating clear, incredible content, putting it where you can, which already are. I thought, God, did he listen to our episode or maybe, but of course that was last week, not, the other day. but he did get me thinking about this. Is GEO an evolution of SEO? Is it? the same thing by another name. We talked about this and that’s not what we figured out what’s what’s your take on that?

Stephanie Grober (04:26.786)

I wouldn’t say that they are exactly the same thing, but they are very parallel to each other. I think that if you have successfully been employing SEO strategies as a part of your overall marketing efforts, then you are probably ahead of the curve, as far as GEO. And that would be because you’ve been consistently adding optimized content to your website. You know, which keywords you want to appear in search.

You may have been structuring your content in smart ways that already are answering questions. And that would be all on your own website, right? But now when we’re talking, GEO, we’re talking about getting that content out to external sources and reinforcing many of the same things. So SEO, could say it’s about keywords. GEO is about credibility, but the LLMs, they still have to learn.

So those keywords are gonna be important for them even in your external sources. And overall, what we’re looking for with GEO is mentions and visibility, whether it’s you as an individual or your brand.

Shel Holtz (06:34.097)

That doesn’t necessarily mean that if you’re doing research or if you’re just in one of the LLMs doing your job, that Reddit or Quora for that matter will be the dominant source of the information that you get. And yet this chart is everywhere and everybody’s talking about it. I confess, I went to our leadership in the organization I work and I said, we need to be in Reddit. And now…

It appears I was just chasing a shiny object or a magic bullet. How do you stay on top of what is working in this generative EO space?

Stephanie Grober (08:16.376)

AI overviews simply because of how the content is structured in a very human questioning way, but it’s not going to be the right place for everybody. So when we take a look at that at Horowitz agency as PR professionals working with law firms or other other business professionals, there’s some other interesting stats. I think that stood out. So Muckrack put out a great report recently also analyzing which sites are read by AI.

And I believe it was almost 30 % of the sources are journalistic outlets with prominence and attention paid to outlets like Reuters, AP, Axios, for example. So those are sort of your tier one media. So that is a strategy you can employ for your credibility. If you don’t think that Reddit is the right place for you, okay, then let’s go after the tier one media

Now I will caveat that by saying, niche outlets are also very important to AI. So don’t think that you have to be an AP or Reuters. If you ask a niche question, it is very likely that the AI is going to read a niche or trade press outlet. So those are very valuable as well. But overall journalistic sources are a very valuable way to start appearing in GEO results. That’s where from a PR perspective, we can start maximizing our approach and our strategies, tailoring them there to support GEO.

@nevillehobson (10:21.792)

Stephanie Grober (10:51.534)

So the best approach today is to make sure that as part of your overall marketing plan, PR is included and you have a comprehensive… hopefully you already have that, but if you don’t have that and you’re thinking, I want to make sure that we’re doing GEO right, don’t neglect PR. There’s a few parts of the PR process. First one is just having your sources become media trained and responsive. And again, that takes time to be comfortable speaking to the press, to identify what they want to comment on, to give good sound bites.

That all takes some practice. So somebody who’s just starting out in PR might not be comfortable if the Wall Street Journal calls them on day one and they’re like, this is my first rodeo. So you wanna have some practice working with smaller outlets. Again, working with those trade publications which are still going to be very valuable.

So we don’t only wanna prioritize tier one, but just having a variety of PR opportunities, seeing what works best, that’s something that takes some time. So if you’re not already doing that as part of your PR strategies, the time to start is now, it’s all going to benefit your GEO. And then another key part of this is making sure the messaging is consistent. And that is down to the way you are cited in the press, for example

So, you know, as one example that comes to mind is if you’re somebody who is always referred to in the press as a celebrity criminal defense attorney over and over, that’s going to train the LLMs. When somebody is searching for a celebrity criminal defense attorney, you’re gonna come up in that AI overview because the reporters have referred to you that way in interviews. So how you present yourself to the media and how they cite you is important. It’s important to be consistent.

And then of course, you know, what you’re saying in each opportunity matters too, but I think down to the way that you are cited is, very key.

@nevillehobson (13:24.213)

So where does this fit in that case? And probably the example you gave is someone brand new to this to PR just starting out suddenly is immersed in all this. What, how do you deal with this in this changing environment?

Stephanie Grober (14:36.91)

They can’t exist without each other because otherwise, you know, what has authority, what do we trust, right, to build a response from the AI. So like you said, Nebel, the landscape is changing. There’s new outlets every day. That continues to happen to myself and my team. We’re constantly discovering new outlets.

There’s journalists who have left major newsrooms, who have started their own newsletters, they’re on Substack, they’re podcasting. All of this is important, is the good news when we’re talking GEO, because GEO assesses a very wide variety of sources, including video, including podcasts. So I recommend that anyone who is wading into PR take as many opportunities as they’re comfortable with.

And again, don’t only hold out for Wall Street Journal and New York Times. Take a variety because you never know what is going to give you the most bang for your buck or where somebody is going to discover you. This is all about discoverability. This is about mentions. And the more you can do it, the better. All of the LLMs have their own way of reviewing sources at this point. They are not consistent.

There is not one formula that they’re using, whether it’s chat GPT or Claude or perplexity. Some of them use journalistic sources at a higher rate than others. Some of them use smaller outlets. Some of them have partnerships with major newsrooms like Financial Times to train the AI. So we’re in the very early stages.

That’s why, again, I don’t think that there is a one size fits all formula. I don’t think that there is a magic bullet today where it’s do it this way or you’re going to fail. It’s be prepared to be flexible, but be everywhere that you can. So as things shift, you’re still ahead of the curve. And anyone who has been a marketer through the rise of digital marketing, I think is probably familiar with that, and anyone who has been on the internet since the beginning of the internet is probably familiar with that, right?

When I grew up, it was the dawn of Wikipedia and things have really changed. We just got Google. I remember the first time a librarian told me about Google. So this is all gonna change. It’s gonna change very rapidly. It could go away. It could be the most important part of marketing I don’t think we know yet.

Shel Holtz (17:50.39)

Stephanie Grober (18:16.046)

And again, it might be certain keywords, certain questions that you want to prioritize, but that’s the easiest way just to be the end user and see how you come up, ask, ask the LLMs to describe you, to describe your brand, your company and see what comes back to you. so again, it’s not going to be perfect. We see a lot of errors or mistakes or misassignments of names and things when we do this.

So, you know, this is not the be all and end all to being successful. And I will say that, you know, AI search accounts today for, I think less than 30 % of search traffic. So, fortunately it’s not the only driver of traffic and, you know, discoverability, so we have a little time to iron out those kinks.

@nevillehobson (19:35.906)

Stephanie Grober (20:03.592)

in working with attorneys thought leadership is huge. Attorneys are always writing. They’re speaking. can repurpose their content. So there’s always fresh content going up, on websites and things like that. one thing I wanted to mention too, as, as we’re discussing this, whether it’s a brand that builds their own content platform, or a company working with content in another way is that the LLMs prefer recent and fresh content.

So, you if you were writing or speaking or quoted in the press five, six, seven years ago, that’s not gonna help you today. It’s time to get back out there. In the past 12 months or so is ideal with ongoing fresh content. So just something to keep in mind because I know, you know, time passes quickly and we’re like, when was I quoted? No, it was like five years ago.

Anyway, back to the content. I think that’s a very smart and strategic play if it can be supported. We know that marketers only have so much time in their day. There’s a lot of things that demand attention. So you have to choose to prioritize what makes the most sense and is a sustainable effort for your team.

Shel Holtz (21:43.063)

Stephanie Grober (22:32.75)

Now, if you put out press release across the wire, meaning in most cases you’re paying to put it out across the wire, that might be something that hits an LLM and is used to train on a certain topic. So in some ways, a press release still can have influence in that way. Other than that, the typical press release is not going far these days. It’s very difficult to maximize a press release.

We are competing for attention in the media landscape. There are less journalists. There is more news. The news cycle is shortened. It’s not even 24 hours. It’s about 24 minutes, it feels like most times. So just your standard press release, not put across the wire, not going far for most companies, you know, unless you are a enterprise corporation or, you know, very exciting in some other way.

@nevillehobson (23:58.229)

Shel Holtz (24:12.945)

Stephanie Grober (24:20.301)

@nevillehobson (24:20.936)

But this notion of repurposing press releases to take into account the audience change, i.e. it’s not people, it’s the algorithm. I’m not using the word machine. I see people talk about it’s the machines. It’s not the machines. It’s the algorithm, right? So I think that is a credible view.

I disagree with you there, Shel. I think that is something that we are seeing that you need to prepare your content to publish it online with two audiences in mind, which are the humans and the algorithms. And the example Shel mentioned that we discussed specifically in an episode was somebody who has thought this through, it’s a really good visual explainers on the differences between them. They made a lot of sense to me, I have to say.

But is it going to be like the press release, the social media press release from 2006 to 2010, that was a template of the things you should include for social media to take advantage of it generated quite a lot of excitement, a lot of buzz, lot of hype and ultimately just kind of faded away. It didn’t really, you know, attract a lot of attention.

Is this likely to be the same case? I wonder. So I think this does this is important this change along with all the other things that we’ve been discussing. And I just wonder where this is going to fit if people are going to be creating press releases where the prime audience they’re thinking of is an algorithm. Where does that fit into the picture?

Stephanie Grober (26:19.436)

The LLMs, the algorithm, it has to address the human at the end user who has a question and is seeking information and it has to answer that question.

Shel Holtz (27:23.025)

I’m thinking of the great content marketing that comes out of Microsoft where they’ll have a lengthy feature, but it contains some short videos. It contains some short audio clips. It has infographics and photos and text. And it’s all there in that format so that whoever wants to use it can just grab that audio file and maybe use it in a radio broadcast or just grab that video clip and use it in a TV news report. Does that make sense? Should we be focused more on content marketing and less on more traditional forms of communication?

Stephanie Grober (28:34.432)

So this shouldn’t be groundbreaking to anybody, but think about variety in your content. Think about making sure it’s answering questions, play with the format, use various types of multimedia to support your content. I think that is absolutely a sound approach today.

@nevillehobson (29:35.04)

What impact is that having, do you think, and will continue to have on search generally and how you measure search, whether it’s GEO or SEO, how big of a concern should that be that people are not clicking through? And by the way, I’ve seen some reports in the last few days, which I haven’t bookmarked, frankly, but they’re talking about, you know, this is not what’s happening. People are clicking through. That doesn’t seem to fit what I see.

I don’t know, respectable search results being produced or data being produced showing that that is not the case. What’s your thought on that, Stephanie?

Stephanie Grober (30:36.482)

And again, it comes back to the content marketing that we were just talking about. Folks land somewhere else now in your website environment. I think it varies very much brand to brand, company to company, depends on what type of answer the end user was seeking.

And then again, we have to think, is everybody trusting AI? Personally today, I don’t fully trust the answers AI is giving me. I’m always going to go back and research them. Now that might change individual to individual, generation to generation, but it’s not perfect yet. So, you know, I don’t think we’re at a place where somebody is just going to solely get their questions answered by AI and go about their day.

Maybe we will get there and we will see a real sea change in the way web traffic works, but I don’t think this is going to completely break the system. And I don’t think it’s going to end search traffic as we know it. and you know, if folks are answering a question where they need something, they’re still going to have to click through to get it. AI can’t procure something for you. perhaps it can answer a question, but most likely you’re going to want to click through to read further and do your own research if the AI is just producing relevant sources for you.

Shel Holtz (32:38.473)

Stephanie Grober (33:08.174)

Rather, they embrace the fundamentals of great marketing and then make sure that everything that is put out adheres, complies, represents the brand consistently and correctly. There’s a lot of layers of approval. Anyone working in corporate marketing is probably very accustomed to that. And I think that that’s a great thing. We are not trying to utilize any gimmicks.

We are not trying to trick the AI because we have to stand behind what is put out on behalf of our clients. And when you’re talking about professional services, that’s really guidance and counsel to folks with very important personal or business questions.

Shel Holtz (34:24.593)

Stephanie Grober (34:49.132)

But then they are prioritizing the value giving advice that their professionals can provide. So it might not take as many billable hours on research, but you might get more value in the conversation with your attorney or advisor. Of course, marketers are using AI in very interesting ways.

But again, it’s not perfect. So I think it’s still very early stages. Certainly it’s not replacing anyone in these industries yet today. And we’ll see if we get to a point where it will. Now, the same can be said for communications professionals. Is AI going to take our jobs? I personally think if AI is writing all the content, then… wouldn’t we reach a point where human written content is actually at a premium and bespoke and in demand? Because how can you stand out in a sea of AI written content, right? That doesn’t sound appealing at all. I mean, that’s not what I wanna read. hopefully we’ll still be here in five years.

Shel Holtz (36:36.049)

Stephanie Grober (36:54.516)

@nevillehobson (37:11.518)

Stephanie Grober (37:58.167)

Of course there was the Google antitrust case decision this week where, know, they’re keeping chrome and Gemini is going to be, feeding us its results. So I don’t see that going anywhere in the next year. I will be watching to see if AI search gets smarter and gets more accurate. and how our clients or those I work with appear in the search. So it will be sort of testing for us.

Of course, we’ll be looking out for more case studies of it leading to work. Anecdotally, there are folks in legal who are saying, yes, I’ve gotten clients from chat GPT searches, which is great. I personally know that there are some attorneys I’ve worked with in corporate law, for example, who after a great streak of appearing in outlets like Wall Street Journal, CFO.com, know, AI will tell me about them if I say who is a great &A attorney in Los Angeles. That’s what I want to see. That’s what I’ll be looking for in the next year. I can’t say that definitively we’re going to see a sweeping change more than that.

Shel Holtz (39:44.634)

I’m not sure that’s the answer, but certainly budgets aren’t keeping up with volume. The point was made that this individual did not get more budget to help create all that content. So if your firm were hired by a communications leader and asked you to adjust their content strategy for GEO, what process changes would you recommend, say, over the first 90 days?

Stephanie Grober (40:42.35)

We do probably over 500 nominations for our clients each year. So that is always a part of our strategy, but very important. I’d be looking at online reviews, whether for a company, could be your Google My Business reviews. It could be Yelp, Facebook, wherever you might get reviewed, in whatever way you might get reviewed. And then making sure that the client is out there, mentioned and visible again.

Each month, fresh mentions in journalistic outlets, whether they are prestige media or trade press, they still have value. Multimedia, getting them on video, getting them in podcasts anywhere we can. And then from a content strategy as a marketer, hopefully at this point you are repurposing, but use AI and let it help you repurpose.

There’s so many tips and tricks that marketers can use when it comes to AI. And that includes taking what you already have and making it new, repurposing it into different formats to make your job a little bit easier. So that today is one of the biggest benefits of having AI available to us as a tool to make content production easier.

@nevillehobson (42:30.014)

Stephanie Grober (42:53.998)

So even as we are working to boost GEO results, doing public relations, getting media mentions, we’re working with people. You have a PR professional, you have a client source, you have a journalist who’s a person, and that is still very valuable. AI can’t do that for us, it’s relationship driven. So make sure people are doing your PR, not AI.

@nevillehobson (43:43.818)

But is that kind of like a serious disruptive element suddenly appearing on the horizon that will have a huge impact on this amongst many, many, but think specifically what we’re discussing today and the change it might bring to that where you’re introducing AI team members in a team. What do you think about that?

Stephanie Grober (45:00.706)

So, you we pitch byline articles for clients all the time. A lot of newsrooms now have a, you know, a disclaimer that we may reject your piece if we think it’s written by AI. So it remains to be seen, you know, there are AI helpers, they’re on our teams right now, you know, how many companies are incorporating AI, we do have AI teammates.

We’re figuring out the best use for them. Some are better than others. Some are more trusting of AI than others. And some folks are more clever to use it as a tool than others. when it comes to communicating back and forth with artificial intelligence completely, the more strategic and in depth you get, just don’t know if that’s what we’re going to see in the very near future.

Shel Holtz (46:29.649)

If I develop a strategy and I want somebody to play devil’s advocate, I can’t go to my $400 an hour consultant, I don’t have a budget for that. So I’ll just ask the AI consultant. I realize that it’s not as good, but in the absence of any alternatives, it’s fine. And it has come up with some really good responses. So…

Stephanie Grober (47:18.7)

It’s changing, it’s evolving so rapidly that, you know, don’t put all your eggs into one basket. Don’t buy into a one size fits all approach today. It’s still too soon. And don’t abandon your other marketing strategies or tactics in favor of some of the AI driven ones.

Shel Holtz (48:03.843)

Stephanie Grober (48:23.146)

Thank you guys very much for the time today.

The post FIR Interview: Generative Engine Optimisation with Stephanie Grober appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

“Artificial intelligence will not save us. But it might help us understand who we are.” – Monsignor Paul Tighe

In one of our most thought-provoking FIR Interviews to date, we speak with Monsignor Paul Tighe, Secretary of the Section of Culture of the Dicastery for Culture and Education at The Vatican, about the ethical dimensions of artificial intelligence and the role of the Church in shaping global conversations around technology.

As AI continues its rapid development and deployment across all sectors of society, the question of how we use it – and why – has never been more important. From concerns about algorithmic dehumanisation to the challenge of building ethical cultures inside corporations, Msgr. Tighe brings a unique voice of moral clarity and practical insight to the discussion.

In this wide-ranging conversation with FIR co-hosts Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson, and guest co-host Silvia Cambié, Msgr. Tighe addresses:

From practical reflections on professional identity and solidarity to broader insights on how we can avoid becoming de-skilled or ethically numb in a machine-paced world, Msgr Tighe offers a balanced view: not alarmist, but clear-eyed about both risks and opportunities.

He reminds us that technology reflects the mindset of its makers – and that responsibility must remain human.

“We must not become blindly dependent on technology. We must cultivate the wisdom of the heart.”

For communicators, business leaders, technologists, and policymakers alike, this interview is a compelling call to think more deeply – and act more responsibly – in shaping the future of AI. The conversation offers rare insight into how values like dignity, trust, and ethical discernment can and must coexist with innovation.

Whether you’re navigating the rollout of AI in your organisation or simply grappling with its broader societal implications, this is a conversation worth hearing – and sharing.

Listen now, read the transcript (below) or watch the video version, and be part of a vital global dialogue.

A native of Navan, County Meath in the Republic of Ireland, Monsignor Paul Tighe was ordained a priest of the Dublin Diocese in 1983. After post-graduate studies in Rome, he was appointed as a lecturer in Moral Theology in the Mater Dei Institute in Dublin, where he was appointed head of the Theology department in 2000.

In 2007, he was appointed as Secretary of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications. In that capacity, he was involved in promoting Church reflection on the importance of digital culture and in the launch of some of the social media initiatives of the Holy See.

In 2015, he was nominated to the Pontifical Council for Culture and as titular Bishop of Drivastum. At the Council, he followed questions related to digital culture and technology.

In October 2022, he was appointed as Secretary of the newly established Dicastery for Culture and Education, where he has particular responsibility for the Culture section. In January 2025, that Dicastery, together with the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, published ‘ANTIQUA ET NOVA: Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence.’

Paul Tighe Wikipedia entry

Links from this Interview:

Based on the audio recording of the FIR Interview recorded on 22 July 2025. Lightly edited for clarity and syntax, and formatted for the reader experience.

Neville Hobson

As artificial intelligence transforms society, who speaks for humanity? In this FIR interview, The Vatican’s Monsignor Paul Tighe shares why the Church is stepping forward in the global tech debate, exploring how dignity and ethical responsibility must lead the way.

V/o and intro music

This is For Immediate Release, the podcast for communicators.

Shel Holtz

Welcome everyone to a For Immediate Release interview. I’m Shel Holtz in the US and I’m joined today by my co-host Neville Hobson in the UK and our guest co-host Silvia Cambié in Italy. And I’m very pleased to welcome our interview guest Monsignor Paul Tighe, who is secretary of the Dicastery for Culture and Education at The Vatican, responsible for the Culture section.

In January of this year, the Dicastery for Culture and Education, along with the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, published Antiqua et Nova, a “Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence.” Given our interest in AI on FIR, we’ve been intrigued by and even reported on both Pope Francis’ and now Pope Leo’s focus on AI and humanity.

Monsignor, we’re very pleased to welcome you to FIR. Thank you for joining us.

Paul Tighe

Thank you. I’m very happy to be with you and I look forward to our conversation.

Shel Holtz

I wonder if you might share with us, before we jump into artificial intelligence, a little bit of your background.

Paul Tighe

My own background, originally, 100 years ago, I studied law in Ireland, civil law, subsequently studied theology here in Rome, and eventually ended up teaching a kind of combination in the field of ethics, the relationship between law and morality and public policy and those issues.

When I came to work in Rome about 20 years ago, more or less, I worked in the communications department where we were working on the integration of digital technologies into the Holy See. And what really began to fascinate me at that stage was how digital technologies were really impacting culture in general, how we behave as individuals, how we form community, how we learn from each other, how we communicate, how every aspect of life has been transformed.

And I think that led me into the area of reflecting on AI as something that has an extraordinary potential to impact how we as human beings live as individuals and in community.

Silvia Cambié

I think we can get started then with a few questions we have, Monsignor Tighe. And if I may, on the first end, I would like to refer to Antiqua et Nova. And in it, the Church highlights some dimensions of human intelligence, the relational dimension, the spiritual dimension, the embodied dimension.

There is, however, a school of thought out there which says that that artificial intelligence is helping us to truly understand what makes us human. Because artificial intelligence helps us with repetitive tasks, with pedestrian tasks, it actually gives us the time to focus on different abilities that we have as humans, like spiritual self-respect, empathy, insight.

What do you say to that?

Paul Tighe

Yeah, I mean, undoubtedly AI has the potential to facilitate a lot of human reflection and human thought. It’s interesting, one of the earlier terms that was used before artificial intelligence really won the round was to talk about augmented intelligence. AI is something that we can work with, that we can use to increase our own capacities, to expand our own capacities in certain fields. But I think the limitation would be is that those fields are of necessity somewhat limited.

One of the things that we were very interested in questioning and maybe it’s AI that has forced us to think about this is what do we mean by intelligence? What is it that we really qualify as a human intelligence?

AI is extraordinarily good at certain types of tasks to which we would give the title intelligence, calculation, analysis, pattern spotting, processing of more and more data, extraordinarily capable in those arenas.

But there are other issues that I think are questions for human intelligence, too, which are the questions, well, what should we do with these new potentials, with these new capacities, and how do we ensure that they actually serve the true good of human beings? And that’s a type of intelligence, I think, that we still have to maintain a certain agency over and a certain responsibility for.

Shel Holtz

Monsignor, The Vatican has warned that while AI systems are able to make decisions – and I’ve seen research that says particularly among Gen Z – a lot of people are turning to AI to make day-to-day decisions for them that they used to have to make for themselves. These AI systems don’t bear any moral responsibility. That’s on us.

Now, just this week, OpenAI has released ChatGPT Agents. We have seen some early agents, but now anybody can, if they have the right account, and more accounts are going to be coming online soon for OpenAI’s customers and even free users, able to use agents that I just read Ethan Mollick today saying, really for the first time, does that analogy of an intern working beside you feel apt?

With this coming, and I know that one of the things I’ve been focused on is how managers are going to need to help their employees through this transition to an age where we’re working alongside AI employees. For what it’s worth, that’s basically what they’re going to be.

What do you think are the implications of this in terms of the dignity of workers and the humanity of work?

Paul Tighe

Yeah, I think there’s a whole range of issues you’ve raised there, you know, and the idea that people might hand over decision making to some sort of an AI program, even relating to personal questions. You know, I hope they would be vigilant about the kind of replies that we’re going to get.

And I think we also have to recognize in the past, people might have been going to fortune tellers or to horoscopes looking for advice on how to spend their lives. So one has to be recognized.

I mean, there are certain tasks which I think you would ask an AI platform to undertake. There are certain types of scoping exercises you might ask them to work on. But I think one of the things one has to be able to retain is something of your capacity to recognize, to be able to critically engage with the results you’re getting, to understand those results. And even at times to have an intuition that this may be something that’s somehow not in the right line or is a hallucination of some sort or other.

So I think of… for example, I belong to a generation that grew up with the very first calculators that could do speedy mathematics. And as we were coming to our final examinations at school, one of the issues, could you bring the calculator into the exam with you? And one of the things people said was you needed to keep your own certain numeracy and ability with numeracy that you could spot a gross error at least immediately.

And I think that’s one of things that we need to keep a sense of tuning our own capacities, not becoming de-skilled. My worry would be we would become de-skilled and we’d become blindly attentive or dependent on a technology.

I mean, another analogy I would choose sometimes is I think we’ve all got a little lazy about using GPS systems and different navigation systems as we drive; when they don’t work or when we suddenly find ourselves without a signal, sometimes we find some of our abilities have been lost.

That ability to navigate, to to map read, to find our way around, I use that as an analogy for life. We have to keep that, our own ability to ask the right questions and to know what are more likely to be the dependable capital questions.

I think the area of obviously the introductions of having an intern working beside you in the form of a platform. That’s another issue though, but it’s an issue that will become important about the impact of that on how people work and on the amount of jobs that may or may not be available in the future and how we think about issues about that.

Silvia Cambié

I have another question about Antiqua et Nova, and in it there is a very powerful observation about the fact that AI often forces workers to adjust to the pace and demands of machines rather than machines having to adjust to the needs of humans. And when I read that, that really resonated with me.

I’ve worked in managed services throughout my career, so I know the pain of having to adjust to that pace and the anxiety. So I would like to ask you, what do you think societies and employers can do to make sure that AI respects the needs of workers, particularly those workers in vulnerable and outsourced roles in the Global South?

Paul Tighe

Yeah, I think that you’ve hit a hugely important issues. One of the things I think when we think about AI, we have to think about AI as something that will be an accelerator and a multiplier of existing practices. And one of the things we have to recognize, there are many contexts in which human work is not valued, in which the dignity of workers is already not valued.

And the risk is that AI in certain ways could exacerbate that, where people will see AI as something that can displace workers, that can work all hours. This is becoming some… as you know, there’s been some talk about unshoring employment into the first world again. But a lot of that unshoring is likely to be handed to machines rather than human beings.

And we’ve already seen anecdotally and in literary examples I’ve been reading about, something about workers in an Amazon warehouse, or in any warehouse you care to mention, where there are logistical processes that have been directed by algorithmic concerns and that somehow the humanity of the worker is lost.

There was an extraordinary article in the New Yorker magazine or the New York magazine looking at food delivery operators in New York who essentially are driven into competition with each other by an algorithm that will give work to those who are the speediest in their delivery tasks. And therefore dehumanizing and also creating competition between people who might previously have been seen as working together.

So I think we need to reflect and to be not complacent about how this could impact. At another level, there are ways in which it may displace certain types of work that are already meaningless, and maybe less than worthy of human dignity.

So I think it’s in the balance, my worry would be, and this is a thing that Pope Francis often brought out: it’s not just about the technology that’s there and it can be used for good or it could be used for bad. It’s that the technology is born out of a certain mentality.

And if the mentality, the commercial mindset that is giving birth to the technology has at its heart exclusively values about efficiency and profitability, then the chances are that the dignity and worth of individuals will not be respected.

Whether you blame that on the AI or on the commercial mentality is probably we need to be careful not to do that.

The other example, if I may, that struck me because we talked, it links with something Shel said earlier, which is the one is like people are saying AI can liberate us from some of the more menial or less important tasks and allow us to come in at the specifically human level.

And an example of that was in the field of medicine where AIs and AI platforms will be able to process enormous amount of diagnostic materials, do comparisons with other X-rays, prescribe individual drug regimes relating to the genetic makeup of the individual.

And some doctors began to say, this is great. This will allow us to recover what is the essence, what is at the core of our being as doctors, which is that we aren’t able to give time and care and attention to our patients. And that was a very kind of positive view and understanding of the role.

Other doctors kicked back and said, in reality, we wouldn’t be so complacent because the real risk is that we will now be expected to see more patients and to see them more speedily rather than giving them more time and giving them more individualized attention. They said that was for two reasons. One, an obvious one, is that so much of health care is commercially driven and there are drug companies and other investors requiring a certain throughput.

But they said more subtly was that an AI can measure the amount of time you spend with a patient. It can measure how many patients you see, but it can’t necessarily quantify the quality of the interaction. So therefore, the quality of the care, the attentiveness of the communication gets lost because it’s not capable of being measured. So one of the dangers with the AI thing that we suddenly have to fit into a world where everything has to be measured and where some of our most important human tasks and human achievements are not necessarily capable of pure measurement or external measurement.

Silvia Cambié

So if I may, Neville, very quickly, I’ve got a follow up question. So, you know, those roles being dehumanized, as you described, that’s definitely an issue, again, going back to my experience in managed services. But often, you know, when someone works in that environment, as you say, that’s the culture, right? You have to deliver.

You participate in a lot of international discussions and you sit on different fora. Is there a serious effort to counter that mentality?

Paul Tighe

What I’ve found is sometimes an attentiveness of some of the people from the tech side, being very attentive to say, well, we will be benevolent towards those who are displaced. And we need to look at the possibility of having a system of a universal social benefit or some sort of a universal income that we will share with people that will compensate them for the work that they lose.

What we would be bringing to some of those discussions is a sense that, yeah, but work isn’t just about economic reward. Work is where I express my creativity. It’s where I express my identity. It’s where often I socialize. So in terms of some of the costs of loss of employment, it’s not simply about an economic argument. It’s back to more qualitative issues about what it means to be human.

Neville Hobson

Before I get to my specific question, it’s interesting, this topic, by the way, I find very interesting indeed, this particular segment of our conversation.

I guess my question is quite a broad one as a follow up to this broad topic, which is, if we’re talking about deploying AI efficiently, showing that it uplifts people rather than displaces people, I wonder in today’s climate, where morality seems to be absent in many organizations in terms of how they’re approaching their business and the treatment of employees, I guess the question I wanted to ask you is, what do you see as the moral obligation of companies and other organizations developing or deploying AI? What would you say to that?

Paul Tighe

Well, in a previous life, I used to teach business ethics. So I’m back to that famous article that’s saying that the business of business is to produce profits, but I think one of the things we’re all becoming much more aware of is that need to breach the corporate veil in terms of commercial activities that we ensure that corporations don’t somehow level down people’s sense of ethical responsibility.

So one of the issues that we would be kind of promoting is if you look at the area, the future of governance in the broader sense of this area, there’s the kind of governmental and multi-government multinational regulation that may be needed. Many of the companies talk about their commitment to establishing their own ethical practices.

But in the middle of that, I would also want to maintain something about the individual, the responsibility of the individuals who make up those companies. And our history in the world of treating whistleblowers is not great. They might get a wonderful film made about their life 30 years later after everything has fallen apart.

But it’s about somehow creating environments in which people feel they have a freedom to look beyond the simple tech moment of their task and to reflect on the broader human impact of what they’re doing. The language of many of the companies pays tribute to that, but it’s how do you change the culture of a corporation to ensure that the high and noble ethical standards that they often hold are in fact effective in day-to-day happenings.

There’s that old statement that, you know, culture eats strategy for breakfast.

So what is the culture of a group? I can have a lovely set of ethical principles, but I may be learning in my day-to-day work that all my boss is interested in is expediency and quick turnaround, and that we’re ahead of the competition in what we’re working on. So one of the challenges here is to try and get, which is again, precedes and will continue to be an issue, precedes AI is that issue about how do we create environments where ethics are important.

And one of the hopeful things I see in that area is that you see something like professional associations trying to articulate for their own members standards that they would hold to. So the IEEE, the electrical engineering groups, have been very good on kind of articulating standards that they will work to.

So I think it’s… we did a small thing with the Santa Clara University, which sits in Silicon Valley, who produced a handbook on how a corporation could intentionally create an ethical culture where individuals will be empowered to actually take seriously the high ethical standards that the companies may be trying to hold for themselves.

But I wouldn’t want to exaggerate or be naive in that matter. I think competition is driving a lot of what’s happening at the moment. The next standard is to get the next standards in. You know, there’s a small, relatively small number of companies who are in competition with each other to get ahead of the game on AI.

There’s a huge amount of money invested in it. And then there’s the geopolitical desire to keep one’s country ahead of any other country. So it’s complex and just in necessity, the environment to the broader sense is not necessarily conducive to the best ethical thinking and reflection.

Neville Hobson

Yeah. Ok. You’ve described the need for a wisdom of the heart in shaping AI’s future. And Antiqua et Nova mentions how a technological product tends to reflect the worldviews of developers, owners, users, and regulators. And in fact, this fits very nicely to an extension of what we’ve just been discussing. Because my question specifically is, what would be your advice to a corporate communicator trying to create a culture respectful of the dignity of technology users in their company.

Paul Tighe

Yes… I’m thinking here now! I would say that, I mean, I think the communicators, those who communicate on behalf of companies have a particular responsibility, which is to go beyond simply selling of their own product, of their own platforms.

I think on that area that I think there’s something at stake here that if I’m trying to get traction with the corporate world, it’s somehow about issues about trust and about risk. If companies behave in such ways that they destroy the trust that people should have on them, they will pay the price of that ultimately.

Maybe not immediately, but ultimately I’d like to think they will pay the price of that. And we’re beginning to see it with people being much less… people becoming even more suspicious and I think rightly so, more critical of the big companies and the platforms. I think people are becoming much more alert to the business models of companies… are becoming more alert to use that idea if the product is free, you’re the product. And I think cultivating that kind of sense of responsibility.

So if I was talking to the communicators of the companies, I think I would try and imagine that I am trying to create ultimately a public that is more educated, more alert, and more capable of being critical of what I am presenting rather than trying to bamboozle or to simply, I think even the long term, I will lose trust, yeah.

Neville Hobson

I think a kind of mini follow up to that would be given the reality of societies generally, particularly in the developed world, the Global North, if you will, fast moving, it’s fragmented, there’s so much disagreement and different opinions. Ethics doesn’t seem to get much of a look in, it seems to me. I don’t mean in terms of behavior and how people demonstrate ethics but conversations about ethics.

So my question to you on that then is how do we encourage deeper conversations about ethics, particularly in organizations? What’s your thinking on that?

Paul Tighe

My own thinking on that one is as somebody who’s worked in ethics over the years and we’re to recognize that sometimes we’re inclined to privatize ethics. We’re inclined to say, look, that’s somebody’s own view and just leave it to them. And that there’s a fear almost of entering.

But I think we need to empower people to ask questions about the choices that we make as individuals and that we make as a society. Which choices and which developments and which attitudes are actually conducive to what the Greeks would have called human flourishing, meaning human flourishing in terms of my individual sense of wellbeing, but also the wellbeing of the society in which I live.

And I’m conscious that the task of ethics, particularly around issues around AI, becomes complicated because we’re living in a very fractured world with different political systems, different religious beliefs, different philosophical commitments, different value systems.

But ultimately, I believe that there is something about being a human – and maybe this is back to the wisdom of the heart – that it is possible for human beings to discern together on what are the types of choices, developments, attitudes that actually promote a sense of well-being? And maybe more easy to get agreement on what are the attitudes and approaches that are certainly not conducive to well-being?

And in terms of thickening out an ethics dialogue and empowering people, one thing sometimes, I remember doing this for many years, I would have been invited into different professional associations to talk to them about ethics. And you had to remind them, you’re the experts, not me. I can teach you a method and a way of thinking and a way of analysis that is ethical. But ultimately, you’re the person who needs to think, reflect of what it is that gives value, worth and purpose to your life and to the life of people around you.

And that’s even in terms of some of the issues we had in one interesting dialogue with some people from China. And the issue that came in that discussion was a little bit like the Chinese were quite critical of the Western approach to ethics, which is highly individualistic. We were starting out being a little bit critical of AI in China and totalitarianism.

But what we began to perceive was maybe there was a corrective in the middle in how we think of what it is to be human. And to be human is to live in society with others. So even if we begin to think about how the decisions, the choices I make are not just impacting me, but others, and in the broader sense, the whole human family, then I think we get a possibility of finding coherence.

That’s not going to be easy, but I think I look at, I think, and in that one, I think it’ll be very much people coming from the humanities will help us there. Writers who can kind of get us thinking more critically.

I’ve read some novels by David Eggers. I don’t know if you’ve seen The Circle and The Every. I wouldn’t say they’re great novels, but they do capture something about a tendency in human beings, particularly in the Western world, to be willing to exchange their privacy, their own autonomy for convenience. He’s looking at that in terms of the world of social media. I think that will be even more so in the world of AI.

Are people going to be looking for convenience and ease and their own personal immediate satisfaction? Or will it be a capacity to think and reflect on a more grounded experience of what it is that really makes life worthwhile?

So I do think AI in its own ways – and Silvia, this back to you – is forcing us to open up some of those more limited questions about what it is to be human, what it is that gives us satisfaction in life, what is it that makes life worthwhile?

And I think the hope we had in producing Antiqua et Nova was kind of to say, look, here are our perceptions, here are some ideas we have, but this has to be a truly global debate involving people from different traditions and different perspectives, and we cannot be left either to the so-called ethical experts or to the so-called technical experts.

Shel Holtz

We have some time left and I’d love to follow up with a question on that global ethical debate. I know that The Vatican has supported the Rome Call for AI Ethics and has advocated UN level treaties of various types. Just recently we had Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta would not sign on to the EU framework for AI ethics and I would have to characterize the US government’s approach to this as all gas no brakes.

Do you think that a global consensus is realistic and I’m wondering what role you think religious institutions should play and how that would work with input and dialogue from other types of institutions?

Paul Tighe

Yeah, no, think, I mean, at a time… one of the sad realities is a time when the world needs some form of global governance or agreed standards and agreed attitudes and some of those institutions have never been so weak. What I think, certainly, part of our Catholic social teaching tradition has always been to insist on the need for attempts to develop international… to strengthen the international organizations so that we have some sort of a global input into the thinking about our future.

I’m not trying to be naive here. I probably don’t want to become either despondent or to give up on it, but I mean, it’s been quite disappointing as you mentioned, you referenced the AI Act for the European Union, which was a relatively limited initial first step, which was beginning to get a little bit of traction until political considerations, I think, empowered the companies to feel that they don’t need to take it as seriously as I would have hoped they would.

So I was at the AI Summit in Paris at the end of January, beginning of February this year which was certainly disappointing in terms of the kind of reluctance to establish any overall governance standards and to somehow the geopolitical considerations of keeping one’s country to the forefront and therefore supporting the companies who are doing that was quite considerable. Yeah.

But I do think at the same time where I would build back and say, it’s not any one religion. And one of the interesting things is trying to develop kind of a community of religious voices who may have perspectives to offer on it, and who more particularly may through their own interaction with people who are working in the industry might be able to have an influence.

So one of the ones I mentioned, the document we worked on with the people from Santa Clara University and with people who work in Silicon Valley, many of whom were self-declared Catholics, who say I want to somehow find a harmony between my professional work and my actual religious convictions, my human convictions.

But I want to do that in a way that I can engage other people within my company who share the same ethical and moral concerns, may not have the religious beliefs or the religious vocabulary, but are no less committed to trying to ensure that we are attentive to the impact of what we’re doing in the broader sense on society.

So I think it’s… I have great hope in what individuals will do, and we’ve seen that in some situations where people have been willing to sacrifice their own jobs rather than doing something that they’re uncomfortable with.

Silvia Cambié

I had a follow-up question, Monsignor Tighe, about that need to find a balance between one’s professional obligations and one’s religious beliefs. So that’s something that in these days in tech, I kind of struggle with. And I encounter people in delivery jobs in tech who just have to roll out tech and do what they are told and basically meet their targets. But they are also struggling because of the privacy issues, because of the data issues. So what would be your advice to them?

Paul Tighe

Certainly, Silvia, I don’t want to be simplistic on this one, but I often, when I’m talking with people like that, I remind them that the, you know, what is a profession? Profession actually begins with a kind of a religious etymology, that it was standing for something. I profess something. And the skills I have as an engineer, the skills I have, the capacities I have as a doctor, enable me to almost intrinsically stand for certain values.

So the important issues that emerge there for me, I think, is to enable people to have that. What do you stand for? What are the limits of what you’re going to do? And how do you think about your own ethical and moral responsibility? That, again, in the professional issue here would be that is often achieved better when we can do it cooperatively with others when we take a stance together and professions traditionally limited entrance, they decide who’s qualified to have this term, whose behavior means we exclude them from the profession.

So that if a profession and people who work together can find a way of working in solidarity with each other and collaboratively to defend certain values rather than being picked off one by one and forced into things that they’re not comfortable.

Shel Holtz

Monsignor, looking back at the digital communication work that you have done and in looking at your background, it’s considerable media transformation at The Vatican, you’ve been involved with the Internet Governance Forum, South by Southwest panels.

I wonder… I’d love to get your views on what kind of communication strategies we in the communication profession should be looking at that, based on your experience, would best translate the ethical complexities about AI to our audiences, whether it’s employees inside our organizations or to the publics our organizations engage with.

Paul Tighe

Yeah, one of the things, Shel, I’ve done a lot of is peering in unlikely venues, dressed like this and all that goes with that. At least I don’t have to introduce myself. one thing that I’ve learned and I think I have no formal qualifications in communications.

What I learned, though, was what I call an insecure teacher, which is the insecure, the lecturer gives the lecture and if the student doesn’t understand, that’s his or her fault. The insecure teacher is the one who’s watching around the classroom to see, do they understand what I’m saying? Where I feel a responsibility not simply for the transmission but for the reception of a message.

So one of the things that I would say that for any people working in communications is to try and test effectively what people who are hearing you and listening to you are taking from what you’re saying. So that you try and close out that loop. If there’s a gap in the communication, I think it’s the communicator’s fault.

And I say that as I say the insecure teacher who had to correct examinations and could see these horrible answers that were coming back from people whose interest was to as accurately repeat what you had said as possible. I saw the mistakes.

So what I learned was to know your audience, know who you’re talking to, know their mentality and find a language that can bridge between you and them. So for people working communications in the tech standard, one of the things I would do is try and do whatever your communication is to bring people along so that they acquire enough understanding to maybe become more difficult and more awkward and ask harder questions, but to commit to empower them through your communication.

Neville Hobson

That’s a good response, I think.

We’re approaching the end of our time today, Monsignor, and we always ask this question in our interviews with interesting guests, such as you, for instance. I think we’ve covered a great deal on this fascinating topic that is very much at the heart of all the conversations we have had in episodes of this podcast over the last year or two about artificial intelligence that’s business focused.

And it’s terrific to get your insights on all of that. But I guess the concluding question we would have would be to say, if there’s a question you wish we had asked, but we haven’t asked it, what would that be?

Paul Tighe

I’m always nervous that I don’t get to speak enough about the potential and the good potential of the AI platforms. And I think properly developed and with adequate human buy-in, I think they will have extraordinary and positive transformative effects.

And I think of the area particularly of medicine. It won’t happen automatically because our medical systems are already just orientated towards the rich and not necessarily fully in keeping, but there is extraordinary potential there to offer new diagnostic tools, new pathways. That I would… there are the sort of things I would always want to say.

At the same time, back to the wisdom of the heart, I think it’s about… even there, we have to avoid the seduction of a technology that’s going to save us and get back to healthy practices in ways of living our life. And maybe AIs can become a kind of a way of tracking how we’re living, what we’re doing with our time, how we’re, I think it has a potential to make us more alert to who we are and what we’re doing and maybe therefore making healthier choices.

Shel Holtz

Excellent. Well, Monsignor, thank you very much for your time today. It’s been a fascinating conversation and we’re very grateful that you carved out the time to spend with us today.

Paul Tighe

No, thank you very much. Thank you. And look forward to seeing you all again sometime. Thank you.

Shel Holtz

It would be interesting to catch up again in a couple of years.

Silvia Cambié

Thank you.

Neville Hobson

Thank you.

Paul Tighe

Bye bye. Thank you. Or my avatar will do it. Cheers. bye. Thank you. Thank you.

Silvia Cambié

Thank you.

Neville Hobson

Thank you.

Fade in outro music, Neville Hobson pre-recorded narrative

 You’ve been listening to an FIR interview podcast. FIR Interviews are just one of the podcasts you’ll find on the FIR Podcast Network, which is anchored by For Immediate Release, a monthly show hosted by Neville Hobson and Shel Holz, with tech reports from Dan York.

Neville and Shel also host short-form episodes during the working week.

Visit us at FIR Podcast Network dot com to find all the public relations and organizational communication podcasts available for listening and following.

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How do we prove the real value of communication in an age of fragmented media, AI-driven analysis, and relentless demand for results? In this episode of FIR Interviews, we talk with Richard Bagnall, a Board director at AMEC, the International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication, and a global authority on comms measurement, about the newly released Barcelona Principles 4.0 – the most comprehensive update yet to the world’s leading framework for communication neasurement and evaluation.

From embracing transparency, ethics, and impact, to the contentious advertising value equivalents (AVEs) metric, this conversation is a must-listen for anyone serious about elevating the role of communication in modern organisations.

The conversation centres on Richard’s insights into the thinking behind the update, what has changed since version 3.0, and why these principles matter more than ever in a fast-evolving media and technology landscape.

Among the key themes discussed:

Richard also highlights AMEC’s tools and resources – including the Integrated Evaluation Framework and Measurement Maturity Mapper – to help organisations move from outdated metrics to strategic, outcomes-focused evaluation.

Listen now to hear why Barcelona Principles 4.0 is not just an update, but a call to action for the global communications industry.

Richard Bagnall is Co-Founder of CommsClarity Consulting Ltd, Board Director of AMEC, the global trade body for communications measurement, and a non-executive Director at Milk & Honey PR. He is a globally recognised expert in PR and communications measurement, planning, and research, with over 30 years’ experience. He has led several of the sector’s most respected media intelligence and evaluation firms, including Metrica, Gorkana, PRIME Research, and CARMA, and has advised many of the world’s top brands.

He now applies this experience at CommsClarity Consulting, which he co-founded to support PR agencies, in-house teams, and media intelligence firms with strategy, best practice evaluation, insight generation, and business scaling. For the past decade, Richard has advised the UK Government’s Strategy & Evaluation Council and co-authored its Digital Communications Capabilities Review.

A long-serving leader at AMEC, he chaired the organisation for six years and has been a driving force behind many of its best-known resources, including the Integrated Evaluation Framework, the revised Barcelona Principles, its PR Planning Guide, and Measurement Maturity Mapper.

Richard is a Fellow of AMEC, the PRCA (Public Relations and Communications Association), and an Honorary Fellow of the CIPR (Chartered Institute of Public Relations). His lifetime commitment to improving communications evaluation has earned multiple accolades, including the CIPR President’s Medal, the SABRE Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement, AMEC’s Don Bartholomew Award, and induction into PR News’ PR Measurement Hall of Fame.

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Video Version

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In this episode of FIR Interviews, we welcome back a long-time friend of the podcast, award-winning journalist and media researcher Craig Silverman, for his third appearance – this time to talk about his new venture, Indicator.

Craig is best known for his work on media accuracy, verification, and exposing digital misinformation, including reporting at ProPublica and BuzzFeed News, and as founder and editor of “Regret The Error” and its subsequent book.

Now, with co-founder Alexios Mantzarlis, he has launched Indicator, a subscription-based site and newsletter focused on reporting, resources, and training that help professionals understand and investigate digital deception.

In this wide-ranging conversation, Craig explains how Indicator came to be, the challenges of launching a media startup, and what kind of impact he hopes to achieve. He also shares practical insights for communication professionals facing the growing threat of coordinated inauthentic behaviour, fake reviews, and AI-generated disinformation.

Discussion Highlights

Craig Silverman is an award-winning journalist and author, and one of the world’s leading experts on online disinformation and digital investigations. He is the co-founder of Indicator, a newsletter and website dedicated to exposing digital deception and equipping professionals with the knowledge and skills to help them investigate it.

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In this FIR Interview, Neville and Shel talk with author, investigative journalist, and New York SEO, Eric Schwartzman, about his Fast Company article, “Bot farms invade social media to hijack popular sentiment.” A consultant who specialises in SEO for financial services companies, Eric explains how coordinated networks of smartphones and AI-generated content are distorting public perception, manipulating virality, and reshaping what we trust online.

Eric, a long-time friend of FIR and a former entertainment public relations correspondent for FIR, discusses how bot farms now outnumber real users on social networks, how profits drive PR ethics, and why Meta, TikTok, X, and even LinkedIn are complicit in enabling synthetic engagement at scale.

Eric also previews his forthcoming book, Invasion of the Bot Farms, which explores this escalating threat through insider stories and case studies.

Discussion Highlights

Eric Schwartzman is a digital PR and content marketing strategist, author, and award-winning podcaster specialising in organic media, SEO, and content marketing. With deep experience in both agency and client-side roles, he helps organisations boost visibility, web traffic, and conversions through strategic digital campaigns.

As a freelance journalist, Eric has written for Fast Company, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, AdWeek, and others, and is the author of two best-selling books on SEO. His work bridges technical expertise and clear communication, making him a trusted voice in the evolving digital landscape.

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Zora Artis is a leading voice in strategic internal communication with a passion for how IC can lead the integration of AI into the workplace in ways that reinforce, rather than replace, human connection.

In this FIR Interview, Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz speak with Zora about how artificial intelligence is reshaping internal communication, prompting a strategic transformation in the profession.

The conversation builds on Zora’s article on the Poppulo blog in March 2025, “Bridging AI and Human Connection: What’s Possible for Internal Communication,” and draws on her experience facilitating a global roundtable debate of senior communicators in The Hague.

Zora challenges the narrative that AI erodes empathy or replaces people. Instead, she explores how AI, when used intentionally and ethically, can support personalisation, amplify employee voice, and help communicators focus more on strategic value and less on repetitive tasks.

The discussion also examines examples of AI in action: from internal GPTs (large language models that use deep learning to generate human-like text and content) trained on leadership content, to custom AI advisors embedded in daily workflows.

But with opportunity comes risk, and Zora highlights the need for governance, inclusivity, and ethical clarity in how AI is used within organisations.

Discussion Highlights:

Zora Artis, GAICD, IABC Fellow, SCMP, is a strategist, advisor, and coach specialising in alignment, communication, and leadership. She is the CEO of Artis Advisory, co-founder of The Alignment People, and a partner in Mirror Mirror Alignment.

She helps leaders and teams cut through complexity to build clarity, cohesion, and high performance.

Zora is a passionate advocate for responsible human–AI collaboration and the evolving role of communication professionals in the way we work and the value we create and deliver.

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AI-powered search is fundamentally changing how reputations are built, managed, and perceived online. In this FIR Interview, we’re joined by Sam Michelson, founder and CEO of digital reputation management company Five Blocks, to discuss how companies and executives must rethink their approach to digital reputation management in a world where search is no longer just about Google.

Sam explains how AI-driven platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity are shifting search behaviour. Users are no longer just looking for links; they’re asking complex, conversational questions and expecting detailed, AI-generated summaries. This means that traditional SEO tactics, like keyword optimisation and structured markup, are becoming less relevant. Instead, companies must focus on creating rich, authoritative content that AI models can reference to shape narratives.

A key challenge, Sam notes, is that most companies don’t address their own challenges online. When people ask AI models about the risks or controversies surrounding a brand, the answers often come from news sites or third-party sources rather than the company itself. By not filling this information gap, businesses risk having others define their reputation for them.

We also explore the rise of Agentic AI, where autonomous digital agents gather, analyse, and summarise information, both for consumers and businesses. Five Blocks is experimenting with AI-driven monitoring tools that track how different AI platforms present brands, helping companies stay ahead of reputational risks.

Sam Michelson is a recognised thought leader in digital reputation management and the Founder and CEO of Five Blocks, a pioneering firm that helps executives and brands take control of their online presence. With over 20 years of experience, Sam has worked closely with industry leaders and top PR and public affairs firms, advising them on strategies to shape search results, Wikipedia pages, and AI-driven platforms like ChatGPT.

A sought-after speaker and consultant, Sam shares insights on the evolving digital landscape, reputation strategy, and the intersection of technology and communications. He holds two U.S. patents for innovations in knowledge base technology and interactive digital advertising.

Beyond his work, Sam is an avid traveller, scuba diver, and mountain biker. He is married and has eight children.

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