FIR Podcast Network

In this episode, Chip and Gini discuss how agency owners should handle situations when an employee resigns.

They explore the emotional reactions owners might have, the importance of maintaining professionalism, and the need to gather more information from the departing employee. They emphasize the value of a cooling-off period to devise a rational plan and the potential for restructuring the team.

Chip and Gini also talk about seeking feedback from remaining team members to ensure a smooth transition and mitigate the risk of more employees leaving. They stress seeing an employee’s resignation as an opportunity to learn and improve the business. [read the transcript]

The post ALP 274: Turning employee departures into opportunities appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

A growing body of research suggests employees are more disconnected than ever. What are internal communication teams getting wrong? Also in this long-form monthly episode for June 2025:

In his Tech Report, Dan York looks at Mastodon’s updated terms prohibiting AI model training, announcements from TwitchCon, and the impact of Texas’s mandatory age verification law on Internet privacy and security.

Links from this episode:

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report:

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, July 28.

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

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

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

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

Raw Transcript:

@nevillehobson (00:02)

Shel Holtz (00:13)

Definitely some challenges facing the world of associations in general and IABC in particular. But as usual, the content at the conference was excellent. There were some really good sessions on things like driving AI adoption in the organization presented by ProSci, the change management research organization with some really revealing data, some very interesting stuff. For example, Neville, the

number one driver of adoption of AI in an organization is the very visible and vocal support from the most senior leadership of the organization. That’s the top factor. And in a lot of organizations, those guys don’t have a clue what this is or how it

@nevillehobson (01:18)

Opportunity for communicators, would say that signifies Shell.

Shel Holtz (01:29)

@nevillehobson (01:43)

But we started with the topic on AI. Not only are AI chatbots still hallucinating, we said by some accounts it’s getting worse. And we had a conversation about LLMs and hallucinating and so forth also in that episode. A handful of other topics too, including one I’ve been reading even a more about in the past week or so. So Google’s new tool for making AI videos with sound following the one with text, that’s VO3.

these seem to be coming out of the woodwork from a variety of players mid journey, most recently this past few days. So expect to hear us talking about it on FIR during the course of July, I think.

Shel Holtz (02:37)

@nevillehobson (02:51)

Yeah.

There’s around a dozen such tools currently, according to who was at the verge, if I recall correctly. And I’ve heard of half of them. So new things are appearing left, right and center. The mid journey one just a quick aside, I coughed up some money just so could try it. Blimey, I tell you, this is extraordinary. That you upload a static image and it creates a five second video from that you just prompted a bit.

or not as you as you prefer it’ll do something. And I’ve done a poor about half a dozen of these that I’m going to stretch together into a single video I saw a couple on LinkedIn to people doing similar things. So for 10 bucks a month, it’s worth it to discover what this can do. So expect to see lots of silly stuff out there. But there’s a great learning for what everyone else is doing. So it’s definitely another phase in these tools.

Shel Holtz (03:43)

I have a Mid Journey account. haven’t tried that yet, but you’ve been able to do that on PyCo, which I’ve been paying for for a while. So it’d be interesting to see how it works on Mid Journey. Yeah.

@nevillehobson (03:50)

Sure, there are a number of tools that you could do that.

This one I’m seeing in the tech press is saying, wow, over this particular one. So it’s offering something, I suppose. Go and give it a shot. So we also talked in this episode, this is a bit of a kind of a roundabout way to get to what we talked about in the last monthly. We talked about a new global alliance report on lack of strategic leadership about AI’s ethical use. AI again.

Shel Holtz (04:01)

@nevillehobson (04:18)

Shel Holtz (04:33)

@nevillehobson (04:45)

dedicated entirely to AI, 304 slides, not the most slides she’s had as a deck. One of her internet ones was 600 slides, substantial content. But this is worth a read. We talked about it. She has credibility, as we said in the show, credibility as strong as hers is likely that this report will become the defining source of truth about the state of AI. So it’s definitely worth taking a look at the report and

listen to that episode to get our take in what she had to say. And then finally, 468 published June 17th, new threats to reputation. We said, while a company’s reputation doesn’t appear as a line item on a profit and loss statement on a balance sheet, it is nevertheless a critical intangible asset that significantly influences financial performance and long term success. So in this episode, we looked at some recent research.

and reports to zero in on the newest reputation challenges and how communicators should face them. So you’re up to date now with that little wrap up.

Shel Holtz (06:12)

@nevillehobson (06:15)

and he explains how he does all that. He explained how indicator came to be the challenge of launching a media startup and what kind of impact he hopes to achieve. He also shares practical insights for communicators facing the growing threat of coordinated inauthentic behavior, fake reviews, and AI generated information very timely. That was a good conversation. Almost three quarters of an hour, we talked to Craig about that and it was some really good insights he shared. So very much worth a listen.

Shel Holtz (07:10)

@nevillehobson (07:12)

Right. And you might,

if you know of Craig, you might remember back 15 years ago, he published a website that was called Regret the Error, pointing out errors made in media reporting that led to a book deal. And I’ve got the book. It’s nice, a nice look back in time to see what that was all about. But that was a good conversation we have with Craig, must admit.

Shel Holtz (07:47)

Yeah

Also published since last month is episode 117 of Circle of Fellows, the monthly panel discussion with IABC fellows and a moderator, also a fellow, usually me, sometimes Brad Whitworth, talking about a topic of interest to communicators. This one was different. We did this one live at the IABC World Conference. We had…

three of the five new fellows up on stage. The other two weren’t able to make it. And then we had eight fellows in the front row of the audience. So we had a camera aimed at the stage. I was at the lectern and the three fellows in chairs. And then Brad was out in the audience with a microphone and his wife, Peg Champion, was following him around with a camera.

And all of this was feeding into StreamYard, which we used to do Circle of Fellows. And I was able to do the camera switching seamlessly. And this was all questions from the audience. So it wasn’t on a single topic. We went an hour talking about issues that were on the minds of communicators. It’s really interesting episodes. So that’s available both as a podcast and a YouTube video.

We’re also preparing for episode number 118, returning to the usual format. This one’s on communication leadership. The panelists include one of our brand new fellows, Mike Klein, along with Robin McCaslin, Sue Heumann, and Russell Grossman. This will be at noon Eastern time on Thursday, July 17th. So if you’re interested in hearing the perspectives of some senior communicators on leadership and communication,

Tune into that or catch the video or audio replay later. And with that, it’s time to turn to our reports as soon as we pay these bills.

There was a time when digital was something you bolted on to your PR efforts. Neville, you undoubtedly remember those times where should we do something digital? Should we have a website to go with this? I remember when TV commercials had URLs appearing at the bottom and it was, wow, look at that. They’re showing their URL on a TV commercial. PR now is digital. mean, calling it digital PR is almost ridiculous.

It’s just at the center of how we communicate. And BuzzStream’s latest state of digital PR survey is out. And if you’re wondering where the industry is headed, this year’s survey pulled in answers from 150 digital PR pros across the globe. I guess that means there are PR pros who are not digital PR pros, which is a little worrisome, but there’s a lot of food for thought here. So let’s start with the basics.

What’s working in digital PR these days? The clear winners are data-driven hero campaigns and good old fashioned expert commentary. It turns out about 95 % of the professionals out there lean on these two tactics. You need both the big attention grabbing home run campaigns and the steady reliable singles. And Neville, I apologize for the baseball metaphors. I don’t know the equivalence in cricket. ⁓

@nevillehobson (11:14)

Shel Holtz (11:18)

72 % also say it’s gotten more challenging at the same time. If that feels like a paradox, it is. Blame it on everything from industry layoffs to Google’s never-ending algorithm updates to the growing army of competitors in the digital space. Basically, the pressure cooker has been turned up to 11. Now, what about budgets? It’s not exactly a free-spending landscape. Most digital PR teams are working with less than $10,000 a month and

Only a handful, about 4%, have more than $20,000 to play with. The cost per link, which is how a lot of these teams still measure value, typically stays under $750. Here’s something interesting. A full quarter of respondents are generating 40 or more links per month. If you’re into link building, that’s a pretty solid haul for your money. And interestingly,

link building is still at the heart of most of these digital PR campaigns. So what does success look like in digital PR? It is still all about the links. Not just any links, quality links are more important than they’ve ever been with 87 % of PR pros saying that’s their number one metric. Tools like RF’s domain rating and Moz’s domain authority are the go-to yardsticks for measuring those links.

And when it comes to relevance, two thirds of practitioners say they check the page title when the link appears. Little detail, sure, but one that says a lot about the evolution of the craft. Patience remains a virtue. Around half of those surveyed say it takes three to six months to see meaningful results from a digital PR campaign. For some, it’s even longer, think six to eight months before you really start to notice the uptick in authority or referral traffic. If you’re in a hurry,

Digital PR probably isn’t for you. Follow-up emails deserve a quick mention here. A massive 98 % of respondents say they send at least one follow-up, and the data shows that it pays off. Sending a follow-up boosts your reply rate by 85%. So consider that a best practice. The best results come when you follow up within a day. Open and reply rates both peak right after the first message. Now here’s why all this matters.

Digital PR isn’t just about backlinks anymore. It’s about driving organic traffic, raising brand visibility, sparking social buzz, and even helping organizations weather a crisis. Done right, digital PR delivers a kind of surround sound effect for your organization. One campaign, multiple touch points. The big takeaway in 2025 is that digital PR is harder than ever, but also more rewarding.

It’s also about mixing hero campaigns and expert commentary, following up quickly, measuring what matters and above all, being patient. Because if there’s one thing this year survey makes clear, it’s that digital PR is a marathon. It’s not a sprint. The other thing that occurs to me, Neville, and I think where we’re probably going to end up talking, is it’s all still about referral traffic to drive folks to a website. And we know that’s on the decline because of AI. And I was…

really struck that they’re still talking about success in terms of backlinks and not a word about showing up in AI search results. So Neville, what was your take on this study?

@nevillehobson (15:15)

It’s PR, right? And you talk about digital channels, isn’t that a bit of a misnomer now, because everything’s digital. If it’s defined by the channel, that makes less sense to me, even more so. So I think in the report early on, they asked, they have a little section called expert opinions, a little drop down, where one of the questions at the start was, how does digital PR compare to traditional PR?

And the quote I liked, and you’ll understand why in a second, is from Will Hobson, hi Will, US VP of PR, Rise at Seven. He says, the lines are getting more blurred, but in my opinion, digital PR is just PR. Our activity needs to be brand relevant, but also culturally relevant while being closely tied to business objectives. Now, you can apply that to PR, and I agree. So we haven’t moved on from…

not calling it digital PR, which emerged when all this was kind of new about 15 or so years ago, where we had digital PR. And I always had a problem as well with digital marketing, where you slap the word digital in front of a job description or a job title or some kind of activity, and it sounds super cool and new and fresh and amazing. We need to stop doing that, because if you then look at these definitions, so the Digital Marketing Institute says,

Digital public relations is a strategy used to increase awareness and visibility of your brand using online channels. That’s the first part of it, to which I would say, but isn’t that what PR does? Let’s call it traditional PR for differentiation. Isn’t that what PR does? Digital PR is similar to traditional PR, they say, but it offers the opportunity to reach more people in a measurable and targeted way. I don’t know what that means, but that doesn’t make sense to me either.

I’m not going hang up on this because I’m not, but it just struck me is that we’ve to stop calling it digital PR. I think your point, though, to kind of focus on this major issue is that exact one about links driving traffic to websites and so forth. I did think that they had the report show some interesting aspects related to SEO that are very much in the the dane of

domain of this is how we’ve always been doing this. This is not new. So that makes sense to me. The syndication, no follow, I found interesting. But I guess the main point is, though, if we’re going to call it Digital PR for the purposes of this article, I’m OK with that. When you get into some of the kind of slicing and dicing of what they came up with, which teams do you work with more closely if you’re in Digital PR?

And that I didn’t find surprising that the number one by huge number was SEO, the folks who do SEO, followed by marketing and then PR. So traditional PR is third on your list of people you work closely with. Surprised me a bit to see in this result that strategy was way down the list. And I would have thought that if you’re gonna, know, surely we’re talking about being strategic.

to, well, not to coin a phrase, of course, but I hear that all the time. But I would have thought that would have been higher. And it, you know, I could slice and dice this, but I don’t think that would add to our conversation. I think there are things we can learn from this survey, without doubt. But to me, it was obscured by this thing about digital marketing. And I think things are moving so fast that the kind of feeling I get from some of this

is that this is not on top of these changes that are moving fast. And I’m thinking in particular about what you and I have talked about in a variety of episodes of this podcast over the course of this year on things like Google Overviews, the role of AI in all of this that is going to interfere with all of these traditional sounding plans, it seems to me. So the future, according to this, to my mind, doesn’t look very rosy as changes upon us. And this doesn’t look like it’s addressing change.

Shel Holtz (19:18)

The old line being when the bear is coming at you, you run, you don’t have to be faster than the bear, just faster than the other campers, right? ⁓ But as I think about the term digital PR, I guess I can see the distinction in the respect of PR as being a reputation management and relationship building activity.

@nevillehobson (19:47)

Shel Holtz (20:06)

I think what we’re talking about with this is outreach, right? And when we’re trying to get our message out, so PR messaging is all digital these days, but there’s a lot of relationship building and reputation building that doesn’t happen online. It happens over the phone, it happens face to face. So I guess we could say that’s the distinction.

@nevillehobson (20:57)

Shel Holtz (21:03)

@nevillehobson (21:21)

leaves your pitch. So these kind of narrow definitions to me are obscuring the value of these activities and dressing them up with a word that is wholly unnecessary. So Will Hobson’s got my vote where he says he doesn’t think this is, we should not call it that, we just call it PR.

Shel Holtz (22:05)

I don’t disagree. I am thinking back to an old, old case study. This was when, I can’t remember who was behind it, but there was a call to boycott the tuna industry, the canned tuna, because of the inadvertent dolphin catch that was happening. were scooping up dolphins in the nets and dolphins were dying.

@nevillehobson (22:10)

Shel Holtz (22:30)

in the sweep of tuna. Look at our numbers, look at our tactics, the things that we have implemented as procedures to avoid this. And the group came back and said, okay, yeah. And they went out and said, boycott tuna, except StarKiss, they’re already good guys. That was negotiation. That was getting people at the table. So today, communicating the outcome of that would clearly be digital, but the actual effort

@nevillehobson (23:12)

Shel Holtz (23:21)

@nevillehobson (23:27)

Shel Holtz (23:33)

@nevillehobson (23:51)

Social media overtakes TV as the main source of news in the US.

Shel Holtz (24:16)

it social media? It’s all just media. ⁓ just…

@nevillehobson (24:19)

right? I I’m as guilty as everyone for calling it social media. Indeed, I often talk about social media marketing. So, is it just marketing? mean, it’s okay. my God. Yes, absolutely. So this story I’m going to share is actually kind of a subset of a huge report from the Reuters Institute, the latest global report that was published actually just literally a week or so ago.

Shel Holtz (24:30)

@nevillehobson (24:47)

compared to 50 % who still rely on TV. Now, I’ve been hearing for a long time that, you know, more Americans get the news online than anywhere else. This seems to provide clear evidence of that perspective. And it comes from a highly credible source at the Reuters Institute. I found the reporting, which I’m referencing by the Guardian was really good at summarizing the whole thing in a way that helps me discuss it with you rather than all the huge chunks of data that’s in Reuters report.

But this isn’t just a shift in platforms, it’s a shift in power, according to The Guardian. Influencers and podcasters, not journalists, are increasingly shaping what news gets seen and heard. Joe Rogan, the famous American podcaster, alone reached more than a fifth of Americans in the days after Trump’s reelection. mean, a fifth of Americans? That’s got to be in the least, what, close to 100 million, if not more, people.

especially among younger men, a demographic traditional media often fails to reach. That shift brings both opportunities and deep concerns. Trust and transparency are now front and center, as news increasingly comes from personalities rather than publications. AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini are starting to become news sources themselves, particularly among under 35s, yet users are already questioning their accuracy and reliability. There’s also a darker undercurrent.

Globally, news avoidance is rising fast. In the UK, nearly half the population say they sometimes or often avoid the news altogether. And I tell you, I’m in that group. It’s the highest figure in the study, that UK statistic. Many feel overwhelmed by negativity or simply tune out from what they see as repetitive or irrelevant coverage. In my case, it’s both in this context.

So as a center of gravity shifts from institutions to individuals and from owned newsrooms to algorithm driven feeds, what does this mean for trust, for civic awareness and for the role that communicators like us still have to place to play? What do you reckon, Cheryl?

Shel Holtz (27:16)

is so much to unpack here. Let’s start with the fact that people are avoiding the news. I just heard an interview Kara Swisher interviewed Nicole Wallace on her podcast, On with Kara Swisher. For those who don’t know Nicole Wallace, she was the press secretary for President George W. Bush. She worked in the upper echelon of the John McCain presidential campaign.

@nevillehobson (27:18)

Shel Holtz (27:41)

of news on CNN, MSNBC, Fox, wherever you prefer to go. And it’s an assault of nonstop distressing stuff. She has, Nicole Wallace, started a new podcast through MSNBC. And it’s not 100 % news. It’s interviews with A-listers just about whatever they want to talk about. She said it always…

finds its way to some news, but it’s not news from beginning to end. And people are hungry for that. And that’s one of the reasons they’re turning off the relentless assault of news and opting for either something that has less of it, is more entertaining and soothing and comforting, or presents the news through a filter that is equally comforting in their bubble.

Interestingly, as you mentioned, a fifth of Americans listen to or watch Joe Rogan. I was reading that he is turning away from Trump lately in his commentary in the episodes where he is political because he’s not always, but that’s going to be an interesting thing to watch to see if he wields the kind of influence that can sink the poll numbers even lower than they are.

But you mentioned using AI tools for the news. I do that, not exclusively, but ChatGPT has the ability to set up tasks. And I have set up tasks to get the latest news on trends in elements of the industry where I work. And every day I check and every now and then I find something really, really interesting and good out of that.

@nevillehobson (29:48)

Shel Holtz (29:51)

go to these other sources for news. And frankly, know, watching MSNBC or CNN or Fox is the same. The only way I find out what’s going on in the rest of the world is to watch the BBC. That’s where I find out what’s going on in the Sudan, for example, or in Colombia, because they don’t cover that on the cable news stations in the US. They’re laser focused on

the four or five stories that are going to gin up the most outrage among the audience right now. So it’s all the current politics and that’s what’s turning people off. And I think if the media wants to maintain an audience, they’ve got to figure out how to bring people back, how to make these more palatable because what’s missing is the gatekeeper. And I understand that people don’t like the idea of the gatekeeper. I can pick for myself what I’m interested in.

But if somebody isn’t saying this is important and you need to know about this, this is what was great about reading a newspaper, the old fashioned newspaper is even if you weren’t that interested in the story, you saw the headline and you knew what was going on. Maybe you read the lead and now you knew what was happening in that part of the world that could have an influence on you and your life at some point in the future. Because when you are curating the news,

by following the TikToker who presents the stuff in a style that entertains you, what aren’t you hearing about that you should be hearing about? And somehow we need to get back to having somebody who can curate what’s important. So at least you have a superficial knowledge of what’s going on beyond what’s in that bubble.

@nevillehobson (31:54)

Shel Holtz (32:07)

Well, exactly.

@nevillehobson (32:20)

So Joe Rogan, as I mentioned, according to this report, he reached 22 % of Americans that week, as I mentioned after Trump’s inauguration. But I’ve read also separately, he himself has been critical of some of the people out there who are so-called sharing news and stuff like that. So is this a generational thing that I say to myself? I suspect it is largely. But the challenge for

or for all of us, I suppose, are the shifts in the platforms. So there’s some statistics from Reuters, YouTube at 30%, Instagram and WhatsApp at around 20%, TikTok 16 % are major players in news dissemination. X is losing liberal users and gaining right leaning ones. There’s no surprise there. But that again, that that has a big impact on this big picture. The challenges of publishers, according to Reuters,

struggling to adapt to video-driven and personality-led content, struggling to adapt to it, not dismissing it or combating it. They’re really struggling with that. Losing commercial value and visibility on platforms they don’t control. Facing a bypass of scrutiny as populist politicians speak directly to people through influencers. Now, that is definitely something that we’re seeing a lot happening over here in Europe, certainly.

News avoidance, we just discussed that, is rising. 40 % globally, at least sometimes, are avoiding it. That’s up from 29 % in 2017. So in five years, 29 % to 40%. That’s a big rise. So the interesting thing I find about the emerging role of AI, to your point, you mentioned that younger users are turning to chat bots like GPT, chat, GPT, Gemini, forgetting the news, not setting up a program that delivers a news to you.

but actually getting the news from those chatbots. I do that occasionally, but I don’t say, I’m done, I’ve got my newsfeed. No, no, no, I’ll do it for something specific where I want the benefit of either perplexity, which was good at this, or I’m not using that so much anymore. Gemini’s most interesting how it’s doing this is finding stuff that I know enough about my own use of those platforms that generally speaking, and this is a very general comment,

I trust what chat GPD tells me, not blindly. Let me tell you that I check most things, not every single thing. But if I’m getting something that I’m going to make use of in some form, I will double check it myself. And I have encountered recently a couple of things where it’s made a mistake. So what do we call that hallucination or whatever? And I’ve challenged it and said, you’re absolutely right. Thank you for pointing that out. I made a mistake. I get that just like a human being might do. So that’s how I tend to regard it.

But this is something that…

Shel Holtz (35:26)

fewer mistakes than humans undertaking the same task would make. They’re not perfect, but they’re better than we are.

@nevillehobson (35:35)

well, that’s probably true. So I think that’s a that’s a good way to approach it that many of the critics I see about chat GPT notably don’t seem to do it this way, which is to be literally you think of your AI assistant as a person as a colleague you’re working with, and you’re asking it to do a task as you would a colleague to do or a hired contract or whatever it is that you’re doing. Don’t just say to yourself, this is just a program doing stuff. Think of it that way.

And when you challenge it, don’t worry too much about, you know, working for hours on getting a prompt, talk to it conversationally. I do that all the time. And it works well, I find. But this is, this is a useful report. And the reporting I’ve seen not just in the Guardian, but elsewhere that zero in on particular aspects of this are worth paying attention to. And I think the one thing I would say that

you could argue is not emerging anymore. It’s kind of with us. There’s concerns that persist about the accuracy, trust, and transparency in AI-generated news. And that’s something we need to pay close attention to, not to circumvent it or think, now, no, it’s there. That is part of the landscape. So if the younger users, according to surveys like this one, are turning to this, we’ve got to understand that.

and make changes according to our planning and be part of the changes that are happening and the shifts that we are seeing right in front of our eyes. That’s what we need to do.

Shel Holtz (37:01)

And that means identifying the influencers, the podcasters, getting stuff on YouTube so that people will find it, making it easier for people to find. And getting into those AI-generated search results. Interestingly, I’ve heard recently that the AI-generated search results, particularly the Gemini overviews or the Google overviews, are heavily dependent on Reddit and Quora.

both of which are other sources that people are going to for news. And these are not places where you can just post your news. You have to go in there and engage. So another opportunity for a strategic shift in the communications department.

@nevillehobson (38:10)

Shel Holtz (38:12)

basic PR strategies, they’re expected to anticipate political and cultural turbulence and shape organizational strategy accordingly. The study makes it clear that CCOs are now business drivers, not just messengers. In volatile contexts, think fractured politics, rising cultural tensions, corporate affairs leaders are being brought into the room to offer strategic counsel. They’re expected to flag risk.

convene cross-functional war rooms and guide public positions. As Ben Kalovich from United Mains puts it, with an audience of one in DC that can and will quickly strike, CCOs need to lead their organizations to make the right decisions. That’s a weighty responsibility and one that requires a shift from reactive communications to proactive leadership.

In companies that embrace this new model, the CCO serves as a kind of stabilizing board voice, a steady hand while other leaders overreact to daily political noise. Interestingly, that’s kind of what the Melbourne mandate called for, what, 13 years ago from the Global Alliance. They called for PR to be at the center of maintaining that steady guidance through political turbulence and social turbulence.

Anyway, the organizations set up frameworks, monitoring political signals, introducing decision protocols, and convening diverse teams early. And the result of this is anticipation of contentious issues like DEI or AI regulation and the ability to respond with unity and credibility rather than scrambling under pressure.

Not every organization is embracing this shift, though. In more traditional companies, communications is still seen as downstream messaging. Boards and CEOs may say they want early risk warning, but when the CCO raises a flag, they end up getting marginalized. As Dave Tovar of Grubhub noted, CCOs are caught between expectations, knowing they should warn but lacking authority to influence outcomes. Picture it.

telling the company the winds are shifting but not being allowed to change course. This tension between leadership resistance and expectations creates a double bind. Leaders may resist expanding CCOs remit, preferring to keep them in a PR silo, but then when political or reputational risk escalates, they demand answers. The CCO is stuck, expected to prevent or manage a crisis but without the platform or agency to do it.

That gap undermines both credibility and governance and risks turning strategic warning into a career killer if leadership ignores it. We’ve seen indicators that the pressure on CCOs is rising. A recent Axios survey reported a 10.5 % turnover rate among global CCO roles in 2024. That’s up from 8 % the year before. Why? Because these roles are expanding and not every executive ready or empowered

to lead with that level of complexity. A lot of these folks are hired for the moment and then find themselves lacking when volatility demands broader strategic competence. That signals a growing divide between what companies want and what communicators are equipped or intend or invited to deliver. So for CCOs navigating this evolving role, there are a few paths forward. One, step into the advisory space.

Build political risk frameworks and cross-functional coalitions before these crisis emerge. Second, map your internal networks. Engage peers in legal, government affairs, HR, trust and influence are built pre-crisis. And finally, translate your role. Reframe your value not as PR, but as strategic insight, especially to boards and CEOs. But if none of this sticks, leadership…

both expects and empowers, reducing resistance has got to be an area of focus.

@nevillehobson (42:47)

This goes much, much deeper than that. And I think it’s not new, the depth of this, but in the context of where we’re at today with all the things that are going on in the world that could, well, not so much could impact us, but that we ought to be paying attention to because this is the world in which we are doing business and living. Political risk is a business, is a valuable…

attribute for somebody to be able to provide guidance and insight to leadership on in a way that they are trusted by those leaders to do that. So if you want to get a seat at that table that we hear about as a trusted advisor, this is a route. But it’s complicated, really is high risk and what you outlined the reality of human behaviors and the ways in which we engage with others in a work environment.

be marginalized, you’ll be sidelined, you will not be supported, you’ll be sabotaged, all that stuff, if you don’t do it right. And that sounds a pretty trite way to say it because it’s wider than that. But you need to have all your ducks lined up. You’ve got to have support. You need to have that network to support you. And you need to show your value in supporting others. I this is a diplomat’s role as well. I think I don’t know anyone. Just going through my mind, I know a number of

people with the CCO title in large corporations as well, but not anyone I could think of who I could say, yeah, this person will be a role model for this kind of role. doesn’t mean to there aren’t any, I just don’t know any at the moment. But I think this is a natural evolutionary step for a CCO in a large enterprise in particular, particularly in a, let’s say controversial to some industry, pharmaceuticals comes to mind, actually armaments comes to mind, although that’s probably a…

a hot one to be in that right now in that you don’t need to try and persuade customers to buy your products. But the way in which you are able to navigate the political risk is key. you know, I couldn’t offer more than what I just said, Shell. I think it is a it is a fascinating topic to be discussing, given the context of where we’re at in the world.

Shel Holtz (45:08)

is going to affect us negatively if we don’t get on the right side of it or if we don’t communicate it effectively with key stakeholder audiences, they’re going to do what they want to do. And I imagine that’s a tough place to want to be strategic in terms of what this report is talking about.

@nevillehobson (45:53)

But that’s what you’re probably going to have to do, I would say.

Do you to say thanks to Dan? I see, I should just notice he’s uploaded it now to…

Shel Holtz (46:29)

I’ve already downloaded it, but clearly I haven’t listened to it.

You’re up next. Do you want to say? no, I’ll do it. then then we’ll.

@nevillehobson (46:44)

Shel Holtz (46:53)

Thanks for that report, And also, Dan, congratulations on your job change. I don’t know, Neville, if you heard about this, but Dan is now the chief of staff to the head of the Internet Society. So just big shout out. That’s a tremendous move and congratulations on that.

@nevillehobson (47:10)

So let’s talk about something unusual and increasingly important that’s happening at the intersection of faith, ethics, and technology. At the second annual Rome conference on AI held last week at the Vatican, attended by executives from Google, OpenAI, Meta, and more, Pope Leo XIV made a bold call. AI must be developed within an ethical framework that upholds human dignity, not just innovation for its own sake.

He’s positioning AI ethics as a signature issue of his papacy, something that’s been widely reported in some of the mainstream media, notably the Wall Street Journal just a few days ago. He’s doing this in the same way Pope Leo XIII, so one number less than what Pope Leo XIV is and some hundred years in between, once defended factory workers during the Industrial Revolution.

But this time it’s not about wages or working hours, it’s about what it means to be human in an age of intelligent machines. Crucially, he’s not rejecting technology, he’s confronting its unregulated ambition, warning against the illusion that access to data equals wisdom, and calling attention to the risks to children’s development, justice, and even spiritual well-being. What stands out is how Pope Leo is reframing AI, not as a technical or economic issue, but as a spiritual and societal one.

He’s using the church’s global moral influence to challenge the Silicon Valley narrative, especially the idea that salvation might one day come from code rather than grace. And this brings us as communicators into the frame. As I explored last week in a post on my blog, referencing a deeply analytical report by the Wall Street Journal, we have a strategic role to play here, not just translating complex technologies, but interpreting what they mean for people and society.

We’re often the ones asking the hard questions about trust power and impact inside organizations. So when the Vatican calls for ethical restraint in the face of AI’s rise, it’s not just a headline, it’s a reminder that we too need to help shape the values that drive technological progress. The church is offering one model of how to do that through moral clarity, digital diplomacy, and deep reflection on human dignity. This is not just a church versus tech story.

It’s a lesson in how moral authority, strategic dialogue, and long-term vision can influence how the world adopts powerful technologies. Communicators can draw on this in multiple ways, elevate ethical concerns internally, lead with principles, not just performance, and frame AI not as a product, but as a public conversation about who we are becoming. The Vatican is showing that digital diplomacy doesn’t require dominance. It requires clarity, conviction, and credible values.

Shel Holtz (49:53)

@nevillehobson (50:09)

Shel Holtz (50:12)

@nevillehobson (50:19)

Shel Holtz (50:38)

@nevillehobson (50:52)

Shel Holtz (51:03)

that represents the world’s public relations and communications associations. They represent close to 400,000 communicators worldwide. IEBC is a member, the Chartered Institute of Public Relations is a member, most of the world’s associations are members. And they have just released the Venice Pledge, so-called because it was hammered out.

in Venice. In fact, they say it’s result of a collaborative AI symposium workshop session held in Venice, Italy, hosted by the Global Alliances European Regional Council in partnership with Therpy, the Italian Federation of Public Relations as part of the Global Alliances Technology Trends and Communication Transformation Month in May. This was signed by the board, passed by the board in July.

Let me read this just so everybody can understand what they’re saying here and see how it aligns with what Pope Leo is saying. The Global Alliance defines responsible AI as the ethical, transparent, and human-centered development and application of artificial intelligence strategically deployed to support, not replace, human judgment, creativity, and communication. It emphasizes accountability, fairness, and accuracy while minimizing

bias, misinformation, and harm. Responsible AI upholds privacy and data protection, reflects professional and organizational values, and ensures proper attribution, governance, and human oversight to maintain trust, integrity, and societal well-being. The seven responsible AI guiding principles are ethics first, human-led governance, personal and organizational responsibility, awareness, openness, and transparency, education and professional development,

active global voice and human centered AI for the common good. And they are asking communicators to sign the pledge. We will have a link to this in the show notes. And if this is something that you agree with, by all means, give it a click and sign the pledge. It’s fairly benign. I don’t see anything particularly controversial there. It is though, think entirely aligned with what Pope Leo is saying and very much at odds.

with the US government’s approach to AI, along with the approach being taken by most of the big players in the industry.

@nevillehobson (53:52)

hitherto people who are highly critical of what they are saying. So big tech in particular and continuance of a let’s call it digital diplomacy that started around 2020. So five, five years ago under Pope Francis that has led to meetings with the leaders of all the big tech companies that the big six, I suppose you could argue if not including some others, I’m sure.

And this meeting recently that I mentioned is another step forward in that journey where they’re looking to, I guess, illustrate the value of principle dialogue. Although I think it also highlights the limits of voluntary codes and the need for firm accountable governance. And that’s the bit that I think is going to be the critical one. Can Leo as the head of the Catholic Church?

move the needle on that, where we have a lot of talk around the world about regulation, for want of another word, and various things happening, but that hasn’t really moved any needles yet. But I think Pope Leo is going to be a far more tech savvy, regulation minded voice than his predecessor, who was not.

as informed. Both pontiffs shared a deep concern that I’ve read a lot about that, that innovation without ethics risks eroding the very dignity it promises to enhance, and that’s their starting point. So communicate, as you and me and all the others listening to this can help bridge that gap to increase the understanding of that. But I think the fact that the Vatican is

is taking this, it’s certainly not news headline making everywhere, but increasingly I’m seeing reporting on these steps that the Vatican is taking. So as I mentioned over the past decade, actually, they’ve held private meetings with tech leaders. So Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Brad Smith, Eric Schmidt, and others more recently. Many took place under the umbrella of the Minerva dialogues. That’s another grouping of meetings that took place privately.

convened by a number of very influential voices, senior church leaders in the Vatican, and they’re continuing. And they moved from, reportedly, from enthusiasm about connectivity to deeper concerns about AI. So you’re seeing a convergence meeting of minds on certain aspects of this. So concerns about AI, misinformation, polarization, and this phrase I plucked from a Vatican report, the nature of truth.

I thought, they should get Donald Trump in there then if you want to talk about the nature of truth. Vance would do, I suspect. But the point to me, though, is that I think this is a massive shift in possibilities over this broad topic that everyone in the whole world seems to be struggling with. And yes, we can have pledges. Like you, I think from what you said, I’ve not read it myself, it doesn’t seem to be anything in there that would cause a conflict to anyone.

you’re pledging that you would follow these things and you are likely, in fact, I can’t imagine anyone is going to say no to that. Anyone you’re to take seriously and say, no, I’m not going to follow these things. Of course you are. But that’s not, well, he’s not a person in our circle of conversational focus even. But I think what we’re talking about here is a sea change that is only just emerging into the public space. And it’s

Shel Holtz (57:17)

@nevillehobson (57:34)

That’s a pledge that Microsoft, IBM and Cisco have signed and that was launched in 2020. That laid out the principles of transparency, inclusion and responsibility. But one thing I found interesting, Charles, Google and OpenAI have not signed it, not yet. So that highlights the unresolved tension between tech autonomy and ethical oversight. So there’s a hurdle to get over at some point. But shaping global discourse.

This is something I remember this Pope Francis, he spoke at the 2024 G7 summit warning of a technological dictatorship and calling for legally binding treaty on AI governance. The 2025 G7 meeting in Canada has just happened. No news about that. But I think Pope Leo undoubtedly is going to carry that mission forward. But here’s the thing. Firmer, more technically informed posture. He’s going to talk like he knows the topic he’s talking about.

So these to me are converging into something quite interesting. Symbolic and narrative power is another one. And this pope is very savvy on all of this. So for instance, referring back, you remember this, I’m sure you will. AI generated image of Pope Francis in a white puffer coat went viral in 2023. It exposed the public’s vulnerability to deep fakes and the church’s symbolic visibility in digital culture. But rather than dismiss it as a joke,

Pope Francis used the moment to amplify concerns about truth, trust, and the limits of data, which is an example of value-led narrative shaping. So all these elements are happening. So I think Pledge is great. And I think it’d be good for other professional bodies to either support this as a single initiative or come out with their own. Where is the harm in doing this? It’s not affecting anything that’s going on here. think it’s, let’s not forget.

This is aimed at a wider societal grouping as opposed to narrow demographics, let’s say. But this to me is a very interesting time and we are seeing the possibility, I believe, and there’s me with my always my glass half full view of a big change happening that can only be a good thing.

Shel Holtz (1:00:10)

@nevillehobson (1:00:13)

Shel Holtz (1:00:36)

@nevillehobson (1:00:42)

we had a year or so back about, we don’t need code of ethics for AI because we’ve got a code of ethics. And I think this illustrates actually why we do need something specific for AI. ⁓ Exactly.

Shel Holtz (1:00:53)

so routine and is just a part of life. But right now, yeah, I agree, especially because of the risks that we’re seeing. I still in my heart believe that if you read IEBC’s code of ethics, PRSA, CIPRs, it’s all covered there, but it’s not explicit, it’s implicit. And right now what we need is for things to be explicit.

@nevillehobson (1:01:00)

Yeah, absolutely. So there’s lots for communicators to absorb in all of this. So if you’re interested in the devil being in the detail, there’s the we’ll have links or there are links in the show notes for this episode for that Wall Street Journal piece I mentioned, it’s lengthy, extremely deeply analytical. It’s behind a paywall, unfortunately, but there are probably ways you can get into it.

There’s also a linked article I wrote about my blog, which I found rather fascinating. It was from the Catholic Health. I’m not a sudden conversion to reading religious publications, by the way, but in the focus of my interest, I’m encountering these stories. But they had an interesting analysis of transhumanism. Now, I have a number of deeply Catholic friends whose eyes rolled when I told them about this story, because this to me is a major issue for the Pope to grapple.

grapple with where transhumanism, if I understand it correctly, is all about. It’s not salvation you’re going to get from a God when you die. It’s likely to be from computer software and software engineers or the new priests. mean, that’s the take I’m reading from the Catholic Herald’s article. I don’t agree in any shape or form with that. But it’s nevertheless, it’s a point of view. And that’s part of the conversation too. So you got to take care of that. We’ll have a link to that in the show notes if you want to read it. But

Wall Street Journal piece, this piece, CNN article, which is talking about the meeting that just happened this past few days. And then of course, there’s our conversation. there’s a lot to unpack from this. And if you have comments to share, we definitely want to hear what you think.

Shel Holtz (1:02:48)

@nevillehobson (1:03:06)

That’s right. You’re absolutely right.

Shel Holtz (1:03:15)

@nevillehobson (1:03:16)

goodness.

Shel Holtz (1:03:39)

place is sapping productivity, its undermining culture, and frankly costing companies a lot more than they realize. So let’s talk for a couple of minutes about the hidden costs of internal disconnection and what smart strategic internal comms leaders can do to close these gaps. Let’s start with a stat that jumped out at me from a recent Axios HQ report, a stat that gets right to the heart of one of the biggest problems I see with what internal communicators do every day.

The data says employees lose more than a month of work every year just trying to find information. Clarifying confusing updates or waiting on other people to respond. We’re talking about 41 work days per year per person. Do the math and that’s about $20,000 in lost productivity for every employee. All that time chasing down answers or trying to interpret vague emails adds up.

And let’s be honest, this is not just a minor nuisance. For most organizations, it’s a massive silent drain on resources and much of it’s preventable. So what’s the fix? It starts with clarity and consistency. We need to deliver the right information at the right time in the right way. That might mean tighter, more concise updates. Maybe it’s a centralized digital hub where people know they’ll find what they need.

Maybe it’s just making sure leaders are trained to write and speak with a little more empathy and a lot less jargon. But it also means that internal communicators absolutely must start devoting some of their attention to how communication happens within the organization between other people and between departments and functions, not just the formal messaging between leadership and employees. When was the last time a communicator that you knew did a process audit to see what messages are being sent?

by processes. This ought to become a key area of focus. Now, the same Axios report had another stat that’s alarming. Eight out of 10 employees say the quality of internal communication affects how well they understand company goals. But only about 9%, that’s just one out of every 10, feel they’re fully aligned with those goals. That’s not just an internal comms problem, that’s a business problem.

If people aren’t clear on where the organization is headed or why it matters, how can we expect them to bring their best to the table? And if internal comms isn’t about alignment, I don’t know what it’s about. Here’s where internal communicators can make a real difference. And I’m not talking about an all hands meeting or a CEO memo. Short frequent touch points from leadership, weekly what’s important notes, town halls that actually allow employees to ask questions.

And maybe most important, managers translating those big picture goals into the realities that their teams face every day. Now let’s talk about frontline workers, people in retail, healthcare, logistics. Fast Company shared some eye-opening findings from a WorkVivo study. Nearly half of frontline employees don’t even know who their CEO is. This is just staggering to me, although based on a personal experience, it’s not all that surprising.

When I was running communications at Mattel, we did quarterly CEO town halls, but only for manager and above because we didn’t have a space big enough for everybody. And I convinced leadership that let’s do a second one. And they said, okay, we’ll bring all the people from below manager into the other one. So they weren’t going to be mixed groups, which is what I had in mind. And so they had the second town hall.

The CEO got up, did his dog and pony show, same thing he had done for managers and above. And afterwards, a group of admins walked up to him and they were just so effusive. They said, this is so wonderful. It’s so great to be included. We never get to hear this stuff. We understand so much more of what we’re hearing about. Now we just have one question. Who are you? He didn’t introduce himself. He assumed.

@nevillehobson (1:08:09)

Shel Holtz (1:08:15)

So what can communicators do? Well, for starters, we have to get creative about reaching people who aren’t sitting at a desk all day. More mobile friendly platforms, digital signage, even a quick weekly video from the CEO specifically for the frontline. And crucially, two-way communication channels, places where frontline employees can get, ask questions and get real answers. Now,

Here’s a twist, and I apologize, I know this is a longer report, but there’s a lot of this stuff happening out there. According to a recent piece from the New York Post, Gen Z employees, those just starting their careers, are shying away from office small talk. In fact, three out of four say they struggle to strike up conversations with coworkers. It might be tempting to chalk this up to generational differences or social anxiety. I think it’s deeper than that.

As more work moves online and hybrid, those water cooler moments, as we’ve talked about frequently in the past, aren’t happening organically. And that’s a problem because informal interactions is where trust is built and where silos are broken down. Internal comms can help here too. Can’t force small talk, but we can create spaces for it. Slack channels for non-work chat, virtual coffee breaks or interest groups, let people connect over something other than deadlines.

We just launched a new intranet. It has communities, and I made a point of setting up some communities that are not work related. Share pictures of your pets. We have one that somebody set up about video gaming, and this is where you’re going to have the opportunity for those kinds of interactions and for people to meet. Then there’s the infinite work day. This is a term that came out of Microsoft’s Work Trend Index, and it describes a world where work bleeds into evenings and weekends.

especially for remote and hybrid teams, Gallup reports that millions of employees are stuck with unpredictable schedules, making it hard to find work-life balance or plan family time. Role here for internal communicators too. We can model and promote boundaries, publicly acknowledging that it’s okay to log off at a reasonable hour and celebrating leaders who actually do it.

We can make sure employees know about resources for mental health and wellbeing and check in regularly through pulse surveys or just simple, are you doing moments. And we can recognize how different employees from different generations perceive this issue, especially given the micro targeting of employees that’s increasingly possible with AI. For example, I learned at the IAVC World Conference that Gen Z is not millennial 2.0.

They’re not interested in work-life balance. They’re interested in work-life blend. That seems to me to necessitate a different messaging to millennials than we’re sending to Gen Z. So all of these issues share in common symptoms of disconnection to information, to leadership, to each other, to the mission of the company. That’s why internal comms isn’t just a nice to have and why we have to stop resting on our laurels.

We are the nervous system of the organization and when it breaks down, everything suffers, productivity, culture, retention. So my challenge to communicators who work in the internal comm space, audit your channels and messages, who’s being reached, who isn’t, and what’s getting lost in translation. Design your strategy for real inclusion, not just efficiency.

make it two-way and make sure that the voices of the frontline and Gen Z and everyone in between are actually being heard and measure your impact. It’s not about how many emails you send, it’s about how much time and confusion you save.

@nevillehobson (1:12:27)

The question my mind listened to was, OK, fine, this is all great. What do you do? How do you do this in a hybrid workplace? Meaning work from home sometimes, work in the office other times, or as we hear occasionally, there’s some companies where some people don’t go in at all, others where the climate is forcing people to go in, so the environment is not a good place. I read on LinkedIn and I didn’t bookmark the person who posted this, unfortunately.

But Mark Reed, the CEO of WPP, the advertising agency speaking at South by Southwest in London last week, said, he talked about hybrid working in the future of the workforce with AI, blah, blah, essentially said people are happy when they’re in the office. Which, which which I’ve seen people commenting. I’ve seen people commenting on what I mean, are you nuts? Are you stupid? Or what? You know, is it without any any any explainer, as I understand it, nothing to say here’s the data that supports that view.

Shel Holtz (1:13:34)

@nevillehobson (1:13:48)

Shel Holtz (1:14:02)

what, are you nuts? How’s it possible to align with your CEO when your CEO is making statements like that?

@nevillehobson (1:14:07)

Yeah, yeah. mean, PR week has a good thing about it. If you subscribe, it’s behind the paywall. And the link in the LinkedIn piece that I saw wasn’t to that. It was to something else, but I’ve not been able to find it. I’ll see if I can. But the fact disconnect is the right word because everything you talked about is about disconnects. And if we sort of know what they are, surely it’s fixable, right?

Shel Holtz (1:14:33)

They are disconnected from things they want to be connected to because they’re not being provided with the information, the data, the resources to be connected. This is serious connection really needs to be a focus for communicators right now.

@nevillehobson (1:15:11)

Yeah, and that plays into everything we’ve talked about over the last months, particularly starting with Edelman’s trust barometer, trust in organizations, trust in leaders of organizations diminishing. And this adds to that, particularly if, I mean, I can picture it, Shell, a large organization that has people out in the field or in factories or whatever it is, they’re not at a desk, so they’re not going to be exposed to easy communication.

you need to build that in. It reminds me of something I did when I was working at Mercer in the early 90s with a client. It was a company called Marion Merrell Dow that was in the pharma business. They had a sales force who were completely not getting any of communication that employees got. So we developed a kind of radio station for them and recorded stuff that was mailed to them on cassette tapes. Because these are sales guys in cars, they could put the cassette tape in the cassette player in the car.

That’s analog stuff for you. But surprisingly, to me, I recall highly effective communication based on surveys that we did. But that idea was bold at that time for that company, the industry they were in. It requires, in my view, just using that as purely as an illustrative example, requires boldness to change these things in an organization. That to me is something that is squarely within the realm.

of a communicator to do something about it seems to me. there’s, you know, there’s a not a roadmap exactly, but there’s a plan that you could see what you need to do. So why not do it? Easy as pie, right, Shell?

Shel Holtz (1:16:53)

@nevillehobson (1:16:55)

highlights the growing use of agentic AI by influencers. We’ve talked about agentic AI before, but just briefly, agentic AI is AI systems that don’t just respond to prompts, but acts with autonomy, engaging people in comments and DMs using the creators voice tone and even catchphrases related to this particular story. The result is that creators are seeing real gains, less burnout, more responsiveness, and deeper fan engagement. Agentic AI is redefining online interaction.

helping creators stay present without being overwhelmed. But says Digiday, there’s a cost. Advertisers are growing cautious with some now adding clauses to influence a contracts to ban AI generated content altogether. The concern is that AI, no matter how well trained, could undermine the authenticity of the relationship between creator and audience or even misrepresent the creator, especially in sensitive brand context. And then there’s the ethical dimension.

As agentic AI starts to simulate personality and build relationships, how should we think about its role? What happens when fans form connections with a chatbot, even if it sounds just like the person they follow? Despite concerns, creators argue that AI interaction has improved their relationships with fans, made them more responsive and enhanced engagement metrics, qualities brands still value. Still, communicators are now in new territory, navigating contracts, brand trust,

and audience expectations all at once. It’s no longer just about producing content. It’s about managing relationships that may now be co-authored by machines. Which brings us to the larger point. As AI becomes a co-pilot in content and conversation, how do we define authenticity? How should brands and communicators navigate this new hybrid territory? What do you make of that show?

Shel Holtz (1:19:09)

@nevillehobson (1:19:12)

Shel Holtz (1:19:33)

@nevillehobson (1:19:38)

Shel Holtz (1:19:59)

said it was 100 % hand drawn in the old Warner Brothers style, the Fritz Freling, Chuck Jones style of animation. And we said, cool. And we watched it for about a half an hour and we looked at each other and we said, the animation is incredible. It is just like it was in the 40s and the 50s. And it is just amazing. The movie is terrible. It’s not.

funny, it’s stupid, it doesn’t have any of the wit and charm that, or the grown-up humor that you turn to Warner Brothers cartoons for. Does doing it the old way guarantee that it’s going to be authentic and credible? No, I think human creativity exhibits itself in the output, regardless of the tools that you are using.

@nevillehobson (1:21:11)

Shel Holtz (1:21:18)

filling TikTok and YouTube these days.

@nevillehobson (1:21:52)

and the other one was a cartoon, very aimed at young toddlers type of style of a bunny rabbit. And I didn’t really tell it to do much, but I was blown away by what it came back with. So imagine that being employed with something like this. In fact, it’s mind boggling to think that through because that is what’s going to happen actually. So, right.

Shel Holtz (1:22:49)

@nevillehobson (1:22:52)

Shel Holtz (1:22:52)

@nevillehobson (1:22:57)

Shel Holtz (1:23:07)

@nevillehobson (1:23:12)

Right.

with you 100 % on that. I think exciting times are coming, Shil.

Shel Holtz (1:23:35)

@nevillehobson (1:23:37)

Yeah.

Shel Holtz (1:23:59)

I remember the original Barcelona principles, which was the first time we saw an official body say AVEs are bad, no advertising value equivalencies. And that’s something I intend to ask him. Yeah, there are public relations agencies that still offer them. And when I asked the president of one of them, he said, our clients want them.

@nevillehobson (1:24:29)

And they’re still with us.

He’s still using it.

Shel Holtz (1:24:49)

@nevillehobson (1:25:06)

Shel Holtz (1:25:16)

Which is interesting because I have been hearing more and more that the AI community, and I’m talking about the CEOs and the AI engineers and the strategists, they’re mainly on X. Most of the communication between these people is happening on X. And that’s what the AI podcast ends up saying is, know, the CEO of Anthropics said this on X and Sam Altman said that on X.

I may need to go back to X just to be able to stay up to date with what’s happening in AI.

@nevillehobson (1:26:13)

Shel Holtz (1:26:29)

I’m gonna have to

find a way to curate so that what I’m seeing is the AI stuff and avoiding however that algorithm pushes that vile stuff at you. I don’t want that, but I do wanna be where these AI thought leaders are sharing their thoughts. mean, know, Ethan Molyks on LinkedIn, which is great, and Chris Pan and a bunch of other people, but apparently X is the hub for all of this. that…

@nevillehobson (1:26:40)

Shel Holtz (1:27:02)

The post FIR #469: Is Internal Communication Failing? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

In this episode, Chip speaks with Ken Jacobs, principal of Jacobs Consulting and Executive Coaching, about providing constructive feedback to team members.

They discuss the importance of leadership coaching in the PR and communication space and the challenges of becoming a good leader without formal training. Ken emphasizes the necessity of providing constructive feedback that builds trust and respect, as well as the importance of listening and asking open-ended questions.

Chip and Ken also highlight the continuous process of coaching and the significance of maintaining open communication with team members to encourage their growth and success. [read the transcript]

The post CWC 111: Providing your team with constructive feedback (featuring Ken Jacobs) appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

While a company’s reputation doesn’t appear as a line item on a profit and loss statement or a balance sheet, it is nevertheless a critical intangible asset that significantly influences financial performance and long-term success. A strong positive reputation fosters trust among consumers and B2B customers, leading to increased customer loyalty, premium pricing power, and greater resilience in times of crisis. It also makes the company more attractive to top talent, reducing recruitment costs and improving employee retention. A favorable reputation can also enhance relationships with investors and partners, providing better access to capital and more advantageous business opportunities.

The public relations profession is in the reputation business. Yet there are new threats to reputations that aren’t yet on most practitioners’ radars — and if they are, they haven’t found their way into plans and strategies. For example, companies that succumbed to political pressure to back away from their DEI commitments have suffered reputational damage, while those that stood by them have seen their reputation scores increase. That may have something to do with general support for DEI, but research found that customers crave consistency from the companies they do business with, and the sudden U-turn away from DEI commitments leadership previously touted was viewed as a failure of integrity.

Add to that the surge of disinformation and job loss AI is already bringing to the business world, and it’s clear we’re facing a new world of reputation management. In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel look at some recent research and reports to zero in on the newest reputation challenges and how communicators should face them.

Links from this episode:

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, June 23.

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

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

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

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

Raw Transcript:

@nevillehobson (00:02)

Shel Holtz (00:08)

It attracts talent, it boosts your stock price, it shapes policy outcomes and partnership opportunities. And increasingly, it reflects how well your organization aligns with societal values, not just what you say, but what you do. Lately, the rules for reputational risk have been changing. Traditional threats are still around, scandals, product failures, bad leadership decisions. But now we’re seeing new ones emerge, many of them tied to technology and politics in ways that communicators may not be fully pro-

prepared for, but can’t afford to ignore. Let’s start with the latest Axios-Harris poll on corporate reputation, because the shakeups there are dramatic. Tesla, which once topped the list of most admired companies, has fallen all the way to 60th. Boeing, with its safety mishaps and culture issues, and now the crash of an Air India 787 Dreamliner, well, Boeing sits near the bottom of the list. And what’s especially interesting here

is how much of this decline has to do with cultural alignment or misalignment with public sentiment. Axios points to companies being dragged into culture wars, and it’s not hard to see why. The Trump administration’s ongoing pushback against DEI efforts is having a reputational ripple effect. Companies that backtracked on their DEI commitments or tried to stay neutral are paying a price. Patagonia, Microsoft, and Costco, on the other hand, have increased their reputation scores

precisely because they stayed the course on equity and inclusion. They didn’t cave and the public noticed. This tells us something we probably already knew. Authenticity matters. People don’t expect companies to fix every problem, but they do expect them to be consistent and to have a spine when it counts. In 2025, wishy washy doesn’t cut it, especially with younger generations.

Now, let’s add technology to the mix because it’s getting harder and harder to talk about reputation without AI finding its way into the conversation. Case in point, New York State just updated its Warn Act notices. These are the documents companies have to file when they plan a mass layoff. Now, if you’re laying people off because of AI, you have to say so. It becomes public information. So not only do you risk headlines like, Company X replaces workers with AI,

You’re also potentially triggering employee backlash, customer concern, and stakeholder scrutiny. All of that’s in the reputation column. Think about that for a minute. Laying off people because of a merger or a downturn is one thing, but layoffs tied directly to AI? That’s a reputational landmine. And I’d argue it’s a signal to communicators to get involved early. Make sure there’s a story ready to be told, one that frames the decision in terms of responsibility

future readiness and long-term growth, not just cost cutting. Lay the groundwork with your stakeholders on your company’s strategic approach to AI so nobody’s surprised when hiring takes a dip or layoffs are announced. And AI’s impact isn’t just organizational, it’s personal. A piece out of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business explores how your AI tools at work could actually hurt your professional image.

If your coworkers or managers see you using AI to generate ideas or speed up tasks, they might assume you’re less competent or less committed, even if the output is amazing. We’ve been telling people to embrace AI, to use it to be more efficient. But if the perception is that you’re cheating or cutting corners, then your individual reputation could take a hit, even if your actual work improves. Now this creates a tension.

Organizations want employees to be innovative and tech savvy, but our workplace culture hasn’t caught up. Consequently, we need to help employees not just use these tools, but frame how they use them. Communicators can play a key role here in educating both employees and leaders, especially managers, about responsible AI use looks like and why it’s not a threat to human value. The threats to reputation are evolving.

culture wars, political pressure, layoff transparency, AI ethics, it is not the same game that it was a decade ago. And if communicators don’t help organizations see it, prepare for it, and respond to it, we’re going to be stuck playing defense. So be proactive, let’s help our organizations walk the talk, and let’s remind leaders that in 2025, reputation isn’t just a brand asset, it’s a survival strategy.

@nevillehobson (05:16)

survey company right to hand. That was done in February. Nearly one in three companies reported reputational harm in the past year. They’re citing inflation, geopolitical uncertainty and strikes as triggers. The Exos-Harris poll you mentioned, that’s kind of interesting. found some other statistics to add to what you said. That poll shows 46 % of companies experienced lowered reputation scores and that’s up from 37 % the year before.

consumers under pressure and rising costs and price quality concerns are the main reason for that. What’s driving it overall? That’s a huge answer for that could take us hours to get through everything. It’s so wide ranging economic stress, digital age, disinformation, you touched on that cultural, political polarization, ethical failing, cybersecurity. I’ve got something to say about that in a bit. But the interesting thing too is that ⁓ the ⁓

The Reputational Risk Index Q1 2025 report that just came out has a really interesting list of the top reputational risks. And what struck me was how three new ones are at the top of this list and the rest of the top 10, the seven, they’ve been around for years. But these risks are fast moving and they’ve replaced what was there before. Those top three won’t surprise you.

Number one is AI misuse, harmful or deceptive use of AI, including deepfakes, misinformation, biased decision making or unethical applications that cause harm or manipulate public perception. Number two, this kind of made me, my goodness, association with Elon Musk, instances where an individual company or entity is associated with, targeted by or publicly criticized by Elon Musk.

So it kind of rubs off on you that kind of social like he insults you on X for instance, or does something that brings your name into association with him. That’s not good at all. So that’s number two, that’s the interesting thing. Number three, this.

Shel Holtz (07:54)

of damned if you do and damned if you don’t, right? Whether you’re on his good side or his bad side is just the connection to him.

@nevillehobson (07:58)

No.

Yeah, exactly. So he’s now departed the White House apparently and has gone back to look after his business interests. Does that mean this will change? Unlikely, I would say. But the third one doesn’t surprise me. ⁓ DEI backtracking. The rollback of regulations, policies or initiatives designed to promote diversity, equity and inclusion, which aim to ensure fair treatment of full participation for all individuals. If you backtrack on that after you said this is what you’ve implemented.

that will hit your reputation. And that’s your damned if you do or damned if you don’t, I think in light of what the US government is trying to do. So those three are the top reputation risks. The others, anti-competitiveness, defamation, breach of contract, copyright infringement, whistleblowing, price fixing, opioids crisis have been around for a while. But that illustrates, I think that kind of complements ⁓ what we’ve said so far in this. And it’s really quite interesting.

I think this I mean, there’s so much that we could talk about on this show. It’s it’s kind of hard to, you know, keep a keeper, keep it focused on on what we need to say. But I think you mentioned communicators. And that’s my focus to what is the role of communicators of this. And, you know, there’s four things that struck me what can companies do and the communicators working for those companies defend against disinformation, ⁓ rapid monitoring of online discourse.

lead with ethics and transparency in your business. ⁓ No longer optional, some of these things, including DEI, and that’s going to be difficult for some organizations, I suspect. Value-based pricing and quality, as inflation bites companies seen as fair in pricing and product, remain trusted. Crisis preparedness, from digital AI enabled threats to executive misconduct, layered crisis and reputation defense plans are vital.

And I’ve seen people talking about that in the last week, actually, that kind of layered approach to it all. I mean, there’s lots more we could talk about there, but there’s so much happening that can be damaging. And the one that I do want to mention, which I’ll do in a minute, is ⁓ an event that happened here in the UK that I wrote about. I’ve talked about it quite a bit online, as many others have. It’s a global story, even though it’s a British company, Marks & Spencer, the big retailer.

that was hit by a cyber attack in April and it’s still ongoing. ⁓ We’ll talk about that in a bit if you’d like, but they are looking at a cost estimated by experts about 300 million pounds as the cost for not paying the ransom to the hackers. But the consequences have been severe. Interesting though is what was the reputational damage? And there is no single answer to that. So I’ll talk about it a bit, but…

All that stuff about the top three and anything surprising there to you about the fact that these are the new ones that are the big deals for people now?

Shel Holtz (10:58)

@nevillehobson (11:04)

Shel Holtz (11:25)

consulting organizations with disinformation practices. Have you heard of one yet? A PR agency or a marketing agency with a disinformation practice or a disinformation center of excellence? I haven’t. So.

@nevillehobson (12:06)

I haven’t. haven’t. But that’s an interesting one, because I think it’s quite complicated for organizations to realize, partly because I think some of the things that you hear about, and there’s a really good story I’m to mention in a minute that was in the Financial Times the other day, that talked about, as the headline called, the disinformation storm is now hitting companies harder. And much of it is

appears to be kind of opportunistic by bad actors to quote that euphemism of people who do things and say things and take actions that can damage you with surprising velocity that come out at you that completely unexpected and in disinformation largely untrue yet the stories out there. Good example, we see FT quotes, a company called Aalef Foods, Danish company.

the UK’s biggest dairy cooperative. have tankers going around all the farms collecting the milk to make butter and so forth and so on. They learned this the hard way after recently announcing a trial of a feed additive aiming to reduce methane emissions in dairy cows. Some customers pushed to boycott milk products. A social media storm ensued featuring unfounded and bizarre claims that the additive was part of a plot to depopulate the world by creating fertility issues. ⁓

That’s in line with, you know, 5G is a conspiracy of Bill Gates to and, you know, all that stuff went on and it sticks with something like he still see reference to this. This is all the foods, though, is illustrative of that type of fast moving event. And social media plays a huge role in this is is is not can be is very damaging. And they suffered damage as a result of this. There’s other examples I mentioned, too. And it includes a survey by Edelman, they say.

of 400 top communications and marketing execs found that 1810 worry about the impact of disinformation on the businesses. So 80 % fewer than half feel prepared to tackle those risks. What we just talked about.

Shel Holtz (14:10)

@nevillehobson (14:16)

Shel Holtz (14:17)

I was actually hoping you would because here’s something that wasn’t, other than not

having a robust ⁓ defense in place to prevent the hack in the first place, this is something that was done to them.

@nevillehobson (14:38)

yeah, this is at the heart of it because it was a cyber attack that began towards the end of April and severely disrupted their operations to the extent that everything you could do before as a customer with online purchasing, the so-called click and collect, looking up your orders, seeing something in stock, reserving it or that was gone. You couldn’t do any of that. Worse, I suppose, for those folks who don’t do online, they go to the stores, you couldn’t use

contactless payment at all. The machines are all offline because of the risks and there were horror stories emerging of ⁓ people, know, pen and paper to write down orders and take stock from one warehouse to another in their own cars so they could keep stock levels going stuff like that. No deliveries. They were halted. Some stores went cash only wouldn’t take anything you could manually do your cars, but they wouldn’t.

The loyalty apps, 18 million members was not working. Recruitment systems and internal logistics were severely impacted by this. Staff, as I mentioned, staff reported manual workarounds like checking freezer temperatures due to IT shutdowns. I the systems were all shut down. So the hacking group behind it, apparently called Scattered Spider, is known for using social engineering and targeting major corporations with ransomware.

I’ve not seen anything new on this since it was first mentioned about three weeks ago, but the speculation is that they got access to Marks and Spencer systems through a supplier, through an employee they tricked into getting them to log in and that then gave them access to all this. Here you’re not allowed to pay ransoms for things like this is illegal, so they didn’t, but they were quite robust in not doing yes, we’ll weather this storm. That is a pretty

bold move and attracted serious criticism. I wrote a post not long ago that was very critical of Marks and Spencer and their communication with customers. Now knowing what I do know from the latest developments, I don’t really feel that I would change that. I might tone it down a bit because they did communicate, which I didn’t disagree with. I just said it wasn’t very effective. They were following a plan they didn’t communicate to anyone. So how would you know even what was happening?

Here’s a reputational impact they have suffered already. It’s actually interesting, in one sense is nowhere near as bad as many people were speculating. There’s a damn good reason for that. But let me just run down the list of some of these things here. So the reputational impact, according to research from the Maru consumer research firms, big, big in the UK here, and obviously, Marks & Spencer is a big client, brand advocacy dropped. So those who would recommend Marks & Spencer

fell from 87 % to 73 % during this period. Trust erosion. Those who would definitely give Marks & Spencer the benefit of the doubt in future issues dropped from 39 % to 32%. Shopping decisions were affected. Between 25 % and 32 % of consumers said they’d shop elsewhere due to the disruption. But broader trust remained more stable. Overall trust, so people saying they’d either definitely or probably trust Marks & Spencer,

dipped only slightly from 84 % to 82%. That’s quite telling. what that means is that that trust, people are still willing to kind of lend them that trust in spite of all of this. So experts analyzing all this, including Maru itself, talking about the incident shows that even long established trusted brands are vulnerable to cyber attacks. That’s the number one takeaway, they say.

Shel Holtz (18:27)

@nevillehobson (18:28)

Maru concludes in their reporting is that this particular attack underscores cyber risk as a growing reputational threat, especially when it disrupts core services and affects logic schemes, as this one did in a way that you honestly couldn’t imagine. They were offline for six whole weeks. You couldn’t do anything at all. And my wife, Laura, for instance, buy stuff from Marks & Spencer online. She went somewhere else to get a blouse she was interested in. Not the same.

So does that mean she’s now tempted by this other firm? I hope not, because it was even more expensive than Marks & Spencer. So go back to Marks Spencer. But you know, the point is that even loyal customers may waver when trust is tested by operational failure. And that was a thing that the communication, I remember getting the customer emails and the messages pop-ups in the app, we’re all about we’re on it. We’re on it. We’re sorting it. Don’t worry back soon. I mean, that was a kind of soft messaging that, in my opinion,

waste of time that doesn’t help you at all. Although, is that really true, given the metrics that Maru has come up with in terms of the overall brand trust? Maybe they’re banking on that, they’ll weather this through until the £300 million hit is showing on their account books, and they put in place ways to deal with customers. One suggestion I saw a lot, which I thought would make sense is they need to offer something to customers as a kind of a

recompense, if you will, as a gift of some kind, and don’t try and, you know, layer it all with marketing talk or any kind of thing, just a selfless gift as a way of saying, thank you for your support and your trust or whatever it might be. I don’t know what that would look like via the loyalty program wouldn’t be a bad idea. Some of the stuff they do with that loyalty program is called sparks are pretty lame, must admit, you know, free donuts in the food stall, if you spend two pounds, that kind of thing, do something bit more meaningful. So that might help.

Shel Holtz (20:53)

you know.

@nevillehobson (20:55)

Shel Holtz (20:58)

Well, they make sense. mean, this was a crisis communication. And if ever there’s an opportunity to take a reputational hit, it’s during a crisis. And they did not behave like a company in crisis. They showed little empathy for the customer telling you we’re on it ⁓ doesn’t make me feel better about whatever it is that I’m dealing with as a result of this, whatever it is I plan to do that I can’t do whatever.

inconvenience or difficulty it creates for me. ⁓ I don’t want to be one of those people giving Marks and Spencer advice, but I would have ⁓ flooded the zone with empathy for one thing. And I would have turned the spotlight on frontline employees who were dealing with this every day. So you could see, more than just we’re working on it, to seeing somebody actually working on it, somebody dealing with taking cash and saying,

We’re trying to serve as many customers as we can as all this gets sorted out. But I would have really tried to shape the reputation through content marketing as this was going on, rather than just popping up messages saying, we’re still working on it.

@nevillehobson (22:28)

It seemed to me highly scripted. It’s like they’d had a presentation, she’d memorize the top three things to say with a smile. Now, I don’t want to imply that it’s fakery, not at all. Was that enough, though? I don’t know. It didn’t really sit well with me, I must admit. But then again, I may not be the best kind of typical customer for that point of view. They were doing something in that regard, but none of it seemed like it was a plan almost. It seemed to me anyway, just looking at what I saw in communication, what I saw being reported.

the press what I saw about the CEO interviewed saying he and his team are working night and day constantly 724 to fix all this that to me did not sound right

Shel Holtz (23:37)

thing you’re going to expect is the CEO to say he just wants to go home. ⁓ Like like Hayward during the BP golf spill. ⁓ Yeah, I guess the bottom line for all of this, though, is I’m as we’re talking and I’m seeing all the threads pulled together is whether it’s a crisis as Marks and Spencer experienced that was a cyber crime or

@nevillehobson (23:42)

Right, exactly.

Shel Holtz (24:05)

around how to deal with this, because certainly with AI and the ability to create fakery that is hard to detect, we’re gonna need to have those new plans. But I think if organizations are consistently true to their values and show that they have a spine when those values are challenged, they stand to do pretty well reputationally. Those that don’t, don’t. And that’ll be a 30.

@nevillehobson (24:59)

Shel Holtz (25:00)

The post FIR #468: New Threats to Reputation appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

In this episode, Chip and Gini highlight the challenges and potential pitfalls of over-relying on AI for content creation in PR and marketing.

They discuss instances of AI-generated content gone wrong, such as the fake book list published by the Chicago Sun-Times and poorly crafted AI-generated pitches. The hosts emphasize the importance of human oversight, individuality, and storytelling in maintaining quality and building relationships with the audience. They also delve into Google’s EEAT guidelines and how PR professionals can leverage their expertise to stand out in search rankings.

Finally, they discuss practical ways to efficiently use AI while ensuring the content remains authentic and relatable. [read the transcript]

The post ALP 273: Ensuring AI is an asset — not a liability — for your agency appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Episode 117 is the first-ever live webcast of the monthly IABC Circle of Fellows. IABC Fellows Shel Holtz and Brad Whitworth moderated the session, an interactive conversation with a panel of nearly a dozen Fellows from around the globe, including members of the 2025 Class of Fellows. The discussion was wide-ranging, covering topics including top communication challenges for the rest of the 20202s, AI, disinformation, and much more.

The Fellows panel – collectively representing hundreds of years of communication expertise – will also take questions from the audience, both in-person and online. Here’s your chance to pick the brains of some of the world’s brightest and most experienced communication leaders during this lively, informative, fun, and fast-paced webcast.

The Fellow is the highest honor IABC bestows on members who have had a significant impact not only on their organizations and IABC but also on the communication profession. Just over 100 IABC members have earned this designation since its inception in 1970.

About the panel:

In addition to eight Fellows in the audience who contributed answers to audience questions, three of the five new Fellows were on stage. They included…

Bonnie Caver, SCMP, is the Founder and CEO of Reputation Lighthouse, a global change management and reputation consultancy with offices in Denver, Colorado, and Austin, Texas. The firm, which is 20 years old, focuses on leading companies to create, accelerate, and protect their corporate value. She has achieved the highest professional certification for a communication professional, the Strategic Communication Management Professional (SCMP), a distinction at the ANSI/ISO level. She is also a certified strategic change management professional (Kellogg School of Management), a certified crisis manager (Institute of Crisis Management). She holds an advanced certification for reputation through the Reputation Institute (now the RepTrak Company). She is a past chair of the global executive board for the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC). She currently serves on the board of directors for the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management, where she leads the North American Regional Council and is the New Technology Responsibility/AI Director. Caver is the Vice Chair for the Global Communication Certification Council (GCCC) and leads the IABC Change Management Special Interest Group, which has more than 1,300 members. In addition, she is heavily involved in the global conversation around ethical and responsible AI implementation and led the Global Alliance’s efforts in creating Ethical and Responsible AI Guidelines for the global profession.

Laurie Dawkins, ABC, MC, SCMP, Fellow, is vice president of Communications & Engagement with the Provincial Health Services Authority (PHSA), one of the largest public sector health-care organizations in western Canada. She leads a team of close to 50 communication professionals in delivering timely, strategic and meaningful internal and external communications, media relations, crisis communications and C-suite counsel to meet the needs of more than 29,000 employees and 5.5 million citizens who turn to PHSA for specialized health-care services provided by BC Children’s Hospital, BC Cancer, BC Emergency Health Services, the BC Centre for Disease Control, and more. Laurie has more than 25 years’ experience in the communications industry, and holds the professional designations of Accredited Business Communicator (ABC) and Strategic Communications Management Professional (SCMP). In 2017, she was delighted to be named a Master Communicator of Canada (MC) by the IABC-Canada. She has hands-on experience in partnering with First Nations and Indigenous leaders to co-create communication strategies that are foundational to PHSA’s organizational vision to “Boldly create an equitable, anti-racist and culturally safe health care system where everyone thrives.”

Mike Klein is the Editor-in-Chief of Strategic Magazine, Founder of #WeLeadComms, and a communication consultant specializing in internal and social communication based in Reykjavik, Iceland. A former US political consultant, Mike shifted direction toward internal communication while pursuing his MBA at London Business School.  Since then, Mike has been one of the leading voices for empowering communication professionals, and advocating a focus on internal influence and social connection as drivers of communication, integration and performance. His 2011 book, From Lincoln to LinkedIn remains relevant as organizations recognize that personal credibility and connection are critical to communication success in a world where content volumes are increasing and instability flourishes. Raised in Chicago, Mike has lived and worked in seven different countries, and is also a Fellow of the Centre for Strategic Communication Excellence and the Institute of Internal Communication.

The post Circle of Fellows #117: LIVE from IABC World Conference 2025 appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

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.

Follow Craig Silverman on LinkedIn

Mentioned in this Interview

The post Craig Silverman on Fighting Digital Deception with Indicator appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

In this episode, Chip and Gini delve into the challenge of agencies being brought in late on client projects. They discuss the common scenario where clients give last-minute requests and share strategies for becoming part of the planning process earlier.

Key recommendations include integrating into internal communications, attending more meetings, and maintaining a mindset of curiosity to stay updated. They also cover how to handle situations when timely inclusion isn’t possible, such as negotiating new timelines or additional costs for urgent work.

The conversation emphasizes the importance of proactive client communication to prevent unrealistic expectations and to potentially increase scope and revenue. [read the transcript]

The post ALP 272: Why agencies get brought in too late by clients — and what to do about it appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Pick a superlative, and it probably applies to Mary Meeker, the venture capitalist and former Wall Street securities analyst best known for her annual Internet Trends Reports. These reports, released in the form of presentation decks, were the culmination of deep research Meeker conducted. Her last report was published June 12, 2019 at Recode’s Code Conference, but she just released a new one dedicated entirely to AI. With credibility as strong as hers, it’s likely that this report will become the defining source of truth about the state of AI. In this short midweek FIR episode, Neville and Shel break down the report to focus on elements that are meaningful to professional communicators.

Links from this episode:

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, June 23.

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

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

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

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

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz (00:10)

@nevillehobson (00:17)

If you’re not steeped in the language of model training, deployment, and what it actually costs to run AI at scale, it can feel like stepping into someone else’s board meeting. So I decided to reinterpret it, not to dumb it down, but to make it readable and useful for business communicators, strategists, and leaders who need to understand what’s coming and why it matters. In today’s short form episode, we’re going to unpack what’s in the MECA report, some of the big themes, why they’re significant.

and how communicators in particular might think about sharing this kind of insight within their organizations in plain English, right after this message. Let me start with one insight that really sets the scene for everything else. AI adoption is moving faster than the internet or mobile did, and there’s no waiting this one out. For business leaders, this means constant adaptation.

You can’t rely on annual strategy cycles when AI tools are evolving weekly. Businesses need to become more agile, not just in tech, but in how they communicate, train and respond to change internally. So the question is, how do organizations keep up with something that doesn’t just disrupt industries? It rewrites the rule book as it goes. Shell, when you saw the scale and scope of this report, what stood out to you? And how do you think people outside the tech investor bubble should engage with this sea change?

Shel Holtz (02:06)

@nevillehobson (02:26)

Shel Holtz (02:32)

adoption and scale section of her report is the need for communicators to understand that the people in your audience are using this. It doesn’t matter whether it’s internal or it’s external. So that was one of the big things that jumped out at me. This is not something, regardless of where Gartner

might place it on their hype cycle. It is not something that is going through slow adoption. There was a report, we talked about this a couple of weeks ago, that said, you know, it really is just another technology. I mean, it may be phenomenal and allow you to do wonderful things, but it still has to spread like a technology. ⁓ And according to Mary Meeker’s report, it’s already done that. ⁓ It’s not going to take as long as other technologies usually do. It’s here.

and people are using it and you have to consider that. There was a lot more ⁓ that jumped out at me, particularly around ⁓ the reshaping of the workforce, but I know you’re planning on talking about that.

@nevillehobson (04:09)

you know, factor in our planning as we go along. If you’ve got a five year plan, you need to do it weekly as the report suggests. And that might surprise a lot of people. You surely can’t be that important. It is. I like the way it’s the report is set up and kind of in eight sections that cover the breadth of what she discusses. But if you look at the kind of headline statement for each of the sections, you do get a sense of the almost a dramatic aspect of

what is actually happening according to Mary Meeker’s report. Change is accelerating. We’ve talked about that. User growth, usage and investment are surging, she says. Performance is improving while costs drop. Usage costs and losses are all growing. And that’s what Mary Meeker describes as part of the huge land grab where you sacrifice immediate profits for simply scaling and getting more people on board. Monetization is complex, she says, open source China and competition.

are rising. AI is merging with the physical world and talks about this now moving out into factories and areas that don’t necessarily make big headlines, but this has been going on already for quite a while. AI-driven growth in internet usage is historic, is driving a new wave of internet activity, says, large-scale adoption across emerging markets. And this is interesting. Many people are coming online primarily to use AI tools. Something I started doing recently was

I installed on my desktop computer, my primary computer, the extension in Chrome to use chat GPT as the primary search tool, not Google, and it replaces Google. It didn’t take me long to suddenly realize that actually I’m getting more value out of my searching this way than I was using Google. Now that just works for me. I know others do agree with that. But this indicates to me, according to another report I saw,

that the younger you are, the more likely you are doing this and not traditional search engines. So this is again, all adds to that picture. And then that final one, number eight, work is evolving rapidly, as you mentioned, and that’s definitely one to focus on. But this gives a sense of the, I guess, the dramatic nature of this that ⁓ is hard to look at it in its totality without

examining each of these areas that are in extreme detail in the report. One of the reasons I did this, which was a I started this for myself, I let me do something in simple English, because this is peppered, absolutely crammed with tech talk. And if you’re not involved in this, you will struggle with this, I’m sure, or maybe not even get the correct synthesis of what you’re reading to understand it fully.

So I think my report did it that did it for me that’s effect. So I decided to publish it, which I did as a PDF on a blog post that you could download. So it’s 340 slides. I’ve done it all down to 18 pages of a PDF. Now, so I’m not saying hey, that’s all you need to read. On the contrary, you need to read this in in tandem with Mary Meeker’s report so you can get the detail because those charts are quite important. I don’t include any of those. But

Let’s talk about the workplace shell because this is something you and I have talked about a number of times on the other episodes of the podcast, particularly one or two of the monthly long form episodes. And I found this one something that if we think people are up to speed with this, I’m not so sure that’s totally true. The awareness that this is happening, we’re going to have co-workers who are AIs and that we definitely talked about.

And the fact that she mentioned in her report, many businesses are lagging behind in supporting the shift that is already underway. So the report underscores the urgency of re-skilling, rethinking performance and supporting AI literacy. And I guess the question arises as it arose in our previous discussions, are we doing enough to prepare teams for AI native workflows or are we still thinking of it as a tool, not a co-worker? That’s the conversation we had recently in fact.

Shel Holtz (08:46)

to manage teams in that environment. The other thing that I think we’re still living in denial is that this is going to affect employment. She makes the point that AI-related job postings surged 448 % between January of 2018 and April of this year. Traditional IT job postings have fallen 9%. So this is a pivot or perish moment in

@nevillehobson (08:53)

Shel Holtz (09:20)

from people who said, ⁓ AI writing can never be as good as human writing. It doesn’t have lived experience. It doesn’t have empathy. It doesn’t have soul. So Chris went and found work that all five of those people had done, things they had written. And he said, you know what? It wasn’t very good. So to claim that we’re as humans producing this Pulitzer quality

⁓ literary level of work as organizational communicators, I think is a conceit. As I’ve said many times, got this from Martin Waxman, most of what we write just has to be good enough and AI can do that. I was listening to the On with Kara Swisher podcast just yesterday and she had on two journalists, each of them have written a book about Sam Altman and OpenAI.

And one of them had interviewed the CEO of EY worldwide. used to be Ernst & Young, one of the big accounting firms. And she said, we will not be laying anybody off because of AI. But we also think that we can grow the business to twice its size without having to increase headcount. you know, where did those new hires come from? Job openings plummet.

I think if we continue to live in this dream world of no layoffs, no job consequences from AI, it’s gonna turn around and bite us in the ass. So we have to start living in reality there. But in terms of the workplace, she also makes the point that this is going to weave its way into everything we do. She says that the biggest changes aren’t coming from Silicon Valley.

They’re showing up where software meets the physical world. And that could be on a farm in Iowa.

@nevillehobson (11:42)

who have also put together some kind of documentation summarizing this port. All of it that I’ve seen, and I’m only talking literally of a dozen or so posts, have used an AI to produce it, which got me wondering on one or two I’ve looked at, one in particular, the first thing I spotted was a date error. Did anyone check the AI’s output before they wrote their LinkedIn post saying, hey, here’s a report about this is my interpretation, et cetera. I used chat GPT to summarize.

the report for me, which I then myself wrote the insights from. So I made sure that I did that took me twice as long otherwise as it would have. And I’m fairly confident that it is as accurate as the report itself. It’s because that’s what I’ve been referencing. I noticed David Amano did something quite cool. I must admit he created the GPT that as it’s described, it summarizes only the uploaded Mika AI report with no outside data.

So I played around with it and it’s got actually when you when load it up in your in your chat GPT client, it’s got four already populated potential questions you might want to ask. So I just clicked one. What does report say about chat GPT use? And boom, off it reeled off a whole load of bullet points and so forth. Hey, I’ve got all that in my report, too. So at least we’re kind of consistent in how we accept that was all generated by AI. The point to me about that, though, is the argument.

That’s ongoing still. I find it’s such a waste of time. Is all this stuff about, the dashes and that indicates as AI can’t be any good, blah, blah, blah. No, look, watch out. This is now what’s happening every single day by people up and down every country and every business are using AI to help them be productive, not to con others in that, ⁓ aren’t I clever, but it’s actually the AI who wrote it. Not at all. Maybe some would do that, but that’s not important.

So pay attention to this tool that others scoff at sometimes that this is going to help you because it’s an inevitability, right? And whether you like it or not, this is here. It’s it’s coming. It’s here now. And others are already making good use of it. As we’ve reported, we mentioned again today that there are others further still who are not doing what they need to do to prepare the people for this wave that’s coming. So it is coming.

I think one other area or a number, but one in particular comes to mind as I’m talking this point is the competitive nature of this from a geopolitical point of view. So we’ve heard Trump going on about this, that and the other. China is catching up fast with these tools. Other countries are doing the same. What does that all mean for us in the context of what’s going on in the world right now, which is pretty alarming everywhere you look. So now there’s this. ⁓

You can’t control the things you can’t control. What you can control is your own organization probably. So I’d focus on that and don’t worry about all the other stuff for the time being until the rockets start coming over, right? So ⁓ it is interesting. One other point to mention, I want to just get across this point here, Shell, ⁓ about how ⁓ this isn’t just a tech race, which is related. It’s a global economic and geopolitical competition, says Mary Meesher. The report highlights three threats to current AI leaders.

powerful open source alternatives, intense U.S. competition, and China’s state-backed AI ambitions. For the global businesses, it isn’t abstract. It affects vendor choices, data handling, and regulatory risk. So should businesses be preparing for an AI environment that’s fragmented, politically sensitive, and constantly shifting? Yes, they should.

Shel Holtz (15:55)

⁓ So I think the software industry is going to catch up with the fragmentation of ⁓ the LLMs, the frontier models after a while. ⁓ You were talking about David Armano’s GPT. I wasn’t aware of that until you put it in our Slack channel. I’m definitely going to go take a look at that. ⁓ I just created a GPT. I got a new camera ⁓ and

It has all kinds of settings I don’t understand. And it’s been a long time since I’ve really paid attention to photography. And I was looking at all the pitches that are on Facebook and other channels for photography lessons and guides. And I was watching some YouTube videos. And finally, I said, the heck with this. And I went to chat GPT and I created a GPT. said, ⁓ create a tutorial that will teach me the settings of, and I gave it the model name and number of the camera I got.

@nevillehobson (17:20)

Shel Holtz (17:21)

I hadn’t had a chance to look at it at all or read a single piece about it. And with limited time, I just dumped all of the links that you shared, the report itself, and one or two other things I found into Notebook LM. created a notebook and I had it create a briefing paper. I had it create the 15 minute podcast that has the man and the woman talking to each other about the substance of the material that’s in the folder. In fact, the briefing report,

divided it into two parts. It was Mary Meeker’s report itself. And part two, it says critical analysis and nuance. And this is some of the other reports that didn’t just summarize Mary Meeker’s report, but shared their own views about it, some of which may have been contradictory. For example, ⁓ one of them made the point that just because people have adopted AI doesn’t mean they’re using it for…

work and productivity purposes. A lot of people have adopted this as just to have somebody to talk to or to ask the occasional question or to play games with or what have you. So you really have to start to think about the depth of use among the people in your organization and not just how many active AI users you have. They could just be, you know, making meme images with them for all you know. you know, so.

@nevillehobson (19:13)

Shel Holtz (19:13)

that was one interesting observation ⁓ that came out of some of the reports.

@nevillehobson (19:21)

Chat GPT has done a great job. My need is different to yours, however, because what I’m looking for is something that will let me not use my phone when Laura, my wife and I are out looking at interesting places or walking around stately homes in the countryside. Instead, having a camera that I can use just for that, and it’s not going to be connected to the internet industry. That’s not a prime need. Chat GPT came out with five recommendations. And here we’re not talking about single lens reflex cameras.

not talking about mini compact cameras, talking about something slightly beyond that, that suits that use. I don’t want to have to figure out aperture and all that. I don’t want to know about any of that stuff. So probably a compact camera. It’s come up with one I’ve now been doing further research on, but it started with that. And that’s a change. And it’s a simple one. people are doing that kind of thing all the time, I’m sure. yeah, exactly. So

Shel Holtz (20:42)

@nevillehobson (20:45)

the way chat GPT works, it knows everything about me now from all those chats. And it surprises me sometimes when I ask it something. And it reminds me that we discussed this very topic six months ago, stuff like that. So it is part of our landscape. This is whether we like it or not. Merrymakers report, highly technical though it is, but look at some of the ⁓ business friendly versions or interpretations or

aligned commentaries that are popping up here and then including the one I wrote and published in my blog today, that it will give you the means to better understand all this in your own particular context. But, you know, don’t don’t look at it then come back to in five months, it’ll be out of date by then I would imagine so it’s as fast moving without any question.

Shel Holtz (21:58)

thing that’s going to drive change to the way people do their jobs. That’s just a new tool. So we need to understand job evolution as it relates to AI, ⁓ things like working with AI coworkers and lead that conversation and help prepare the employee population because it’s going to be a dramatic change or may I say unprecedented. I also think that

@nevillehobson (22:53)

Shel Holtz (22:54)

mantle and run with it. ⁓ Also, it’s important to keep everybody grounded in the role of humans here. One line I read that I liked, and I think this is in one of the reports about Mary Meeker’s report, was that the models ⁓ can predict a perfectly logical next action that falls flat the moment it meets unwritten office culture or office policy.

⁓ You have to keep the company grounded in the fact that people need to be involved in these things. ⁓ Finally, Mary Meeker made the point that this is ⁓ the biggest change in knowledge distribution since the printing press. So bigger than the internet, ⁓ because the internet was after the printing press, right? ⁓ Knowledge is now suddenly more available.

@nevillehobson (23:55)

Shel Holtz (24:18)

an AI CEO, it’ll probably do pretty well at navigating the issues and challenges you’re facing right now. But looking 10 years ahead, my understanding is that it’s not very good at that yet. So keep everybody grounded in the need ⁓ for the human in the loop.

@nevillehobson (25:06)

for my final point to mention is something I mentioned in the blog post where I kind of summarized why does this matter to communicate is more than any other, but not just HR operations, marketing, etc. Your employees are using AI with or without policy. That’s the thing to bear in mind. That’s not like someone they’re using it no matter what your customers expect faster, smarter, more tailored interactions. Your competitors are building new capabilities you might not see coming. And there are about a dozen more, but those three struck me as something that

keep in mind when you’re looking at these developments and trends that Mary Mikos pointing out and others too, and all the interpreted wisdom that’s emerging what others are saying to navigate all of that. And you realize if you are skeptical, that this is definitely real and this is happening and you need to be the change agent as a communicator. So that’s your job.

Shel Holtz (26:25)

The post FIR #467: Mary Meeker’s 2025 AI Trends Report appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Not only are AI chatbots still hallucinating; by some accounts, it’s getting worse. Moreover, despite abundant coverage of the tendency of LLMs to make stuff up, people are still not fact-checking, leading to some embarrassing consequences. Even the legal team from Anthropic (the company behind the Claude frontier LLM) got caught.

Also in this episode:

In his tech report, Dan York looks at some services shutting down and others starting up.

Links from this episode:

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, June 23.

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

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

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

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

Raw Transcript

Shel Holtz (00:01)

@nevillehobson (00:10)

Shel Holtz (00:13)

You know, my memory’s failing and I don’t remember.

@nevillehobson (00:44)

interesting topics we’ve had a handful of short form episodes, 20 minutes more or less, since the last monthly, which we published on 28th of April. And I’ll start with that one because that takes us forward. That was an interesting one with a number of topics. The headline topic was cheaters never prosper, said, unless you pay for what you create.

And that was related to a university student who was expelled for developing an AI driven tool to help applicants to software coding jobs cheat on the tests employers require them to take. And it had mixed views all around with people thinking, hey, this is cool. And it’s not a big deal if people cheat others who are abhorred by it is an abhorrent idea. I’m in that camp. I think it’s a dreadful idea that ⁓ most people think it’s not a bad thing. is. Cheating is not good. That’s my view.

There were a lot of other topics too in that as well. A handful of others that were really, really good. How communicators can use seven categories of AI agents and a few others worth a listen. That was 90 minutes, that one. That’s kind of hitting the target goal we had for the long form content. If it’s too long, hit the pause button and come back to it. Might apply to this episode too.

So that was 462 at end of April. That was followed on May the 7th by 463 ⁓ that ⁓ talked about delivering value with generative AIs endless right answers. This was really quite intriguing one. ⁓ Quoting Google’s first chief decision scientist who said that one of the biggest challenges of the gen AI age.

is leaders defining value for their organization. And one of the considerations she says is mindset shift in which there are endless right answers. So you create something that’s right, you repeat the prompt and get a different for images, for example, and get a different one, it’s also right. And so she posed a question, which one is right? It’s an interesting conundrum type thing. But that was a good one. We had 16 minutes that one. And

Shel Holtz (03:01)

one, too, from ⁓ Dominique B., who said, sounds like it’s time for a truthiness meter.

@nevillehobson (03:02)

Okay, what’s what are those?

Shel Holtz (03:13)

@nevillehobson (03:18)

Got it. Good. Noted. ⁓ Then 464. This was truly interesting to me because it’s basically saying that as we’ve talked about and others constantly talk about, you should disclose when you’re using AI ⁓ in some way that illustrates your honesty and transparency. Unfortunately, research shows that the opposite is true.

that if you disclose ⁓ that you’ve used AI to create an output, ⁓ you’re likely to find that your audiences will lose trust in you as soon as they see that you’ve disclosed this. That’s counterintuitive. You think disclosing and being transparent on this is good. It doesn’t play out according to the research. ⁓

It’s an interesting one. I think I’d err on the side of disclosure more than anything else. Maybe it depends on how you disclose. But it turns out that people trust AI more than they trust the humans using AI. And that we spent 17 and half minutes on that one show. That was a good one. You got a comment too, I think, have we not?

Shel Holtz (04:31)

@nevillehobson (04:48)

people define what news is based on its impact on them becoming their own gatekeepers. And video podcasts have become so popular that media outlets are including them in their up-fronts. So we looked at finding a common thread in our discussion among these trends and setting out how the communicators can adjust their efforts to make sure the news is received and believed. That was a lengthier one than usual. 26 minutes that came in at has always this great stuff to…

to consume. So that brings us in fact to now this episode 466 monthly. So we’re kicking off the wrap up of May and heading into a new month in about a week or so.

Shel Holtz (05:59)

@nevillehobson (06:03)

It’s a precursor to a book he’s writing based on that article that looks at bot farms. They now outnumber real users on social networks, according to Eric’s research and how profits drive PR ethics. Why meta TikTok X and even LinkedIn are complicit in enabling synthetic engagement at scale, says Eric. So ⁓ lots to unpack in that. That was a 42 minute conversation with Eric. His new book,

called Invasion of the Bot Farms. He’s currently preparing for that. He’ll explore the escalating threat, he says, through insider stories and case studies. That was a good conversation with Eric Schell. It’s an intriguing topic, and he really has done a lot of research on this.

Shel Holtz (07:16)

And also since the last monthly episode, there has been an episode of Circle of Fellows. This is the monthly panel discussion featuring usually four IABC fellows. That’s the International Association of Business Communicator. I moderate most of these. I moderated this one. And it was about making the transition from

being a communication professional to being a college or university professor teaching communication. And we had four panelists who have all made this move. Most of them have made it full-time and permanent. are

teachers and not working in communications anymore. One is still doing both. And they were John Clemens, Cindy Schmig, Mark Schuman and Jennifer Waugh. It was a great episode. It’s up on the FIR podcast network now. The next circle of fellows is gonna be an interesting one. It is going to be done live. This is the very first time this will happen, episode 117.

So we’ve done 116 of these as live streams and this one will be live streamed, but it’ll be live streamed from Vancouver, site of the 2025 IEBC World Conference and Circle of Fellows is going to be one of the sessions. So we’re gonna have a table up on the platform with.

the five members of the 2025 class of IAVC fellows and me moderating. And in the audience, all the other fellows who are at conference will be out there among those who are attending the session and we’ll have the conversation. Brad Whitworth will have a microphone. He’ll be wandering through the audience to take questions. It’ll be fun. It’ll be interesting. It will be live streamed as our Circle of Fellows episode for June. So.

watch the FIR Podcast Network or LinkedIn for announcements about ⁓ when to watch that episode. Should be fun.

@nevillehobson (09:54)

Okay, that does sound interesting. Shell, what date is it taking place? You know.

Shel Holtz (10:00)

@nevillehobson (10:27)

Shel Holtz (10:37)

@nevillehobson (10:40)

At the Google I.O. last week, that’s Google’s developer conference, amongst many other things, the company unveiled a product called V.O.3, that’s V.E.O., V.O.3, its most advanced AI video generation model yet. It’s already sparking equal parts wonder and concern. V.O.3 isn’t just about photorealistic visuals. It marks the end of what TechRadar calls the silent era of AI video.

by combining realistic visuals with synchronized audio. Dialogue, soundtracks and ambient noise all generated from a simple text prompt. In short, it makes videos that feel real with few, if any, the telltale glitches we’ve come to associate with synthetic media. ZDNet and others included in a collection of links on Techmeme describe VO3 as a breakthrough in marrying video with audio, simulating physics, lip syncing with uncanny accuracy,

and opening creative doors for filmmakers and content creators alike. But that’s only one side of the story. The realism VO3 achieves also raises alarms. Exios reports that many viewers can’t tell VO3 clips from those made by human actors. In fact, synthetic content is becoming so indistinguishable that the line between real and fake is beginning to dissolve. Alarm is a point I made in a post on Blue Sky.

earlier last week when I shared a series of amazing videos created by Alejandra Caravejo at Harvard Law Cyber Law Clinic, portraying TV news readers reading out a breaking news story she created just from a simple text prompt. What comes immediately to mind, I said, ⁓ is the disinformation uses of such a tool. What on earth will you be able to trust now? One of Alejandra’s comments in the long thread was,

This is going to be used to manipulate people on a massive scale. Others in that thread noted how easily such clips can be repeated and recontextualized with no visual watermark to distinguish them from real broadcast footage. I mean, one thing is for sure, Sal, if you’ve watched any of these, they’re now peppered all over LinkedIn and Blue Sky and most social networks. You truly are going to have your jaw dropping when you see some of these things. It’s not hard to visualize.

just hearing an audio description, but they truly are quite extraordinary. This is a whole new level. There’s also the question of cost and access. ⁓ VO3 is priced at a premium around $1,800 per hour for professional grade use, suggesting a divide between those who can afford powerful generative tools and those who can’t. So we’re not just talking about a creative leap. We’re staring at an ethical and societal challenge too.

Is VO3 one of the most consequential technologies Google has released in years, not just for creators, but for good and bad actors and society at large? How do you see it, Joe?

Shel Holtz (14:00)

⁓ and you couldn’t tell that this wasn’t shot in a, in a studio. ⁓ it was, it was that good. Alarm? I’m surprised that there is alarm because we have known for years that this was coming. ⁓ and I, I don’t think it should be a surprise that it has arrived at this point, given the quality of the video services that we have seen from other providers and

This is a game of leapfrog so that you know that one of the other video providers is going to take what Google has done and take it to the next level, maybe allowing you to make longer videos or there will be some bells and whistles that they’ll be able to add and the prices will drop. This is a preliminary price. It’s a brand new thing. We see this with open AI all the time where the first

time they release something, have to be in that $200 a month tier of customer in order to use it. But then within a couple of months, it’s available at the $20 a month level or at the free level. So this is going to become widely available from multiple services. I think we need to look at the benefits this provides as well as the risk.

that it provides. This is going to make it easy for people who don’t have big budgets to do the kind of video that gets the kind of attention that leads to sales or whatever it is your communication objective was for enhancing videos that you are producing with actual footage in order to create openers or bridges or

just to extend the scene, it’s going to be terrific. Even at $1,800 an hour, there are a lot of people who can’t get high quality video for $1,800 an hour. So this is going to be a boon to a lot of creators. In terms of the risk, again, I think it’s education, it’s knowing what to look for.

getting the word out to people about the kinds of scams that people are running with this so that they’re on their guard. It’s going to be the same scams that we’ve seen with less superior technology. It’s going to be, you know, the grandmother con, right? Where you get the call and it sounds like it’s your grandson’s voice. I’ve been kidnapped. They’re demanding this much money. Please send it. Sure sounds like him. So grandma sends the money. So

This is the kind of education that has to get out there ⁓ because it’s just gonna get more realistic and easier to con people with the cons that frankly have been working well enough to keep them going up until now.

@nevillehobson (17:38)

Some of the examples you can see and the good one to mention is the one from Alejandra Carabagio, the video she created, which were a collection of clips ⁓ with the same prompt. they were all TV anchors, presenters on television, ⁓ talking about breaking news that J.K. Rowling had drowned because a yacht sank after it was attacked by orcas in the Mediterranean off the coast of Turkey.

⁓ What jumped at me when I saw the first one was, my God, this was so real. It looked like it was a TV studio, all created from that simple prompt. But then came three more versions, all with different accented English, American English, US English, English as a second language for one of the presenters that illustrates from that one prompt, what you could do. And she said that the first video took literally a couple of seconds.

And within less than 10 minutes after tweaking a couple of things after a number of attempts, she had a collection of five videos. So imagine that there are benefits, unquestionably. And indeed, some of the links we’ve got really go through some significant detail of the benefits of this to creators. But right on the back of that comes this big alarm bell ring. This is what the downside looks like. And I think

your point about ⁓ it’s going to come down, competitors will emerge. Undoubtedly, I totally agree with you. But that isn’t yet. In the meantime, this thing’s got serious first mover advantage and the talk up that I’m seeing across the tech landscape mostly, it hasn’t yet hit mainstream talk. I’m not sure how you kind of explain it in a way that excites people unless you see the videos. But

This is big alarm bell territory, in my opinion, and I think it’ll accelerate a number of things, one of which is more calls to regulate and control this if you can. you know, who knows what Trump’s going to do about this? Probably embrace it, I would imagine. I mean, you’ve seen what he’s doing already with the video and stuff that promotes him in his his emperor’s clothes and all this stuff. So this is, a major ⁓ milestone, I think, in the development of these technologies.

it will be interesting to see who else comes out in a way that challenges Google. But if you read Google’s very technically focused description, this is not a casual development by six guys with a couple of computers. This is required, I would imagine, serious money and significant quantum computing power to get it to this stage in a way that enables anyone with a reasonably powered computer to use it and create something. ⁓

got that that aspect to consider should we be doing something like this that generates huge or rather uses huge amounts of electricity and energy and all the carbon emissions we got that side of the debate that’s beginning to come out a little bit. So it’s experimental time without doubt. And there are some terrific learnings we can get from this. mean, I’d love to give it a go myself, but not at 1800 bucks. So if I had someone to do it for that was I could charge them for that I’d be happy.

⁓ But I’m observing what others are doing and hearing what people are saying. And it’s picking up pace. Every time I look online, there’s something new about this. Someone else has done something and they’re sharing it. So great examples to see. So yes, let’s take a look at what the benefits are and let’s see what enterprises will make of this and what we can learn from it. But I’m keeping a close eye on what others are saying about the risks because ⁓ we haven’t, you talk about the education, all that stuff.

No one seems to have paid any attention to any of that over the years. So why are going to pay attention to this now if we try and educate them?

Shel Holtz (22:06)

that really depends on how you go about this. Who’s delivering the message? I mean, where I work, we communicate cybersecurity risk all the time. And we make the point this isn’t only a risk to our company. This is a risk to you and your family. You need to take these messages home and share them with your with your kids. And every time something new comes out, where there’s a new scam, where we are aware

@nevillehobson (22:10)

show.

Shel Holtz (22:34)

And you have to use multiple channels and you have to be repetitive with this stuff. You have to kind of drill it into their heads. see organizations spending money on PSAs on TV alerting people to these scams. They’re all imposter scams is what it comes down to. It’s pretending to be something that they aren’t. know, what troubles me about this

I think is that we are talking a lot about erosion of trust. We talked about it on the last midweek episode, the fact that people trust each other less than they ever have. Only 34 % of people say they trust other people, that other people are trustworthy. And we’re trying to rebuild trust at the same time we’re telling people, you can’t trust what you see. You can’t trust your own eyes anymore. So this is a challenging time.

@nevillehobson (23:54)

Shel Holtz (24:00)

@nevillehobson (24:02)

Well, that is the challenge. absolutely right, because ⁓ people don’t actually need organizations to tell them that. They can see with their own eyes, but it’s then reinforced by what they’re hearing from governments. We’ve got an issue that I think is very germane to bring this into conversation, something in this country that is truly extraordinary. One of the biggest retailers here, Marks & Spencer.

was the subject of a huge cyber attack a month ago, and it’s still not solved. Their websites, you still can’t do any buying online. You can’t do click and collect none of those things. Today, they announced you can now again, log on to the website and browse. You can’t buy anything. You can’t pay electronically. You can only do it in the stores. And that no one seems to know precisely what exactly it is. There’s so much speculation, so much ⁓ talk that

of which most is uninformed, which is fueling the worry and alarm about this. And the consequences from Marks & Spencer are potentially severe from a reputational point of view and brand trust, all those things. haven’t solved this yet. That, people are saying, that was likely caused by an insecure password login by someone who is a supplier of Marks Spencer. But this is not like

little store down the road. This is a massive enterprise that has global operations. And the estimates at the moment is that the cost to them is likely to be around 300 million pounds. It’s serious money. They’re losing a million pounds a day. It’s serious. Oh, they won’t disclose it. It’s illegal to do that here in the UK to pay the ransom, if you disclose it. Government advice from the cyber security folks is don’t pay the ransom. Difficult thing to me is that you follow that advice and they’re still not solving the problem.

Shel Holtz (25:45)

@nevillehobson (26:03)

Shel Holtz (26:23)

@nevillehobson (26:33)

Shel Holtz (26:58)

reported on a story like this many years ago. It was, if I remember correctly, a bank robbery in Texas. It was a story that got picked up by multiple news outlets. It was completely fake. The first outlet that picked it up just assumed that it was accurate because of their source and all the other newspapers.

picked it up because they assumed that the first newspaper that picked it up had checked their facts, but it was a false story. This is nothing new. It’s just with this level of realistic video, it’s going to be that much easier to convince people that this is real and either share it or act on it.

@nevillehobson (27:40)

And it won’t be waiting on the media to pick up and report on it. That’s too slow. It’ll be TikTokers, it’ll be YouTube. It’s anyone with a website that has some kind of audience that’s connected and it’ll be amplified big time like that. So it’ll be out of control within probably within seconds of the first video appearing. That’s not to say that, dear, know, this is so what do we do? We’ve got to be that that’s that is the landscape now. And honestly and truly can’t imagine how

example of like a JK Rowling death at sea and all that stuff is on on multiple TV screens, supposedly TV studios that you don’t think when you’re watching hang on, is this legit this TV show you might occur to you, but the other nine people out there watching along with you aren’t gonna ask themselves that they’re gonna share it. And it’s suddenly it’s out there. And before you know it. I don’t know.

If it’s ⁓ say the CEO of big company that’s happened at a time of some kind of merger or takeover going on and then that person suddenly dropped dead, that’s the kind of thing I’m thinking about. So ⁓ I can see the real need to have some kind of, I can’t even call it shell regulation, I’m not sure, I don’t know, by government or someone.

alongside, you can’t just leave this to individual companies like yours who are doing a good job. Well, there are 50 others out there who aren’t doing this at all. So you can’t you can’t let it sit like that. Because this, the scale of this is breathtaking, frankly, what’s going to happen. And I think Alejandro Caravaggio and others I’ve seen saying the same thing, that ⁓ that, ⁓ you know, this is going to be a tool used to manipulate people on a massive scale. We’re not talking about business.

employees necessary, the public at large, this is going to manipulate people. And we’re already seeing that at small scale, based on the tech we have now. This tech’s up notches, in my view. you know, 1800 bucks, people are going to do this, ⁓ that to them, it’s like, you know, petty cash almost, or someone’s going to come out with something, again, that isn’t going to be that and it’s on a dark web somewhere and you know.

So I mean, I’m now getting into areas that I have no idea what I’m going to be talking about. So I will stop that now. I don’t know how that’s going to work. this requires attention, in my opinion, that to protect people and organizations from the bad actors, that euphemistic phrase, who are intent on causing disruption and chaos. And this is potentially what this will achieve alongside all that good stuff.

Shel Holtz (30:19)

@nevillehobson (30:26)

which talks a talks a little bit about that. hey, this is like draft still, I would say.

Shel Holtz (30:33)

@nevillehobson (30:44)

Shel Holtz (31:03)

@nevillehobson (31:04)

Shel Holtz (31:18)

Just this past week, we’ve seen two high-profile cases that illustrate the problem. First, the Chicago Sun-Times published what they called a summer reading list for 2025 that recommended 15 books. Ten of them didn’t exist. They were entirely fabricated by AI, complete with compelling descriptions of Isabelle Indy’s non-existent climate fiction novel Tidewater Dreams and Andy Weir’s imaginary thriller The Last Algorithm.

The newspaper’s response? Well, they blamed a freelancer from King Features, which is a company that syndicates content to newspapers across the country. It’s owned by Hearst. That freelancer used AI to generate the list without fact checking it. And the Sun-Times published it believing King Features content was accurate. And other publications shared it because the Chicago Sun-Times had done it.

Then there’s even more embarrassing case of Anthropic. That’s the company behind the Claude AI chatbot, one of the really big international large language models, frontier models. Their own lawyers had to apologize to a federal judge after Claude hallucinated a legal citation and a court filing. The AI generated a fake title and fake authors for what should have been a real academic paper. Their manual citation checks

missed it entirely. Think about that for a moment. A company that makes AI couldn’t catch its own tools’ mistakes, even with human review. Now, here’s what’s particularly concerning for those of us in communications. This isn’t getting better with newer AI models. According to research from Vektara, even the most accurate AI models still hallucinate at least 0.7 % of the time.

with some models producing false information in nearly one of every three responses. MIT research from January found that when AI models hallucinate, they actually use more confident language than when they’re producing accurate information. They’re 34 % more likely to use phrases like definitely, certainly, and without doubt when they’re completely wrong. So what does this mean for PR and communications professionals? Three critical things. First.

We need to fundamentally rethink our relationship with AI tools. The Chicago Sun-Times incident happened just two months after the paper laid off 20 % of its staff. Organizations under financial pressure are increasingly turning to AI to fill gaps, but without proper oversight, they’re creating massive reputation risks. When your summer reading list becomes a national embarrassment because you trusted AI without verification, you got a crisis communication problem on your hands.

@nevillehobson (34:04)

Shel Holtz (34:28)

Third, we’re seeing AI hallucinations spread into high-states environments where the consequences are severe. Beyond the legal filing errors, we’ve seen multiple times now, from Anthropic to the Israeli prosecutors who cited non-existent laws, we’re seeing healthcare AI that hallucinates medical information 2.3 % of the time, and legal AI tools that produce incorrect information in at least some percentage of cases that could affect real legal outcomes.

The bottom line for communication professionals is that AI can be a powerful tool, but it is not a replacement for human judgment and verification. I know we say this over and over and over again, and yet look at the number of companies that use it that way. The industry has invested $12.8 billion specifically to solve hallucination problems in the last three years, yet we’re still seeing high profile failures from major organizations who should know better.

My recommendation, if you’re using AI in your communications work, and let’s be honest, most of us are, insist on rigorous verification processes. Don’t just spot check. Verify every factual claim, every citation, every piece of information that could damage your organization’s credibility if it’s wrong. And remember, the more confident AI sounds, the more suspicious you should be.

The Chicago Sun-Times called their incident a learning moment for all of journalism. I’d argue it’s a learning moment for all of us in communications. We can’t afford to let AI hallucinations become someone else’s crisis communications case study.

@nevillehobson (36:37)

Shel Holtz (36:39)

The humans are the solution.

@nevillehobson (37:05)

you say you have a strict policy, that’s not the same thing, is it? So I think this was inevitable and we’re going to see it again, sure, we will and the consequences will be dire. I was reading a story this morning here in the UK of a lawyer who was an intern. That’s not her title, but she was a junior person that she ⁓ entered into evidence, some research she’d done without checking and it was all fake, done by the AI. And the case

turns out, and again, this is precisely the concern, not the tech. It’s not her fault. She didn’t have proper supervision. She was pressured by people who didn’t help because she didn’t know enough. And so she didn’t know how to do something. And she was under tight parameters to complete this thing. So she did it. No one checked her work at all. So she apologized and all that stuff. And yes, the judge, from what I read, isn’t isn’t penalizing her. It’s her boss. He should be penalizing.

You’re going to see that repeated, I’m sure already exists in case up and down businesses, organizations everywhere, where that is not an unusual setup structure, lack of support, lack of training, ⁓ lack of encouragement, indeed, the whole bring it out, let’s get the policy set up guidance and not just publish it on the internet. We bring it to people’s attention. We embrace them. We encourage them.

We bring them on board to conversations constantly, brown bag lunches, all the informal ways of doing this too. And I’m certain that happens a lot. But this example and others we could bring up and mention show that it’s not in those particular organizations. So the time will come, I don’t believe it’s happened yet, ⁓ where the most monumentally catastrophic clanger will be dropped sooner or later in an organization, whether it’s a government.

whether it’s a private company, whether it’s a medical system or whatever, that could have life or death consequences for people. Don’t believe that’s happened yet that we know of anyway, but the time is coming where it’s going to, I’d say.

Shel Holtz (39:36)

it undoubtedly will. And you’ll see medical decisions get made based on a hallucination that somebody didn’t check. What strikes me though is that we talk about AI as an adjunct, right? It is an enhancement to what humans do. It allows you to offload a lot of the drudgery so that you can focus your time on more.

human-centric and more strategic endeavors, which is great, but you still have to make sure that the drudge work is done right. I mean, that work is being done for a reason. It may be drudgery to produce it, but it must have some value or the organization wouldn’t want it anymore. So it’s important to check those. And in organizations that are cutting head count,

@nevillehobson (40:06)

Shel Holtz (40:29)

which could do something egregious enough to cost them a whole lot more than they saved by cutting that staff. And by the way, I saw research very recently, I almost added it as a report in today’s episode that found that investors are not thrilled with all the layoffs that they’re seeing in favor of AI. They think it’s a bad idea. So if you’re looking for a way to…

get your leaders to temper their inclinations to trim their staff. You may want to point to the fact that they may lose investors over decisions like that, but we need the people to fact check these things. And by the way, I have found an interesting way to fact check and it is not an exclusive approach to this.

But let me give you just this quick example. On our intranet every week, I share a construction term of the week that not every employee may know. And I have the description of that term written by one of the large language models. I don’t know what these things mean. I’m not a construction engineer.

So I get it written, and then the first thing I do is I copy it, and then I go to another one of the large language models and paste it in, and I say, review this for accuracy and give me a list of what you would change to make it more accurate. And most of the time it says, this is a really accurate write-up that you’ve got of this term. I would recommend to enhance the accuracy that you add these things.

So I’ll say, ahead and do that, write it up and make those things. Then I’ll go to a third large language model and ask the same question. I’ll still go do a Google search and find something that describes all of this to make sure I’ve got it right. But I find playing the large language models against each other as accuracy checks works pretty well.

@nevillehobson (42:56)

outlander really a new report from the Global Alliance of Public Relation and Communication Management that is, it offers a timely and global perspective on how our profession is adapting and in many cases struggling to keep pace as artificial intelligence continues its rapid integration into our daily work. As AI tools become embedded in the workflows of communication professionals around the world, a new survey from the Global Alliance offers a revealing snapshot

of where our profession currently stands and where it may be falling short. The report titled Reimagining Tomorrow, AI and PR and Communication Management draws on insights from nearly 500 PR and communication professionals. The findings paint a picture of a profession that’s enthusiastically embracing AI tools, particularly for content creation, but falling short when it comes to strategic leadership, ethical governance, and stakeholder communication. While adoption is high,

91 % of respondents say they’re using AI. The report highlights a striking absence of strategic leadership. Only 8.2 % of PR and communication teams are leading in AI governance or strategy, according to the report. Yet professionals rank governance and ethics as their top AI priorities at 33 % and 27 % respectively. Despite this, PR teams are mostly engaged in tactical tasks.

such as content creation and tool support. This gap between strategic intent and practical involvement is critical. If PR professionals don’t position themselves as stewards of responsible AI use, other functions like IT or legal will define the narrative. This has implications not only for reputation management, but for organizational relevance in the comms function. Now, in a post on his blog last week, our friend Stuart Bruce

describes the findings as alarming, arguing that communicators are failing to lead on the very issues that matter most, ethics, transparency, stakeholder trust, and reputation. His critique is clear. If PR doesn’t step up to define the response of the use of AI, we risk becoming sidelined in decisions that affect not just our teams, but the wider organization and society. The Global Alliances report also shows that while AI is mostly being used for content creation,

Very few are leveraging its potential for audience insights, crisis response, or strategic decision making. Many PR pros still don’t fully understand what AI can actually do, Stuart, either tactically or strategically. Worse, some are operating under common myths, such as avoiding any use of AI with private data, regardless of whether they’re using secure enterprise tools or not. So where does this leave us? Well, it looks to me like somewhere between a promise and a missed opportunity.

How would you say it, Joe?

Shel Holtz (46:21)

There are a growing number of policies, although most organizations still don’t have policies. Most organizations still don’t have ethics guidelines, although a growing number do. There are companies like mine that have AI committees, but the leadership needs to come from the very top down. And that’s what this research found isn’t happening. I was just scrolling through my bookmarks trying to find it. I’ll definitely turn that up before the…

show notes get published, if it’s not happening at the leadership levels of organizations, it’s not happening at the leadership levels of communication, I certainly can see that in the real world as I talk to people. It’s being used at a very tactical level, but nobody is really looking at the whole overall operation of communication in the organization, the role that it plays and how it goes about doing that.

through that lens of AI and how we need to adapt and change and how we need to prepare ourselves to continue to adapt and change as things like VO3 are released on the market and suddenly you’re facing a potential new reputational threat.

@nevillehobson (48:07)

Shel Holtz (48:12)

And for you and I to be able to talk together and record both sides of our conversation, Skype was the reason that we could do that. The only other option would have been what at the time was an expensive long distance phone call with really terrible audio. Who knew the double ender back in those days? We could have done it. You realize we could have both recorded our own ends. It would have taken forever to send those files.

@nevillehobson (49:02)

Shel Holtz (49:09)

@nevillehobson (49:11)

burning them to a CD and sending it by courier, I would say.

Shel Holtz (49:15)

no kidding. So bless Skype for enabling not just us, but pretty much any podcasters who were doing interviews or co-host arrangements. Skype made it possible, but Skype also enabled a lot of global business. There were a lot of meetings that didn’t have to happen in person. I mean, you look at Zoom today, Zoom is standing on the shoulders of Skype.

@nevillehobson (49:39)

wife’s family in Costa Rica, she used Skype to make calls all the time that replaced sending faxes, which is how they used to communicate because that was cheaper than international phone calls at that time. ⁓ lots happened in that time. But in reality, it’s only 20 years ago. It sounds a lot. But all this has happened in a 20 year period. And Skype ⁓ was the catalyst for much of this. They laid the foundation for

teams that we see now, Zoom, Google Meet, all those services that we can use. So what happened to WebEx and the like? It seems to have largely vanished, what I can see. So we’re used to all this stuff now. But it was great starter for us. And Dan mentions.

Shel Holtz (50:55)

out number I got, it was my business number and I got a 415 area code because that’s San Francisco and nobody knew the 510 area code in the East Bay outside of the Bay Area. So it provided just that little extra bit of cache. Oh, a San Francisco number. I mean, there was just so much good that came out of Skype. They kept coming up with great features and great tools even after Microsoft bought it.

@nevillehobson (51:17)

They did.

Yeah. And the price, the pricing structure was good. At that time I had, I had business in on the East coast in the U S and I had a New York number. So, uh, yeah, it was, was super, but, so good to, to have a reminisce there with Dan. That was great. Um, I was intrigued by your element about Bridgie Fed, which, uh, I’ve been trying to use that since it emerged.

Shel Holtz (51:25)

That’s great.

@nevillehobson (51:53)

and it enables Blue Sky to connect with Mastodon 2. It’s really quite cool, but Bridgifed’s key to much of that functionality. maybe it’s just me. I haven’t figured it out yet. There could be. So this is definitely not yet in the mainstream readiness arena quite yet, but this is the direction of travel without any doubt. And I think it’s great that we eliminate these, you know, activity pub versus AT protocol.

It just works. No one gives a damn about whether you’re on a different protocol or not. That’s where we’re aiming for. And that’s what is actually we’re moving towards quite quickly. Not for me, though, until I get this work.

Shel Holtz (53:04)

@nevillehobson (53:07)

Betamax and VHS, you know, look at that.

Shel Holtz (53:12)

And that’s the power of marketing because Betamax was the higher quality format. Well, let’s explore a fascinating and entirely predictable phenomenon that’s emerging in the corporate world. Companies that enthusiastically laid off workers to replace them with AI are now quietly hiring humans back.

@nevillehobson (53:16)

Shel Holtz (53:35)

He bragged that AI could already do all the jobs that humans do and even created an AI deep fake of himself to report quarterly earnings, supposedly proving that even CEOs can be replaced. How’d that work out for him? Just last week, Semitkowski announced that Klarna is now hiring human customer service agents again. Why? Because as he put it, from a brand perspective, a company perspective, I just think it’s so critical.

that you are clear to your customer that there will always be a human if you want. The very CEO who said AI could replace everyone is now admitting that human connection is essential for brand trust. It isn’t an isolated case. We’re seeing this pattern repeat across industries, and it should serve as a wake-up call for communications professionals about the risk of overly aggressive AI adoption without considering the human element. Take Duolingo, which had been facing an absolute

firestorm of social media after CEO Louis Vuitton announced that the company was going AI first. The backlash was so severe that Duolingo deleted all of its TikTok and Instagram posts, wiping out years of carefully crafted content from accounts with millions of followers. The company’s own social media team then posted a cryptic video. They were all wearing those anonymous style masks saying Duolingo was never funny.

We were. And what a stunning example of how your employees can become your biggest communication crisis when AI policies directly threaten their livelihoods. All this is particularly troubling from a communication perspective. These companies didn’t just lose employees, they lost institutional knowledge, creativity, and human insight that made their brands distinctive in the first place. A former Duolingo contractor told one journalist that the AI-generated content is very boring.

while Duolingo was always known for being fun and quirky. When you replace the humans who created your brand voice with AI, you risk losing the very thing that made your brand memorable. But here’s the broader pattern we need to understand. According to new research, just one in four AI investments actually deliver the ROI they promise. Meanwhile, companies are spending an average of $14,200 per employee per year just to catch and correct AI mistakes.

Knowledge workers are spending over four hours a week verifying AI output. These aren’t the efficiency gains that were promised. Now, I firmly believe those are still coming, those gains, and in a lot of cases, they’re actually here now. Some organizations are realizing them as we speak, but we’re not out of the woods yet. From a crisis communication standpoint, the AI layoff rehire cycle creates multiple reputation risks.

There’s the immediate backlash when you announce AI replacements. We saw this with Klarna and Duolingo and others. Employees and customers both react negatively to the idea that human workers are disposable. Then there’s the credibility hit when you quietly reverse course and start hiring people again. It signals that your AI strategy wasn’t as well thought out as you claimed. And that sort of trickles over into how much people trust your judgment and other things that you’re making decisions about.

For those of us working in communication, this trend highlights some critical lessons. Stakeholder communication about AI needs to be honest about limitations, not just potential and benefits. Companies that over promise on AI capability set themselves up for embarrassing reversals. Klarna CEO went from saying AI could do all human jobs to admitting that customer advice, customer service quality suffered without human oversight.

Second, employee communications around AI adoption require extreme care. When you announce AI first policies, you’re essentially telling your workforce they’re expendable. The Duolingo social media team’s rebellion shows what happens when you lose internal buy-in. Your employees become your critics, not your champions. And brand voice and customer experience are fundamentally human elements that can’t be easily automated.

Companies struggling most are those that tried to replace creative and customer facing roles with AI. Meanwhile, companies succeeding with AI are using it to augment human capabilities, not replace them entirely. The irony here is pretty rich. At a time when trust in institutions is at historic lows, companies are discovering that human connection and authenticity matter more than ever. You can’t automate your way to trust. So.

What should communication professionals take away from this ⁓ AI layoff rehire cycle? Be deeply skeptical of any AI strategy that eliminates human oversight in customer facing roles. Push back on claims that AI can fully replace creative or strategic communications work. And remember that when AI initiatives go wrong, it becomes a communications problem that requires very human skills to solve.

The companies getting all this right are the ones that view it as a tool to enhance human capabilities, not replace them. The ones getting it wrong are learning an expensive lesson about the irreplaceable value of human judgment, creativity, and connection.

@nevillehobson (59:32)

with a chat bot typically as the first line of defense. And I use that phrase deliberately. It defends them from having to talk to a customer where they have a chat bot where it guides you through carefully controlled scripted scenarios that it does have a little bit of leeway in its intelligence to respond on the fly to a question that’s not in the script, as it were, but only marginally. And so you still have to go through a system

that is poor at best and downright dangerous at worst in terms of trust with customers. your point, I agree totally, kind of fosters a climate of mistrust entirely when you can’t get to human and all you get is a chat bot and sometimes a chat bot that can actually engage in conversation. There are some good ones around.

But my experience recently with an insurance company to an accident, car accident I had in December, a guy drove into my car, repaired, and I’m chasing the other party to reclaim my excess. And boy, that’s an education in how not to implement something that engages with people. So, but I don’t see any sign of that changing anytime soon.

So one thing I take from this show, everything you said, indeed what we discussed in this whole episode so far in this context, it’s a people issue, not a tech issue completely in terms of how these tools are deployed in organizations. The CEO at Klana, I was reading about the CEO of Zoom who deployed an avatar to open his speech at an event recently.

⁓ I just wonder what were they thinking to do all these things? Now you mention investors. So it comes back to people. I think ⁓ the idea of replacing ⁓ all these expensive humans with AIs is surely as tempting as you can imagine to some organizations. We’ve talked about recently, maybe it was late last year, on

Part of the future is this deployment. Indeed, recently we talked about you’re to have AIs on your team, a mix of kind of a hybrid in the new sense of the word of people and an AI as part of a team. And how is that going to work? And are the AIs going to take over? So you’ve got to have a strategy. Go back to the Global Alliance support where strategically is a strategy or an approach, a strategic approach, if you will, is one of the biggest failings.

in what’s going on in organizations, not by communicators necessarily, but by the organization as a whole. So it is a time when we said this a lot, know, communicators can really step up to the plate and take on the role of educating their organization into this is how we need to be doing this. ⁓ Often it ⁓ is

the case they want to do that and they would like to do that and they propose all the reasons why they should but they’re shut out by others in the organization. So how do you get around that? You can’t basically. So this is people we’re talking about in the broad sense. People tend to not always do the right things as we know. And we’re seeing a lot of that going on here it seems to

Shel Holtz (1:03:36)

⁓ I didn’t get my check in April and it read off some rote response that had nothing to do with not getting a check. It talked about the cost of living increase for the year and said, if this answered your question, feel free to hang up. Otherwise, how can I help you today? And she said, I need to speak to an agent. And it said, in order to better help you, ⁓ what are you calling about?

And she explained she didn’t get her check in April and it gave her the same response again and invited her to hang up. And she said, I didn’t get my check in April. I need to speak to an agent now. And it did the same thing. She never got to talk to an agent. know, people who get social security, a lot of them, that’s their income for the month. So this is very, very serious. There’s not somebody there to help her and the AI doesn’t direct her to a human.

when she needs one. And you got to think that somebody calling Klarna may not be in as dire a situation, but it’s important to them and their frustration will grow. The perception of that organization, their reputation will suffer.

And I mean, for those organizations that compete for clients, they’re going to see people leaving for competitors where humans will talk to them and they’ll have a competitive advantage if they go out publicly and say, do business with us and you’ll talk to a human.

@nevillehobson (1:05:35)

Yeah, I agree with you. It seems to me that some companies actually don’t give a damn, it seems to me. It truly does. In that example you mentioned, I experienced that too, where you cannot get to a human. Indeed, many companies that I’ve seen, and my experience with this insurance company is one of them, they don’t have a phone number anywhere on their website at all. Their contact page says, feel free to join us on our chat on the website. And you kind of get used to

figuring out what are the what are the kind of key phrases I know that’s going to prompt the bot to say, I’ll get an agent to talk to you now. And there are some that are not consistent and some just will not like like the example you gave. One of the better ones I found is Amazon, where I’ve had occasion to call them on orders, I wanted to return or had questions about something. And they make it very easy. But they their first line is a chatbot. But you can easily get around that because they publish the contact information and they call you back.

Here in the UK, the call center is based in Ireland because there’s an Irish number. But it works well, even though the person who calls could be in Asia. It depends. You don’t really care. You’re talking to a human who is very empathetic and engaging and knows your issue because you pop up on a screen with your account information straight away. It’s very professional, very well done. GoDaddy is another one. I’ve used GoDaddy for years. I had to do something with a domain that I wanted to cancel. I had a question about it.

I phoned them, I got a person and it was delightful experience. And so I’d recommend them ahead of whoever doesn’t do it like that. but this takes time to build up ahead of steam. And in the meantime, you’ve got this situation. And most people, I think, ⁓ don’t really take it to that kind of level. They just hang up and they’ll think twice next time.

That’s a dilemma. as you noted, it’s all part of the big equation about mistrust, etc. I don’t think half of these companies are aware of this, ⁓ which in a sense surprises me. then again, it doesn’t because some of them just don’t care at all. That’s a shame.

And by the way, Duolingo, it’s really intriguing. I didn’t know about all that stuff on their social media. I’ve been using Duolingo for a while and I use them actually to improve further my Spanish. So I take, I do advanced learning with Duolingo. It’s an excellent product. I have to say it truly is outstanding. So I wasn’t aware of any of that bad stuff you mentioned, crazy stuff, really. There you go.

Shel Holtz (1:08:19)

for effective social media for a long time. You remember when they killed the owl and then brought Owly back? So, I mean, they’ve been really good at it. And then just to wipe out all of that, ⁓ because people were leaving bad comments over this short-term stretch, it’s just amazing.

@nevillehobson (1:08:23)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

That really is quite extraordinary, really quite extraordinary.

It’s weird, isn’t it?

So that takes us, I think, to another interesting story that ⁓ one we’ve talked about quite a bit already on this. And yes, AI is a big proponent of this. But this is about Google AI overviews. We talked about this some episodes ago. And something quite interesting is happening with mostly the mainstream media online. So.

Positioning, a foundational promise of the open web, has long been this, publish quality content and search engines will send traffic your way. But that equation appears to be breaking dramatically thanks to this AI overviews product from Google. ⁓ Mail Online, one of the world’s largest English language news sites, the print version is called the Daily Mail. It’s a right wing, but politically oriented tabloid newspaper, still huge circulation.

But the website is definitely one of the, I guess, the top five, one of the top five largest English language sites in the world. They recently revealed that when Google includes an AI overview for a keyword they rank number one for, their click-through rate can collapse by more than 50%. On desktop, click-through rates have dropped from 13 % to below 5%. On mobile, the drop is from around 20 % to just 7%.

Even when they’re cited in the AI overview itself, MailOnline still loses up to 44 % of clicks. Speaking at the World News Media Congress in Krakow, Poland, this month, Carly Steven, MailOnline’s director of SEO and editorial e-commerce, called the effect pretty shocking and warned that we’re witnessing a profound shift in the publisher search engine relationship. She suggested that unless newsrooms pivot hard,

towards branded searches and unreplicable content, think of columnists and live blogs, the traditional model of search that visibility may be lost. And this isn’t just a male online issue. An independent AHRF study found that across a wide sway that informational keywords, Google AI overviews lower average click-through rates by 34.5%. That’s a huge dent in the organic traffic pipeline, particularly for media.

but also for brands, marketers, and anyone reliant on Google for discoverability. Critics argue that Google is building a walled garden, keeping users on its own platform rather than sending them out to the wider web. It’s not hard to see why. The more time people spend on Google’s pages, the more valuable the ad inventory becomes, the thrust of our conversations on this topic in previous podcast episodes. But the price may be a slow suffocation of the free and open internet as we know it.

So let’s consider what this means for publishers, for search strategy, for public relations, for media relations, for the business models that rely on Google behaving more like a neutral platform than a content competitor. Your thoughts?

Shel Holtz (1:11:53)

Google wouldn’t be too upset to know that they’re going to YouTube instead, it’s still one of their properties. But why are these natives so distrustful of traditional platforms? How’s their skepticism reshaping the landscape? And what does it mean for business trying to connect with them? They are, after all, the most digitally savvy generation we’ve ever seen. But for those who are just settling for the…

AI overviews, know, PR is evolving from a support role to a core strategy for brands that are looking for visibility in AI powered search. ⁓ know, AI engines are increasingly relying on brand mentions, reputation and authority signal, and PR excels at generating these. With traditional search results being replaced by AI generated summaries and conversational interfaces,

Brands have to focus on building reputation-based visibility rather than just traditional SEO tactics. I saw one report that said about 61 % of signals that inform AI’s understanding of brand reputation come from editorial media sources. That means PR-driven mentions and high authority publications are critical for establishing topical authority and entity recognition. Unlike traditional Google rankings, AI systems don’t rank content the same way.

They learn brand associations through consistent mentions across trusted publications. Research shows that brand search volume correlates strongly with visibility in AI chatbot searches. And that emphasizes the importance of using PR to build buzz around brand names rather than just product keywords.

@nevillehobson (1:14:02)

and you then, okay, that’s all I need and you then don’t click through, then you need to find another way to get people’s attention rather than ⁓ complain about it as many were doing. But the Daily Mail’s ⁓ experience shows the reality of this, which in my view adds even greater importance to you need to make sure your content. So your focus needs to shift to the new paradigm, which is where we’re at, not the old paradigm.

That’s history and that isn’t going to come back anytime soon, I don’t think. How does it fit as well with changes such as you mentioned? Other platforms are now people’s preferred search tool. I was reading a story earlier today about some research showing that with certain generation of the Phoenix Gen Z, chat GPT is a favored search tool. People are getting to content via looking up something on chat GPT. ⁓

used to be perplexity was always quoted this way, but not so much these days is that you then click the link in the in the results it gives you and that shows us where you came from that chat GPT. So the whole landscape is shifting and yet maybe brands and others that they’re they’re they’re kind of focus on Google search as was hasn’t shifted yet. Maybe that’s it.

Shel Holtz (1:15:50)

@nevillehobson (1:15:57)

Shel Holtz (1:16:17)

Maybe Google’s savior when it comes to traditional search.

@nevillehobson (1:16:51)

they don’t click through from what they find on Google. That’s the thing. They don’t then click through. that they get what I need to satisfy myself that is legit, what I heard this guy say on YouTube or on TikTok. So I’ve got what I need and I don’t go any further than that.

Shel Holtz (1:17:06)

Z. ⁓ It may be true, but they didn’t say that Gen Z was settling for the AI overviews.

@nevillehobson (1:17:12)

probably are, would say, because what I have read elsewhere, and we are sure we’ve talked about this, is Gen Z is typically to, you know, tar everyone with the same brush, trust anything, and don’t do fact checking. And so obviously, something shifted in that case, if they are now doing fact checking. So I guess it just shows the volatility of this overall landscape. And in the context of this topic, this conversation, I think the ⁓ reality of search

is it’s not like that anymore, where you would see, there’s your search term, and it couldn’t be a conversational question. It was just peppered with keywords. And up would come listing of links in a hierarchical order based on whatever Google’s algorithm decides the order. And you click a link and go there. And I think that was always unsatisfactory. I certainly found it completely unsatisfactory when you got to your destination.

And you didn’t notice it was a promotional link, and it would just give you generic sales stuff. The example I gave was always in my mind when we were talking about the changes. And we had it in a conversation. wrote a blog post about it. I had screenshots galore showing, here’s my search term that I wrote. It was about ⁓ plug-in hybrid cars, was the search term I used. And Google search results showed me this car maker, this car dealer, you name it, all showing up as sponsored links.

So I click on a couple of them and all I get is a generic page on the website, nothing related to my search term. That puts you off entirely. Whereas with this new basis, you get the paragraph description, you get the answer to your question and links to a whole lot more. And I remember perplexity a year ago or so now would have at the end of everything, it says, you might also be interested in, and there’s all related stuff too.

So the old way is gone and it seems to me that ⁓ some organizations just haven’t quite clicked that yet and they need to move faster.

Shel Holtz (1:19:18)

@nevillehobson (1:19:36)

While you’ve also got the therapy and all this stuff that people are also using instead of paying for a therapist at extortion or expensive hourly rates, use ChatGPT. By me, that’s serious.

Shel Holtz (1:19:56)

as I heard somebody else say on a podcast recently, you sometimes you can’t find any therapists who are taking new patients or you have to wait a couple of weeks. Using Chachi PT as a therapist is better than having no therapy at all, is what this individual on a podcast said.

@nevillehobson (1:20:13)

GPT is the therapist in that case.

Shel Holtz (1:20:20)

how to change the oil in my car have reached all time highs this year. We’re not talking about advanced home improvement projects. We’re talking about basic adulting tasks that previous generations, yours and mine, for example, Neville, we learned these from family members or home economics classes. According to a report in Axios, they were reporting on Google’s internal data.

More than ever, adults are looking for online help with day-to-day life skills that once might’ve been taught in home ec classes or passed down from elders. By 2018, more than half of US YouTube users were already saying they use the platform for figuring out how to do things they haven’t done before. And this trend has only accelerated. Think about what this represents. Millions of people searching every day for answers to questions like how to change a tire, how to balance a checkbook,

checkbook, how to iron a shirt, how to file taxes, or how to negotiate salary. These aren’t niche topics. These are fundamental adult skills that an entire generation is having to learn from scratch through search engines and AI chatbots. Now, the reason for the skills gap, well, they’re fascinating from a sociological perspective, and we’ll come back to that. But from a communication standpoint, what matters is the opportunity.

When people have questions they’re not asking mom or dad, they’re asking Google or TikTok or Instagram or YouTube. And that creates an enormous content marketing opportunity for companies whose products or services relate to any aspect of adult life. Let me share a few examples of companies that have capitalized on this trend brilliantly and for a long time. Home Depot and Lowe’s have turned DIY education into a cornerstone of their marketing strategy.

Both companies have massive YouTube channels with millions of subscribers, extensive how-to content libraries, and comprehensive guides that answer basic questions like how to use a drill or how to install a light fixture. The key is that they’re not just selling products, they’re positioning themselves as trusted advisors for people who lack basic home maintenance knowledge. Home Depot’s YouTube channel has become what many consider the Internet’s go-to resource for DIY guidance.

And Lowe’s content marketing strategy focuses heavily on educational tutorials that build brand loyalty before purchase decisions. The financial services industry has been particularly aggressive in targeting this trend. Banks like KeyBank have created financial wellness centers that provide guidance for young consumers on topics like how much does it cost to rent an apartment as a new graduate or how to negotiate your salary after receiving an offer. These aren’t just

product pitches, they’re addressing real knowledge gaps that their target demographic has. Credit unions and community banks are using this approach to compete with larger institutions. SF Fire Credit Union, for example, offers content about navigating San Francisco’s expensive rental market and provides rental deposit loans, positioning themselves as allies who understand the specific challenges their young customers face.

It gets really interesting, though, for communication professionals. The companies succeeding at this aren’t just creating content. They’re building entire ecosystems around life skills education. There’s even a phenomenon like the Dad How Do I YouTube channel created by Rob Kenny, which has gone viral teaching young adults basic tasks like changing a tire or tying a tie.

And he isn’t monetizing this directly. Companies are still taking note of the massive demand for this type of content. The scope of the opportunities is frankly staggering. We’re talking about content possibilities around financial literacy, home maintenance, career skills, health and wellness, basic cooking, car maintenance, legal basics, technology troubleshooting, relationship advice, every single one of these categories.

represents potential content marketing territory for companies and related industries. Don’t expect this to be a short-lived trend. The factors that created this skills gap, which is the decline of home economics education, they don’t teach home ec in school anymore. Dual career families with less time for teaching practical skills, geographic mobility that separates young adults from family support networks. These are structural changes in society.

So for communication professionals, this represents a fundamental shift in content strategy. Instead of creating content about your products or services, create content about the life skills your customers need to successfully use your products or services. Instead of assuming people know how to do basic tasks, you can become the trusted source that teaches them basic tasks. The companies that are winning at this aren’t just dumping information online.

They’re creating comprehensive, searchable, well-organized content libraries that position them as long-term resources. When someone learns how to change their car’s oil from your YouTube video, they remember your brand when they need to change their oil. When somebody learns about credit scores from your bank’s educational content, they think of you when they’re ready for a mortgage. The key is authenticity and genuine helpfulness.

Younger consumers, Gen Z in particular, along with millennials, they can spot marketing disguised as education from miles away. The content that works is genuinely useful, comprehensive, and created with the learner success in mind, not just lead generation. From a strategic communication standpoint, this trend also represents a trust building opportunity. At a time when institutional trust is at historic lows,

Becoming the source people turn to for reliable, practical guidance creates a different kind of relationship with your audience. You’re not just a vendor, you’re a helpful resource they discovered when they needed you most. So take a stab at auditing your organization’s areas of expertise and identify the basic life skills your customers need to know to successfully engage with your industry.

@nevillehobson (1:27:06)

via chat GPT primarily. How do I do X? So when we were moving to our new house here in Somerset, I found out all I needed to know about the router that I needed and how to configure it and comparisons between what models are on the via a lengthy to and fro with chat GPT. ⁓ well, let’s say the major work was me checking all the things.

Shel Holtz (1:27:56)

@nevillehobson (1:28:03)

But ⁓ it is an opportunity for companies. But I can see as well that you mentioned the two key words, authenticity and value to the user as opposed to lead generation. And the cynical side of me talks about how really difficult it is for some companies to get out of marketing mode and think about the engagement with ⁓ potential customers or not even potential customers. Offer something of value to people.

that might give you a benefit. Trouble is that’s hard for some companies to justify without the hard facts behind what’s the ROI going to get out of doing this. So it’s a mixed bag and you’ve got to be careful too. I mean, I was looking on YouTube while you were talking and there’s no end of so-called expert videos that you could follow, but how do you know whether they’re trustworthy or not without doing a lot of legwork to check it up yourself?

So that’s your landscape and always best to get a recommendation, I think. There are some that you could take a ⁓ plunge and say, yes, I would trust this organization. I’ve heard of them. They have a local branch where I’ve been. I’ve been in the store and I know them. So I’ll trust what they’re telling me on this, that, the other. That’s great until they get hacked or some other impediment occurs that dislodges that trust. But that is the landscape. So it’s a

It’s caveat emptor most of the time, think,

Shel Holtz (1:30:02)

being strategic about it, creating an ecosystem, making it navigable and searchable and really useful for people and making it discoverable. That’s another thing. But as you mentioned the fact that you use ChatGPT for these how-tos, I’ve talked to other people. In fact, one of the guys ⁓ running the AI subcommittee that I’m on, the Enterprise AI subcommittee ⁓ where I work.

He’s got multiple old vehicles and he’s getting codes when he plugs the computer into it to see why it won’t start. And he’s just going to AI and saying, I have this year model of this vehicle. I’m getting this code on the computer. What do I need to do? And it tells them, and so far it’s always been right. This is happening. So how do we get our adulting tutorials into AI? Well, we talked about that in a previous story. It’s media relations.

@nevillehobson (1:31:03)

Yeah.

Shel Holtz (1:31:27)

That’s the kind of content that finds its way into AI query results.

@nevillehobson (1:32:03)

Shel Holtz (1:32:21)

@nevillehobson (1:32:24)

Do it.

Shel Holtz (1:32:47)

@nevillehobson (1:32:51)

You should do it.

You should definitely do it in your copious spare time.

Shel Holtz (1:33:01)

free time, which I have none of. Well, that’ll do it for this episode of for immediate release. Our next episode is going to drop on Monday, June 23rd. Our next long form monthly episode that is we’ll be recording that on Saturday, the 21st of June. Until then, we would be very grateful if you would send us your thoughts about any of the items.

that you have heard here today, you can send an email to fircomments at gmail.com. You can include an audio comment, just attach it to the email, or better yet, go to firpodcastnetwork.com and click that little button that says send voicemail and record your thoughts right there. You can also just send us ⁓ a narrative text comment.

You can leave those comments on the show notes at the FIR website at FIRpodcastnetwork.com. You can leave those comments where we post the announcement about the show on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on Blue Sky, on threads and on Mastodon. We also very much appreciate your ratings and reviews wherever you get your podcasts and that

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