For Immediate Release

The volume of AI slop appearing as thought leadership on LinkedIn has, according to the Financial Times, led to a surge in interest in human ghostwriters. In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel discuss whether this makes sense or if it’s just another case of people using AI poorly.

Links from this episode:

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR is tentatively scheduled to drop on Monday, October 26.

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

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

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

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

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz: Hi, everybody, and welcome to episode 530 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.

Neville Hobson: And I’m Neville Hobson. AI was supposed to put ghostwriters out of business. Instead, according to the Financial Times, something rather different is happening. LinkedIn is awash with generic AI-generated posts, and the flood of polished but forgettable content is creating new demand for human ghostwriters who can help executives sound human again. There’s a nice irony in that, but it also raises a question I keep coming back to: If I use AI to help write a blog post, a LinkedIn update, or an article published under my name, is AI effectively my ghostwriter?

Shel, you and I have touched on this territory before, most recently in FIR 526 in August, when we discussed Anthropic’s text watermarking. We argued that detecting whether AI was involved in writing something tells you remarkably little about who actually did the thinking. A more useful test is whether the author understands the argument, stands behind it, and can defend every sentence.

I developed that argument afterward in a blog post titled “So AI Helped Write It. Who Cares?” My point wasn’t that authorship doesn’t matter. It does. But there’s an important distinction between asking AI to do your thinking for you and using it to help express thinking that is yours.

Now, a Bloomberg Businessweek article adds another twist. It argues that, for many people at work, using AI to write is simply becoming normal. Writing isn’t necessarily their craft. It’s a means of communicating an idea, answering a customer, updating colleagues, or getting something done.

The article introduces another tension. Some businesses actively expect employees to use AI for writing because it saves time. But it also describes the opposite problem at one company, where AI-generated documents became polished, lengthy, and difficult to read. The CEO concluded that AI was making writing quicker for the sender but slower for the recipient—a point we touched on in our last discussion—and asked employees for rougher versions containing their actual thinking instead. There’s a novel idea.

That brings us back to ghostwriting. We accepted long ago that a CEO might put their name to words written by a communication professional, provided those words express what the CEO thinks. So, is AI-assisted writing fundamentally different?

For me, this raises several questions. If the ideas, argument, and judgment are yours, does it matter whether you, a ghostwriter, or an AI produced the sentences? Where is the boundary between assistance and substitution—editing your thoughts versus generating thoughts for you? In an environment where producing polished prose is becoming almost effortless, will distinctive thinking become more valuable than distinctive writing?

And would you feel differently upon discovering that someone’s LinkedIn post was written by a human ghostwriter rather than ChatGPT? If so, why? And perhaps more importantly, does it matter?

Shel Holtz: Yes, it does matter. You have to consider the audience’s expectations. Those matter as much as the intentions of the person who drafted the speech, article, or whatever it might be.

Think about the difference between an operational update, a CEO’s personal account of a career failure, and a condolence message to an employee. Those messages could be accurate, carefully reviewed, and approved. On the other hand, readers could reasonably expect a particular level of personal involvement from the person whose name appears on them. I think that makes a difference.

But I’d like to step back for a minute and explore ghostwriting itself. I’ve known a couple of people who made their livings, or part of their livings, as ghostwriters. You knew the late Shel Israel, a very good friend of mine.

Neville Hobson: Sure.

Shel Holtz: He was a ghostwriter. He wrote books for people who didn’t know how to write, but he didn’t spend most of his time writing. His clients hired him because they liked his writing and his approach to getting to know them and their styles, so what he wrote sounded like them.

How did he do that? Through a lot of interviews—hours and hours, dozens of hours, on the phone and in person. He challenged the generalities he heard from clients and drew out experiences they might not have thought mattered. As an experienced ghostwriter, he understood which experiences would lend color to the manuscript and what readers would care about.

The Financial Times story opens up a more interesting possibility than simply saying humans write better. Perhaps the valuable service of ghostwriting was never just sitting there typing sentences. One person featured in the article said in a public response that AI remains integral to his business, but people still handle the conversations and relationships.

Another person I know ghostwrites for an online service. Someone signs up and says, “I want to write a memoir. It’s only going to go to 10 people in my family, but I want somebody to write it.” The service matches that person with a writer. There’s a prescribed number of meetings, but they talk for hours. The writer takes notes and produces a first draft.

If I take all those notes and everything I’ve learned about the subject, understand their writing or speaking style, and incorporate that into what I ask AI to produce or help me produce, am I still doing the lion’s share of the work as a ghostwriter? I think I am, especially if the person tasked with doing this isn’t a writer in the first place.

We’ve talked before about people in organizations who might be assigned this work but can’t write their way out of a paper bag. Writing wasn’t what they studied, and it isn’t their area of expertise. If AI can help them use the material they’ve gathered by doing the work of a ghostwriter, I have less of a problem with it.

Neville Hobson: I have a similar view. The FT article includes a good quote from Bernie Hogan, an associate professor at the Oxford Internet Institute. The journalist asked whether LinkedIn ghostwriters could help cut through AI slop.

The part that caught my attention was his point that the message behind a post can still be sincere, even if you didn’t write it. He compares it to buying a greeting card: Someone else wrote the words, but the sentiment can still reflect what you mean. I agree with that.

His further point is where the rubber meets the road. Because we can’t tell when a LinkedIn post is ghostwritten, is it authentic in readers’ eyes, even if it broadly reflects what the person posting it believes?

That sums up the situation we’re in. I don’t think there will ever be agreement on the broad question of whether it’s wrong for someone else—or an AI—to write something you publish under your name. We’ve discussed the details many times: Is it your thinking? Did you contribute to it? Or did you give AI some material, ask it to write something, and post the result without further involvement?

It isn’t a simple question. I keep coming back to this: Would you feel differently if you discovered that someone’s LinkedIn post was written by a human ghostwriter rather than ChatGPT? If so, why? I’d particularly like critics of AI-assisted writing to answer that.

Shel Holtz: It would be interesting. I like the greeting-card analogy. The greeting was written by a copywriter at Hallmark, American Greetings, or somewhere else, but you don’t just grab the first card off the rack. People spend 15 or 20 minutes looking.

Neville Hobson: You might.

Shel Holtz: You might, but I’ve never seen anybody in the greeting-card aisle just grab a card and go. They pull one off the shelf, open it, read it, put it back, and try another. They’re looking for the one that expresses the sentiment they have. Then, when they get home, they write a little more. I would consider that the human in the loop.

Human ghostwriting deserves the same scrutiny as AI ghostwriting. Someone assigned to write a LinkedIn post can manufacture the persona of the person they’re writing for. They can avoid the hard work, fabricate a profound message, or give someone credit for expertise they don’t have.

An AI-assisted post grounded in a leader’s actual experience, with that experience shared as part of the process, could represent the person more faithfully than a human ghostwriter does. So, are we defending authentic communication, or are we defending an outsourcing arrangement we’re already familiar with?

Neville Hobson: I think we’re defending authentic communication, but the definition of “authentic” seems to be a movable feast.

I don’t believe we’ll resolve this argument in the near future. Where I land—and I think we discussed this in episode 526—is that you, as the human, need to be confident in your thinking and in how the text expresses it. If you are, you can comfortably continue what you’re doing.

Apply that to a human ghostwriting a LinkedIn post for a CEO, senior manager, or someone else. The post will appear on that person’s profile under their name. That’s common practice; I know many people who do it.

The question isn’t simply whether the manager or CEO is happy with it and praises you. Are you satisfied with it? Does it meet your standard for authenticity?

You might outline your ideas, share them with your AI assistant, explain the assignment, and ask it to suggest the best way to tell the story. You might then ask for a proposed draft. It comes back, and you think, “This is a reasonable start. I can work with this.”

You might edit it extensively and create something fresh, then pass it back to your AI assistant. It might suggest three changes. You could decide the second suggestion is useful and incorporate that. That process resembles what you might do with a human ghostwriter.

So, my question is: What’s the difference? Does it matter? I’ve been accused of being terribly naïve for asking that, but I don’t believe it matters if you’ve satisfied those questions about authenticity, honesty, and confidence in what you’ve created with AI’s help.

Others will disagree strongly. I still see absolutist comments on LinkedIn from people saying you can always tell when something was written by AI. I used to ask how they could tell, but I’ve stopped because the responses often suggest they don’t really know. I don’t believe you can reliably tell.

I particularly enjoy examples where somebody submits a passage by Charles Dickens to an AI detector and it comes back as 98% AI-written. Or somebody tests an article they wrote for a magazine in 1995, and the detector says the same thing. What can you do with that?

Let me ask you, Shel: Would you feel differently if you discovered someone’s LinkedIn post was written by a human rather than an AI?

Shel Holtz: Generally, no, assuming they used the AI well.

I’ll disagree with you on one thing, but only to an extent. You can sometimes recognize AI writing when it was given a weak prompt and defaults to a familiar approach. But that’s different from giving it detailed information about the person whose byline will appear, helping it understand their writing style and thinking, sharing other things they’ve written, and providing guidance on what the piece should say. You might even interview the person and share the transcript.

We’ve had this conversation since the early days of blogs, when people debated whether communicators could acceptably ghostwrite for CEOs. I remember where we came down on it. If the CEO calls and says, “Write a thought-leadership post for me on this topic,” then hangs up and leaves you to invent it from scratch, that isn’t acceptable.

If you go into the CEO’s office, interview them, and turn your notes into a post, that’s different. Bill Marriott used to record his thoughts and give the recording to his communicators. They didn’t transcribe it word for word because spoken remarks needed editing to work in writing. But the substance was his.

Did he sit there and type it? Was every word one he had chosen? No, but it was his post. In that case, ghostwriting is perfectly acceptable.

Today, AI can assist with that process. If we maintain the practices that make ghostwriting effective, authentic, and ethical, I have no problem with it. It doesn’t matter to me whether a human or AI helped produce the wording, as long as it reads well and reflects what the person would have said. That person also needs to approve it. We haven’t mentioned that yet.

Neville Hobson: I agree. The process you described, using Shel Israel as an example—interviewing the subject, spending hours preparing, and understanding their thinking—would still apply.

I particularly like the idea of using voice-recording tools that connect to Claude, ChatGPT, or another AI assistant. You could ask the CEO to do a brain dump on the topic, as unstructured as they feel comfortable making it. The recording uploads, you get a transcript, and AI can help interpret or organize it and suggest where you might take the story.

That can save a tremendous amount of time compared with doing everything the traditional way. There’s a benefit to AI assistance, and I hope professional communicators make the most of those tools.

Of course, some people will skim the output or post it as it is. We’re talking about people who bring their professional skills and judgment to the work. Based on the criteria you outlined, I wouldn’t feel differently about a post written with AI assistance. If those steps had been followed, I’d be comfortable with it.

Yet I can think of half a dozen people who would strongly disagree. This seems to be a never-ending discussion.

Shel Holtz: It is. One other thing we haven’t discussed is disclosure.

I don’t think most ghostwriting requires disclosure. I don’t think Shel Israel’s name appeared on the books he ghostwrote. My friend Bill, who writes memoirs through the online service, doesn’t have his name on them either. Those memoirs have a small distribution: “This is my memoir for my children and grandchildren.”

But you may remember an instance when a company wanted a PR agency to tweet on the CEO’s behalf while he was at a conference. The agency initially refused, saying, “We’re not you. We’re not going to pretend to be you.” They eventually agreed that roughly every fifth tweet would remind readers that the agency was tweeting on the CEO’s behalf.

You have to think about where people might feel deceived and where the writing arrangement simply doesn’t matter.

Neville Hobson: I agree. That’s our latest 50 cents’ worth of opinion on this topic. We’d like to hear your thoughts. If you’re a ghostwriter listening to this, we’d especially love to hear what you think. It’s an ongoing conversation.

Shel Holtz: And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #530: Has AI Created a Demand for Human Ghostwriters? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

A Press-Gazette investigation found that dozens of experts quoted in the mainstream media don’t actually exist, and PR agencies are unwittingly sharing them with the press. This poses a credibility issue for the agencies and the media. It requires a layer of verification unlike anything we’ve faced before.

Also in this episode, crisis communication has long been housed in the PR or communications department. Should it be a governance responsibility of the C-suite? That’s the case made in a new report from the Chartered Institute of Public Relations and the Institute of Directors.

In his Tech Report, Dan York covers an initiative to close the AI language gap, including video moves by YouTube and Bluesky, smart glasses, and enhancements to Threads’ podcast toolkit.

Links from this episode:

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report:

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR is tentatively scheduled to drop on Monday, October 26.

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

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

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

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

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz: Hi, everybody, and welcome to episode 529 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz in Concord, California.

Neville Hobson: And I’m Neville Hobson in Somerset in the UK.

Shel Holtz: Neville, it is wonderful to be back together with you again.

Neville Hobson: It’s been a bit of a strange few weeks because of some health issues I’m working through. They’ve affected my availability to record our midweek shows. I was particularly keen to make sure we could record the topics we’re discussing today. Hopefully, by the time our next monthly episode comes around, I’ll be close to normal again.

Shel Holtz: My fingers are certainly crossed. To accommodate all of this, we’re recording a shortened version of our monthly episode: two topics plus Dan York’s report. We’ll also have a quick recap of the two episodes since our last monthly show.

Neville Hobson: Episode 527 was a particularly interesting long-form show with six topics. Our lead story was about a senior manager who discovered that AI was rejecting job applications within seconds of their arrival. One reason was that applicants had graduated from college before 2010, even though the instruction was to surface candidates who displayed “youthful energy.” What’s worse, the talent acquisition manager saw no liability issue because AI had made the decision. If I recall correctly, she said, “We’re okay. We have no liability because the AI made the decision.” If it weren’t so serious, it would be hilarious.

We also discussed an expert witness who used ChatGPT to prepare a report for a legal case. The prompts he used—not just the AI’s output—were uncovered during discovery and entered into evidence. You have to check these things.

Then, in episode 528, we talked about fandom. We explored the differences among fans, audiences, and communities. A fan’s identity can become tied to a team, artist, product, or other object of passion. It’s no surprise that marketers want their brands to inspire that kind of excitement, but not everything has the potential to develop a fan base. We received a couple of comments about that episode.

Shel Holtz: Brian Kilgore in Toronto wrote, “Good show. In my life, I’ve worn Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and Hopalong Cassidy clothes, an MG T-shirt, and a sweatshirt I designed using ASCII code as the hook for CNCP telecommunications. One cap that I’ve lost says ‘Nikon Most Excellent.’” Brian has been a fan of quite a few things.

We also received an audio comment from our tech reporter, Dan York.

Dan York: Hey, Shel and Neville. I had a comment on episode 528. I found myself cringing when I heard marketers talking about how to grow a fandom. You have fans, and marketers should find where those fans are and engage with them. They shouldn’t be trying to build a fandom.

You were right that fandom can be part of someone’s identity. My neighbors across the street are big Mazda Miata owners. They each have one, and they go on rallies and tours with other owners. It’s a community and a group, but being Miata owners is also part of who they are. To its credit, the local Mazda dealership supports that community.

There’s a lot of fandom on Reddit, too. I own a Hyundai Santa Cruz, a little vehicle that’s rather like an SUV with a truck bed on the back. Its subreddit has people sharing photos, asking questions, and talking about what they’re doing with their vehicles. Some are passionate about these little trucks. I’ve seen that with other vehicles as well.

Marketers and communicators, please don’t talk about trying to create a fandom. Find the fans where they are.

Shel Holtz: Thanks, Dan. I couldn’t agree more. If there’s a fan base around something you make or represent, by all means, see how you can support it and become more visible to it. Trying to build a fan base around something that doesn’t naturally inspire one can feel artificial.

I hadn’t thought to look for those communities on Reddit. I have a Ford Mustang Mach-E, and as soon as we’re done recording, I’m going to look for a Mach-E subreddit. I have to believe there is one. I appreciate the comment.

I also want to mention Circle of Fellows. Episode 133, part two of our conversation on AI and the leadership moment for the communication profession, should be available by the time you hear this. Adrian Cropley returned, and we were joined by Mary Hills, Cyrus Mavalwala, and Robin McCasland.

Our next episode is Thursday, October 29, at 6 p.m. Eastern. That hour accommodates Zora Artis, who will be joining us for a discussion of connection and leadership. Three other Fellows will join us as well. You’ll find details on the FIR Podcast Network website.

Neville Hobson: Let’s talk about crisis communication—or, more precisely, governance. When we talk about crisis communication, many of us picture what happens once a crisis is underway: the holding statement, the spokesperson, media response, frantic internal calls, whether the CEO should go public, and how quickly the organization says something. But a new handbook from the Chartered Institute of Public Relations’ Crisis Communications Network, published with the UK’s Institute of Directors, argues that this way of thinking starts far too late.

The handbook, Crisis Communication for Boards: A Handbook for Good Governance, argues that crisis communication belongs within governance, risk management, and organizational resilience. By the time a crisis breaks, many factors that determine how well an organization responds have already been decided.

Has the board understood the risks? Has it treated reputation as a strategic risk? Are escalation routes in place? Can uncomfortable information move quickly from the front line to senior management and the board? Have stakeholder relationships been built before they’re urgently needed? Has anyone rehearsed making decisions quickly under scrutiny with incomplete or conflicting information?

The handbook’s point is that crisis management begins long before a crisis hits, and boards should own it as part of their responsibility for organizational resilience. Communication runs through crisis management because it shapes how events are understood, how decisions are interpreted, and whether trust is maintained or lost.

One line early in the handbook captures the argument: “You cannot communicate your way out of a crisis that you behaved your way into.” That shifts the communicator’s role. If communications is brought in only after management has made its decisions, when the organization is already under pressure, the communicator starts at a disadvantage. Senior communicators should be involved earlier to help boards understand how decisions may be perceived, where stakeholder concerns are emerging, which assumptions may be wrong, and where the organization’s behavior may be creating reputational risk.

That means treating communications as an intelligence function as well as a messaging function. The handbook emphasizes horizon scanning, stakeholder relationships, and the flow of information throughout the organization. Emerging risks increasingly cross legal, regulatory, HR, operations, technology, and communications boundaries. Communicators can help boards understand what’s happening and what it may mean for trust, legitimacy, and reputation.

The handbook is blunt about the consequences of getting this wrong. Poor or delayed communication can itself become a reputational risk. Minor incidents can escalate, information can become trapped in silos, and boards can lose touch with what employees, customers, and other stakeholders are saying. Once trust is damaged, recovery can take years.

It also addresses AI, cyber risk, misinformation, and the speed at which reputational issues spread. With AI, it asks familiar governance questions: Who decided? Who verified? What accountability was in place? Technology can change the nature and speed of a crisis, but it doesn’t remove the board’s responsibility for decisions.

The handbook goes further, arguing that strategic communication belongs inside the governance structure, with access to the board and potentially representation at board level. A board that waits until a crisis to engage communications has already lost some of the ground on which trust is built.

So, Shel, have we been using the term “crisis communication” too narrowly? Is it about what you say once a crisis happens, or about how the organization is governed before it happens?

Shel Holtz: I think the answer is yes. Communication has to happen during a crisis, but it can’t be the work of a department brought in to clean up afterward. It has to be woven into the organization’s approach to crisis governance. That isn’t solely a communications function.

The question of having a “seat at the table”—a term you know I hate—matters if an organization doesn’t take crisis preparedness seriously. Some leaders think, “We’re fine. We don’t have crises. If one happens, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” If you can’t get access to leadership to make the case for crisis governance, then that lack of access is a problem.

This is timely for me because I’m helping develop a crisis management plan. We’re calling it that rather than a crisis communication plan. I’m not suggesting you can necessarily manage every aspect of a crisis, but the plan needs a name. We’re developing it by committee, and in this case, that’s a strength. Crisis governance requires active participation from several parts of the organization. Communications can’t wave a document when a crisis hits and announce, “Here’s the plan, everybody.” People need to have helped develop it, understood it, and practiced it.

Our committee includes a senior operations leader, our general counsel, our vice president of best practices, and the head of safety. They all have a say in how we approach crisis governance. Horizon scanning falls largely to me in communications, although leadership listens when something comes to us through our monitoring service or another channel.

The plan also identifies who should convene on the crisis team based on the nature of the event. You need different expertise for an operational crisis than for a digital security crisis. Those teams need practice to develop the muscle memory to respond well.

As our friend Philippe Borremans would say, we’re in an era of polycrisis. You may face several dimensions of one crisis at once, or two unrelated crises that begin to intersect. Adversaries can see what’s happening and take advantage of it. I found an example in our industry that started as a safety issue, became a legal issue, then a financial one, and ultimately put the company out of business. The ability to pivot quickly has to be built into both governance and training.

That’s why tabletop exercises matter. Give the team a realistic scenario, put people through their paces, and introduce complications that force them to adapt. Ideally, you would do that four times a year. I don’t know how you build muscle memory if it’s merely an annual exercise people feel obliged to complete.

None of this sits solely within a communications department’s purview. Communications informs the communication dimensions, but leadership and the other functions have to prepare together. It cannot begin with a call to communications saying, “We’ve got a crisis. Help.”

Neville Hobson: Another point that stood out to me is that communicators should challenge decisions, not merely explain them. The handbook presents senior communicators as sources of stakeholder intelligence and constructive challenge. They can help boards anticipate how decisions will be interpreted, spot emerging reputational risks, and counter groupthink. That goes well beyond creating messages.

If the communicator enters the room only after a decision has been made, have we misunderstood the role? Sometimes the most valuable contribution is to say, “You may not want to do this in the first place.”

Shel Holtz: That connects to identifying issues before they become crises. I can’t remember the exact wording, but I recall a thought from the IABC Excellence Study: A crisis is what an organization faces when it fails at issues identification and management. If you see an issue coming and act, you may keep it from becoming a full-blown crisis.

One definition I use for a crisis is that it can become existential. If it spins out of control, it can affect your ability to do business. The organizations that say, “We’ve never had one; things are going great,” may be particularly unprepared when a crisis arrives.

Our plan includes holding statements—not just one, but several for different circumstances—that can be revised and issued quickly. Delay can look evasive. Victims, adversaries, and others may speak first, and that first account can become the version people remember. Then you have to overcome an impression that has already taken hold.

Even if all you can say is, “We’ve just learned of this and are looking into it,” you can tell people when to expect an update. If you don’t have more information at that point, say you’re continuing to investigate and give them another update time. Give people a reason to turn to you for reliable information.

Neville Hobson: The handbook is worth reading rather than skimming. We’ll link to the PDF on the CIPR website in the show notes. It includes case studies and a toolkit that may be useful in your planning. And I’ll repeat that line: “You cannot communicate your way out of a crisis that you behaved your way into.”

Shel Holtz: Self-inflicted crises are among the hardest to handle. In some crises, the organization is a victim too, even if others are harmed along the way.

One last thought: Many crisis plans fail to include employees among the stakeholders they need to communicate with. Employees can be your strongest advocates and supporters during a crisis. If you equip them with accurate information, they may be able to answer questions from clients, vendors, partners, consultants, and others they work with.

Dan York: Greetings, Shel and Neville, and FIR listeners around the world. It’s Dan York on a glorious autumn day in northwest Vermont. I’m drinking warm apple cider and will soon head to an orchard for apple cider doughnuts.

I want to talk about three things happening online. First is an effort announced this past week to close the language gap in AI systems. On September 21, the Gates Foundation announced a five-year commitment with about 60 organizations to make AI services available in more languages.

More than 7,000 languages are spoken worldwide, but most online content is in perhaps seven to 10 languages. AI training data and interfaces are concentrated in even fewer. As part of its Goalkeepers report, the Gates Foundation looked at what’s needed for more people to benefit from AI, and language is a major piece of that.

My employer, the Internet Society, signed on, as did the Coalition on Digital Impact, or CODI, whose board I sit on. CODI is a nonprofit focused on helping people navigate the internet in their own languages. There’s nothing concrete to report yet, but I think this is an exciting development. I’ll share more in the months ahead, including ways people might get involved. Everyone who chooses to use AI should be able to do so in their own language.

My second topic is video. Bluesky now allows uploads of videos up to 10 minutes long. We’ll see whether that encourages more people to make videos there.

YouTube also held its Made on YouTube event on September 23 and announced a range of updates. They include ways to customize the feed on your home page, an Ask YouTube tool for recommendations, more editing tools for Shorts, and features for creating vertical microdramas. YouTube is also adding live-streaming capabilities that appear aimed at competing with Twitch, including new ways for hosts to interact. It says live automatic dubbing into multiple languages is coming by 2027. There’s a lot for creators and communicators who work with video to explore.

I’ve also been following smart glasses. I’m intrigued by their possibilities but concerned about privacy. Cameras built into glasses can be used to record people inappropriately, including women who have not consented. At the same time, I’ve seen how helpful the technology could be for people with disabilities. Someone who is blind, for example, might use smart glasses to navigate a store and learn what’s on the shelves.

That promise comes with difficult questions. You may not know whether the person wearing Ray-Ban smart glasses nearby is livestreaming. Meta has announced more glasses, including a future VR model that sounds closer to goggles than ordinary eyewear. Snap has also announced new augmented-reality Spectacles, with a price around $2,200. Meta has introduced an audio-only option, which may address some concerns about cameras. I’m interested in what these devices can do, but I remain concerned about the privacy implications.

Finally, Threads has announced podcast tools intended to help creators share shows, bring listeners back, and start conversations. They include profile banners, episode link cards, transcript and guest cards, new-episode reminders, and podcast insights. I have a Threads account but don’t use it much anymore. Still, if you’re a podcaster who uses Threads, these tools may be worth a look.

I’ll send it back to you. I need to buy some apple cider doughnuts. Bye for now.

Shel Holtz: Thanks, Dan. I’ve also been following the smart-glasses announcements. Meta’s glasses were around for a while before they developed a stigma, but that stigma has become real. You may remember Google Glass and people being called “Glassholes” for wearing it in public. Something similar seems to be happening with camera-equipped Meta glasses.

A version without cameras strikes me as a smart move. I can see the value of glasses that display turn-by-turn directions or information about what I’m looking at. When I travel internationally and encounter a sign in another language, I pull out my phone and use Google Lens to translate it. Having that translation appear in my glasses would be wonderful. There are many useful things AI glasses could do without intruding on other people.

As for recording, people already use devices such as Plaud and Fieldy. If you ask permission or let people know you’re recording, I don’t see a major issue. I hope AI glasses develop further, though I’m not inclined to buy a pair from Meta.

I’ve also been reading about Meta’s new VR glasses. Initially, I was enthusiastic. I use a Meta Quest 3 mainly to work out with an app called Supernatural. There’s a wonderful story behind Supernatural that we should discuss on the podcast one day. I wanted to know whether my Quest library would work with the new glasses, and apparently it will. I also wondered whether glasses would stay on while I’m jumping around during a workout, and the answer seems to be yes. But then I saw the $1,200 price. People complained that the Quest 3 was expensive at $500. I won’t be rushing out to buy the new device. I’ll see what people say after it’s been out for a while; my Quest 3 works just fine.

Great report, Dan. Thank you.

Dr. Eleni Nicola is described as an art therapist from Cyprus. She has been quoted more than 30 times in recent months: in Forbes on resetting your home office, Vice on what color to paint your walls to calm an anxious dog, Glamour on crying therapy, and Parade on the right way to retire. Different outlets have called her a clinical psychologist, an art therapist, or a creative wellness expert.

The problem is that she doesn’t appear to exist. Press Gazette reported that an image detector rated her profile photo 10 out of 10 for being artificial and her quotes as 100% AI-generated. Her LinkedIn profile was created late last year despite claims of a long career. She isn’t listed by the Art Therapy Credentials Board, which lists thousands of art therapists.

Every one of her online profiles links to the same paint-by-numbers kit retailer, DeVincify, where she is presented as an “expert in residence.” This has become a business model. A quote in Forbes brings a link from a high-authority news site. That can improve search rankings, and rankings can drive sales. SEO operators are building fake personas as part of link-building campaigns. When Press Gazette asked DeVincify to verify her, the company’s statement about taking the matter seriously was itself identified as AI-generated. At the time of publication, her profile was still active.

This is far bigger than one case. Press Gazette has identified more than a thousand articles across outlets including Mail Online, Metro, The Sun, The Mirror, HuffPost UK, Yahoo, and The Independent that relied partly or entirely on fake experts. More than 600 were traced to a single company. One fictitious psychologist was quoted hundreds of times before anyone established that she wasn’t real.

The fakes aren’t limited to sources. Tech sites have pulled articles attributed to finance writers whom Press Gazette couldn’t verify. One claimed a Deloitte career that Deloitte has no record of; another used a headshot that appears to belong to a computer repair technician in the United States.

Dan Simon, who runs the journalist-sourcing platform Qwoted, says the platform handles more than 15 violations a day and blocks about 50 prospective clients from registering each day. As he put it, “AI has just poured petrol on the disinformation fire.” The combinations include real agencies with fake experts, real experts with fake expertise, and fake agencies with fake experts.

David Higgerson at Reach, publisher of The Mirror, said agencies Reach regularly works with had supplied fake experts without realizing it. They had sourced the quotes in good faith. That makes PR both a victim and a vector. If an agency fails to verify the experts it puts forward, it can launder fakes into the news.

These are things we need to catch before publication. A LinkedIn profile is no longer enough to establish that someone is real. Reach has whitelisted hundreds of PR firms, built an AI tool called The Detective to assess whether spokespeople are genuine, and added another layer of verification for people quoted on health or money. Qwoted is introducing video verification. One platform requires responses to be recorded live on camera. Another stopped offering open access because verifying everyone would otherwise have threatened its business.

Simple checks still help. Ask for a five-minute call. Ask the person to respond to a specific photo request. If they claim a professional credential, check the relevant registry. One supposed expert stopped responding when asked for a photo. Another was exposed when an agency checked a WhatsApp profile picture and found that it belonged to a man doing SEO for a recipe blog.

Neville, what else can an honest communicator do to avoid perpetuating quotes from fake experts?

Neville Hobson: I was surprised by how readily fake experts were accepted by major media outlets. I remember a case involving The Telegraph a few months ago. I can’t recall the details, but it published something false, then removed it and apologized. Why wasn’t it checked first?

We make the same argument about people using AI-generated content without checking it, but source verification is even more fundamental. I don’t know precisely how every newsroom chooses and verifies the people it quotes. Clearly, though, something is seriously amiss if this is happening on an industrial scale.

We may need stronger ways to prove digital identity, comparable in some respects to the checks involved in applying for a passport or, in my case as a school governor, undergoing a criminal-records check. Informal methods aren’t working, and manual checks are difficult to scale. The people creating fakes can scale their efforts. We may have to give up some of the casualness with which we’ve approached verification.

Shel Holtz: One detail that struck me was that this involved a paint-by-numbers company. If a company selling paint kits is doing this, who else is? We tend to picture shady crypto operators or other familiar bad actors. But anyone trying to sell something and gain an SEO advantage might be tempted.

A journalist’s credibility is at risk when a quoted expert turns out not to exist. News organizations need a process for vetting sources, and they should tell readers what that process is. PR people need one too. If you use a fake expert’s quote to support a press release or offer that person to a reporter, why would that reporter trust you again after discovering the deception?

This reminds me of a story we discussed years ago about a purported bank robbery in Texas. A local publication reported it, a larger outlet picked it up, wire services followed, and it spread through news sites, television, and radio. The original story was fake. Each outlet assumed the previous one had checked it.

Now the assumption is, “This person has ‘Dr.’ before their name and a LinkedIn profile, so they must be legitimate.” That is woefully inadequate. We need processes to catch these fabrications before we send them into the world.

Neville Hobson: That’s the issue. It doesn’t make much sense for every media outlet to build a different verification process. That won’t scale. There may be a role for independent services whose job is to verify that people are who they claim to be.

Imagine a PR firm with a strong reputation for providing knowledgeable spokespeople. If just one turns out to be fake, doubts could arise about everyone the firm has supplied. Firms need a way to bolster their own credibility and give journalists and clients confidence in the people they put forward. AI will only make this problem worse. It’s unfortunate, but we’ve reached a point where verification is essential.

Shel Holtz: I like the idea of vendors offering verification as a service. It’s also an example of new work arising as AI changes existing jobs. In the meantime, a five-minute video call or a specific photo request can help establish that an individual is real. Those checks may not scale across thousands of sources, but they are steps people can take while better systems are developed.

Ultimately, we need scalable solutions. This affects reputation and trust, particularly if people act on advice that was fabricated simply to sell a paint-by-numbers kit.

Neville Hobson: Amazing.

Shel Holtz: That’s our report for today. We would love to hear your comments. Audio comments are especially welcome—you heard one today. Send us an MP3 of up to three minutes, or record a message directly on the FIR website by clicking the “Send Voicemail” tab on the right side of the page.

You can also comment where we post episode announcements, including LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon, or leave a comment in the show notes at FIRPodcastNetwork.com. We’ll find it, and you can be part of the conversation.

Ratings and reviews mean a great deal to us, too. Wherever you get your podcasts, we’d be grateful if you would rate and review the show.

We plan to record our next monthly episode on Saturday, October 24.

Neville Hobson: That’s right, and we’ll publish it on Monday.

Shel Holtz: Monday, October 26. As for shorter midweek episodes, we’ll see how Neville is feeling. If you subscribe to the show, new episodes will appear in your feed as soon as they’re available, without your having to wait for an announcement. And that’s a wrap for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #529: Fake Quotes from Fake Experts Find Their Way Into Top-Tier Media appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Fandoms are not synonymous with audiences or communities. The difference: Fans’ identities are tied up with the team, artist, product, or other object of their passion. It’s not surprising that marketers are chasing fandoms, in hopes of turning their brands into something people are genuinely excited about. But not everything is a potential flashpoint for a fan base.

In this short midweek FIR episode, Neville and Shel explore what distinguishes fans from members of other audiences or communities, how brands might leverage them, the wisdom of trying to spin up a fan base, and why fandoms might rebel against attempts to use them for marketing purposes.

Links from this episode:

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR is tentatively scheduled to drop on Monday, September 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. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

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

Raw Transcript:

Neville Hobson: Hi, everyone, and welcome to For Immediate Release. This is Episode 528. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz: And I’m Shel Holtz.

There is a new word making the rounds in marketing circles these days, and that word is “fandom.” Obviously, fandom isn’t anything new. Beatles fans constitute a fandom. Star Trek fans are a big fandom. Sports teams have had fandoms for as long as sports have been around.

What’s new is the idea that fandom should be a marketing strategy. Marketers are paying attention because a fandom represents something considerably more valuable than an audience. An audience is passively watching you.

That notion led Jay Rosen to write a 2006 post titled “The People Formerly Known as the Audience,” describing the shift away from a one-way mass-media model to a networked model in which people who once passively consumed information can now publish, respond, organize, remix, and distribute it themselves. That’s not always necessarily a good thing, but it is what it is.

A community gathers around a shared interest, but a fandom goes even further. Fans incorporate that interest into their identities. They create things, develop rituals and inside jokes, recruit other people, recommend things to one another, and sometimes defend the object of their fandom with remarkable enthusiasm.

One definition I particularly like comes from an article in Digiday: Fandom is where attention turns into identity.

You can probably understand why marketers find that appealing. Advertising can buy attention. It’s much harder to buy identity. It’s harder to buy belonging, advocacy, or voluntary engagement.

There is some evidence that fandom deserves to be treated as something distinctive. A systematic review published last year examined 38 marketing studies involving brand fans and concluded that fandom has moved from the margins of consumer culture into the mainstream. Brand fans really do behave differently from people who merely buy a product regularly.

There is another reason fandom has suddenly become attractive: The media environment has fragmented spectacularly. People aren’t gathered around the same handful of television networks, newspapers, magazines, and radio stations anymore. They’re scattered among TikTok creators, YouTube channels, Reddit communities, Discord servers, gaming platforms, streaming services, group chats, podcasts, and sports communities. We could keep listing niches all day long.

Instead of asking, “How do we reach women ages 25 to 44?” marketers can potentially find a group of people who are already intensely interested in something relevant to the organization. That changes the communication challenge.

You don’t approach a fandom as an audience waiting to receive your message. You’re entering somebody else’s existing culture. That culture already has leaders, vocabulary, expectations, and history. It has ideas about who belongs and who doesn’t. Increasingly, creators are among the people who have earned credibility within those cultures.

The strategic question isn’t, “Which influencer can deliver the biggest reach?” It becomes, “Who actually has standing with these people, and do we have a legitimate reason to be here?”

That last question is one I think organizations should spend much more time considering, because fandom is in danger of becoming a bandwagon. Whenever marketers discover something people genuinely care about, there’s a temptation to turn it into a technique. Community, authenticity, purpose, and engagement have all become marketing techniques.

Once every agency presentation starts promising to “activate fandom,” that’s probably the time your Spidey sense should start tingling.

You can’t manufacture a fandom just by announcing that you have one. Nor is every organization capable of inspiring fandom. Nobody necessarily wants to build part of their identity around an electric utility, payroll software, an insurance company, or the manufacturer of the toner cartridge in the office printer. How many true HP fans are there, really?

That doesn’t mean those organizations can’t have excellent customer communities. They can create useful resources, cultivate advocates, involve customers in product development, and provide terrific experiences. There are plenty of organizations that do these things well.

But calling every highly engaged customer a fan doesn’t make fandom a meaningful strategic concept. It just gives customer engagement a trendy new name.

There is another danger: Brands may identify an existing fandom and assume its passion is available for rent when it probably isn’t.

Fans can tell when a company has wandered into their community because somebody in marketing spotted a cultural trend. Borrowing the language, memes, or symbols of a fandom without understanding them can make a brand look less relevant, not more. The more intensely people identify with the community, the more protective they may be of it.

After the animated television series Rick and Morty made McDonald’s discontinued Szechuan sauce into a fan obsession, McDonald’s embraced the phenomenon and announced a one-day return. But stores received extremely limited supplies. Fans lined up for hours, and some traveled considerable distances, only to find that no sauce was available. The resulting anger produced protests and the hashtag #GiveUsTheSauce, and McDonald’s ultimately had to apologize.

The mistake wasn’t offensive cultural appropriation. It was a company correctly spotting a fandom but badly misunderstanding its intensity—and failing to deliver the experience it had encouraged.

I like one test suggested by the material I was reading: If the brand disappeared from the activation, would fans still say that what happened made their community better?

That’s a pretty demanding standard. Your contribution might be access, useful information, an experience people couldn’t otherwise have, a genuine role for fans in developing something, or help that enables creators to do better work. Merely inserting your logo probably doesn’t qualify.

It also means fandom isn’t likely to be an especially good short-term campaign strategy. These relationships require cultural fluency and sustained participation. If the budget disappears after the quarter ends or management expects an immediate conversion metric, conventional marketing may be the more sensible choice.

There are plenty of examples of companies getting this right. LEGO supports its AFOLs—Adult Fans of LEGO—and an existing culture rather than pretending it invented that culture.

Harley-Davidson didn’t merely accumulate loyal customers. It helped riders organize around a shared identity by creating the Harley Owners Group, or H.O.G. It provides chapters, rallies, riding challenges, a magazine, events, and other opportunities for motorcycle owners to interact with one another.

Even the pumpkin spice latte gave Starbucks an opportunity to turn a seasonal beverage into a fall ritual. The company created a private Leaf Rakers Society Facebook group for enthusiasts, which grew to more than 26,000 members. Starbucks didn’t invent the pumpkin spice latte ritual or the anticipation surrounding it, but it certainly learned how to play along.

What should communicators do with all of this?

First, don’t begin by asking, “How can we build a fandom?” Start by listening. Find out whether communities already exist around your organization, its products, the problems it solves, or interests adjacent to it.

Second, distinguish an audience from a community and a community from a fandom. Don’t inflate ordinary engagement numbers into evidence that people have incorporated your brand into their identities.

Third, if you enter an existing fandom, learn its culture before trying to influence it. Identify the people who have earned trust there, including creators, and involve them rather than treating them as distribution channels.

Fourth, look for ways to enable participation rather than merely generate impressions. Give people opportunities to contribute, create, influence, and connect with one another.

Finally, measure whether the relationship persists when the campaign stops. Are people coming back? Are they creating things voluntarily? Are they recommending you? Are they talking to one another rather than just talking to you?

Ultimately, fandom isn’t something a communication department creates. It’s something people decide they belong to.

If organizations remember that distinction, fandom could be a genuinely useful way to think about relationships. If they don’t, it may become the next marketing buzzword we spend a couple of years enthusiastically putting into PowerPoint decks before moving on to the next one.

Neville Hobson: You addressed this a bit, but what’s the difference between a community and a fandom? When does one become the other?

Shel Holtz: The key differentiator is that the members of a fandom incorporate the object of their interest into their identities.

It’s no secret to anyone who knows me—and probably half the listeners to this show—that I’m a Deadhead. I love the Grateful Dead. Grateful Dead merchandising makes a ton of money, and I buy some of that stuff.

I recently received a scale model of the Wall of Sound, the massive audio system the band toured with in 1974. It’s 3D-printed and even has a little Wi-Fi speaker built into it. It was a birthday present, and I just love looking at it. It’s part of that fandom.

I’ve read an entire book about the Wall of Sound. I’ve probably read 20 books about the Dead. I was listening to a 1985 concert on my drive to the office this morning. I am a fan. That is part of my identity.

The Grateful Dead isn’t just a band I like and whose music I sometimes listen to. I may be part of a community of people who like Elvis Costello, for example, but that doesn’t make me part of an Elvis Costello fandom. I don’t incorporate that particular artist into my identity.

That’s the real differentiator.

Neville Hobson: That’s a good explanation. Identity is the key, based on what I’ve been reading as well.

Are marketers suddenly so interested in fandom because traditional ways of reaching audiences are becoming less effective?

Shel Holtz: That’s my take. Marketers are desperate because some traditional means of reaching and engaging people have vanished, some have transformed, and most have fragmented. They’re looking for magic bullets.

You read one or two articles about how an organization leveraged a fandom, and suddenly the response is, “We’ll turn our customers into a fandom, too.”

But I just can’t see someone becoming a fan of their electric utility. You’re a customer. You may even be an enthusiastic customer for some reason, but I’m never going to incorporate the PG&E brand—Pacific Gas and Electric—into my identity. Ever.

Neville Hobson: Here’s a slightly rhetorical question prompted by your comments about Deadhead fandom: Can a brand genuinely become part of a fandom, or does the relationship become transactional the moment the brand begins mapping and monetizing it?

Shel Holtz: I think both things can be true.

A brand can become part of a fandom if it approaches the opportunity in the right way. First, there has to be a genuine connection to that fandom.

I’m trying to think of something that would connect naturally to the Grateful Dead fandom. It might be a guitar brand or one of the nonprofits affiliated with the band, such as Rock the Vote.

If you listen to the Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast, the band’s podcast, it has done a deal with Dogfish Head Brewery on the East Coast. The brewery makes Grateful Dead-branded beer. They have thought it through and developed the connection and relationship so they can reach the fandom through the podcast.

That may lead people to flock to the beer and talk about it. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll become fans of the beer. They may become consumers of it, perhaps even regular consumers, but the company is leveraging an existing fandom.

I think there are also opportunities for brands to build fandoms. Some happen naturally. Consider a car brand. There are Mustang fans. They love their Mustangs. They attend Mustang rallies and car shows.

That reminds me of the brouhaha we discussed many years ago, when Ford sent a cease-and-desist letter to a fan who ran a discussion board. It wasn’t about the Mustang, though, was it? It involved a pickup truck.

Neville Hobson: I think it was the pickup—the Ranger.

Shel Holtz: The Ford Ranger, that’s right. The Ranger Station was the name of the site.

Ford sent the cease-and-desist letter, and the site’s owner posted a note saying, “I have to shut this down. I received a cease-and-desist letter from Ford.” The fandom erupted.

This was an organization that had a fandom but didn’t recognize its power. Ford could have been leveraging it to expand the customer base.

There are opportunities to identify existing fandoms that may revolve around your products, services, or company. More often, though, it will be something adjacent to your business that you can tap into.

You need to understand the culture. You need to know who drives it and understand its rituals and jargon. You can’t parachute in and announce, “Here we are. We’re going to tap into this fandom. Aren’t you excited that we’re here?” People will simply say, “No, we’re not. Go away.”

It’s definitely worth considering, but it isn’t a magic bullet. For most organizations, I think it’s ridiculous to assume they can develop a fandom around what they do.

Neville Hobson: I agree. We’re touching the edges of a discussion about a shift from authenticity—which is unquestionably overused in marketing—toward reciprocity.

Does a brand have to earn the right to participate in a fandom? If so, what does it have to give back?

There’s an interesting communication principle underneath that question: Don’t begin by asking what value the community can create for the organization. Ask what value the organization can create for the community. What do you say to that?

Shel Holtz: Absolutely. That’s how you build credibility and relevance within a fandom, unless it’s a built-in fandom involving something like the Ford Ranger or Ford Mustang.

If you have identified an existing fandom that isn’t centered on one of your products but has a genuine connection or relevance to your business, it may be worth investing the time, effort, and money required to ingratiate yourself with that community.

How do you do that? You might make access to the object of the fandom a little easier or give fans access to the right merchandise. Ask what you can do to make their fandom more meaningful or more fun.

Then you may be accepted, and fans may consider doing something for you—which is obviously one reason you became involved in the first place.

You have to be strategic rather than simply jumping in and saying, “We connected the dots. Look at our connection to this fandom. Don’t you want to help us sell our product?”

I fear that’s what will happen with a lot of marketers who read about this and think, “There’s a solution for me. I’m going to jump all over fandoms.”

Neville Hobson: I struggle a bit to see the precise gap between community and fandom. When does one become the other?

I understand the examples you’ve given: the Grateful Dead fandom and The Ranger Station, for instance.

Shel Holtz: And the Adult Fans of LEGO.

Neville Hobson: That one, too. But do these groups actually refer to themselves as fandoms? What do their members call themselves?

Shel Holtz: Well, they call themselves Adult Fans of LEGO. The “F” stands for “fans,” so they do.

Would members of Harley riders’ groups—the H.O.G.s—call themselves a fandom? Probably not. They would probably call themselves H.O.G.s, but they’re definitely a fandom.

I remember working for a company in the early 1990s whose vice president of compensation and benefits was a Harley owner. He rode with his club every weekend and wore a Harley jacket to the office—and this was a pharmaceutical company in the ’90s.

He was a fan. There’s no question about it. He wasn’t merely a member of a Harley community. Being a Harley rider was part of his identity.

Neville Hobson: This is rich territory for marketers to get wrong. Forgive me for beginning with the cynical perspective, because I can also see the opportunities available to organizations that do it well.

But are we trying to manufacture something that doesn’t need to be there? I don’t particularly like the word “fandom,” although I’m not part of a fandom myself. I belong to many communities, but I’m now wondering about the difference for me personally. Do I see any of those groups as part of my identity? Not really. I probably haven’t encountered one that produces that “wow” for me.

Is fandom a manufactured opportunity for marketers, or is it genuinely something worth investing in?

Shel Holtz: Again, I think both things can be true.

We’re going to see a lot of marketers try to manufacture fandom because it’s a buzzword making the rounds. But some organizations will have a lightbulb moment and realize, “We have a fandom. We’re just not leveraging it.”

Imagine if Harley-Davidson had never organized local chapters or created clothing people could wear to express their fandom. What if the company had said, “We sell motorcycles. If our customers want to form clubs and ride around, that’s fine—but they had better not make clothing with our logo because that’s a copyright violation”?

Harley-Davidson probably wouldn’t have the identity it has today if it hadn’t recognized that it had a fan base it could support and leverage.

The same is true of Adult Fans of LEGO. The company produces kits that clearly aren’t intended for little kids snapping together a few bricks. Some contain thousands of pieces and cost hundreds of dollars. Those are definitely products for adult fans.

As long as you listen to fans and nurture the relationship, there can be value in it. Fans have a relationship with the object of their passion. Organizations need to examine that relationship and ask: Are we strengthening it? Are we reinforcing it? Or are we merely trying to exploit it?

Neville Hobson: Exactly.

Shel Holtz: That’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #528: Why Marketers Are Suddenly Obsessed with Fandom appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

At one company, a leader discovered by chance that AI was rejecting job candidate applications within seconds of their arrival. One reason: They graduated from college before 2010, which contradicted the instruction to surface candidates who displayed “youthful energy.” What’s worse, the talent acquisition manager didn’t see any liability issues, since AI made the decision.

Also in this long-form episode for August 2026:

In his Tech Report, Dan York provides more statistics about the decline in referral traffic thanks to AI overviews and searches via LLMs, Time magazine’s decision to inject ads into markdown files targeting AI agents (and Perplexity’s decision to block them), and LinkedIn’s “Seems Like AI Slop” option — is it working?

Links from this episode:

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report:

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR is tentatively scheduled to drop on Monday, September 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. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

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

Raw Transcript:

Neville Hobson: Hi everyone, and welcome to the For Immediate Release podcast, long form episode 527 for August 2026. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz: And I’m Shel Holtz, and Neville, you’re back in your office. It’s good to see you back there again. It must mean that the heat wave has broken there in the UK.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, it has. I’m enjoying a temperature of low twenties in here with the air conditioning on. It’s very nice. And beats what we’ve had with thirty plus upwards. Not good. But it’s been an interesting few weeks and on a number of levels. One of the highlights, in fact a big highlight, was the fact that when Laura and I and our grandkids and my daughter were visiting California at the beginning of August in Novato in Marin County, we met for lunch. We came into the city and you and I and the whole crew got together and we had a phenomenal time at that lunch, didn’t we?

Shel Holtz: Yeah, we did at the Waterbar, right on the waterfront on Embarcadero

Neville Hobson: Nice place.

Shel Holtz: Overlooking the Bay Bridge. And it was fun to be able to have you sit in there, this wonderful building, and to say we built this because the company I work for

Neville Hobson: Yeah.

Shel Holtz: Did build the structure that the Waterbar is in and the steakhouse next to it, that whole complex. So that was fun, even though that was before my time that we built that. But it was great to see you and Laura. It had been since 2019.

Neville Hobson: A while.

Shel Holtz: And it was just delightful to meet your daughter after having heard about her for so many years. And to meet your wonderful granddaughters. They’re terrific.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. Well, you made a big impression on them because they talked about you a lot afterwards. But it was it was good. I mean, it as we’ve both said, you know, in real life face to face can’t beat it. But this is the next best thing on video. So it was great catching up and enjoying a delightful lunch over a few hours. The wine was super that we had. It was Californian wine if I’m not wrong, Shel.

Shel Holtz: Stag’s leap, if I remember correctly.

Neville Hobson: Okay, no Spanish Rioja there. So that’s good. And we did enjoy our week overall, even though some of the circumstances weren’t quite as we had originally planned it. But it was good to, from my point of view, certainly, where a change is as good as a rest. So a change of scene coming over there I found extremely beneficial to recovering from some of the health problems that I’ve been having prior to that. So enjoyed it a lot, Shel, and we gotta do it again soon, I hope.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, Michelle and I were talking about the fact that we need to get back over to the UK. So it won’t be won’t be next year. We already have our vacation next year plotted out, but maybe twenty-eight we’ll cross the pond and come see you. We’ve not been to Somerset, so need to make

Neville Hobson: Okay, we’ll make a pencil note. Yeah.

Shel Holtz: That journey.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, this is this is quite something to experience for some assets. There’s a lot. Yeah, I look forward to that if we can if we can swing it, it’d be great.

Shel Holtz: But we’re not gonna talk about personal stuff for the entire show. We will

Neville Hobson: No.

Shel Holtz: Be talking about stories in the news that have a connection to organizational communication and technology. And we hope that one of them at least sparks a comment from you listeners. And there are a number of ways that you can comment on. This show, the first is to just leave a comment in the comment field in the show notes at the FIR website, firpodcastnetwork. Com. You can also leave that comment on the post where we share updates on episodes that we have published, LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, Blue Sky. We share on all of them. And you can leave a comment there. We check those for your comments. You can send an email to FIR comments at gmail. Com and attach up to a two-minute audio file. If you would like us to play it, we would be happy to. You can even record that. No fuss, no mus, right there on the FIR website. We use a service called SpeakPipe. It has a tab on the right-hand side of the page that says send voicemail. Click and record, and I’ll get that. And there’s also the FIR community on Facebook where you can not only leave a comment but engage with other listeners. And yeah, lots of ways that you can share your comments and become part of the show and drive the content. We have some comments in this episode to share with you. Also, your reviews are very

Neville Hobson: Super.

Shel Holtz: Much appreciated wherever you have the opportunity to rate and review podcasts. That’s a great way for others to

Neville Hobson: Mm-hmm.

Shel Holtz: Discover FIR.

Neville Hobson: Let’s begin with a recap of the episodes we’ve published over the past month and some listener comments. In the long form episode five twenty three for July published on the twenty seventh of july, You shall reported on rethinking thought leadership, maintaining brand sovereignty in the AI era, and whether hedging in your communication can serve a useful purpose. In FIR 524, on the 3rd of August, you addressed the topic of whether managers are ready to lead an AI fluent workforce or not. Too many indicators suggest they’re not. The subject of workslop. Was our topic in FIR five twenty five on the twelfth of August, with mounting evidence that it can create long term problems for companies. We discuss the latest research and share our thoughts on what businesses can do about it. And we have one comment.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, from Mike Klein, who said, Of course, organizations have been clocking externalities as productivity gains since the time they started clocking anything at all.

Neville Hobson: Okay. In FIR five twenty six, we added our thoughts to the growing debate about Anthropic’s new watermark feature that’s rolling out on Claude. That episode was published just last week, actually. We discussed one firm’s new AI writing policy and its four guiding principles for employees, which make far more sense to us than trying to detect a watermark. And we have some comments on this one.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, Suzy Urjavik Parker wrote that this will never apply to me as a professional communicator because my writing is mine and mine alone. I don’t outsource any of it to a technology destined to destroy the environment, our water resources, and the creative process of humanity. Here’s to everyone saying no to this nonsense. And Ike Piggott, in a reply to Susie, said, let me search online and see if someone has written the thing I want so I can copy it. Is plagiarism. Yet for the AI evangelists, let me ask for a smoothie blend of hundreds of plagiarized documents is somehow fine. Feels like idiocracy is nigh. And Patrick Coyle in an independent comment said, No, we should definitely be asking, Did you use AI to write this? So a lot of people continue to object to this at a fundamental level.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I you’re right. I noticed that myself even. So the debate will continue, in my view, the wrong topic to be debating. It’s not it’s not doesn’t carry the same importance or weight as the one people should be talking about, which is the content that is produced, guidance on how to do it well and do it right. So, you know, this debate will continue for quite a while, I’d say. So yeah, now you’re up to date on FIR episodes.

Shel Holtz: Great. Now let me bring you up to date on Circle of Fellows episodes. This is the monthly panel discussion featuring fellows of the International Association of Business Communicators. I usually moderate these and when I’m not available, Brad Whitworth does that. We have published episode number one hundred and thirty one. This is a monthly program, so you can imagine how many of how long this has been going on to get 131 of them out there. This was on the evolving media landscape and what it means for media relations, the fact that so many journalists are starting their own media companies with Substacks and YouTube channels and the like. And what does this do to pitching and the notion of reaching out to reporters in order to get coverage because the audiences that these media companies have is much smaller than the mainstream media. So it was a great conversation with Diana Degan, Ned Lundquist, Martha Muzychka. And Jennifer Waugh. The next episode is the first of a two-parter, and it is coming this Thursday. And it will feature Adrian Cropley, Bonnie Caver, Theomary Karamanis, and Mike Klein. We’re going to be talking about artificial intelligence and the leadership moment for the communications profession. So should be a good, robust discussion. And I as I say, we’re doing that in two parts. There will be four. Different fellows picking up part two of this in September. So now you’re all caught up on previous episodes, on Neville’s travels, on Circle of Fellows, and we’ll dive into our six stories right after this.

Neville Hobson: So our first story is an interesting one, I find. Three people died, around 200 homes were destroyed, and millions of dollars were at stake. And an expert witness hired by 3M to help defend the company and the resulting litigation turned to ChatGPT to help write his expert report. That alone might raise questions, but it isn’t really the extraordinary part of the story. According to reporting by 404 Media, The expert, Josh Autenrieth, told ChatGPT that he had been retained by 3M and asked it to help him create an exceptional expert witness report defending the standard of care at 3M. More remarkably, he instructed it to show how 3M is 0% at fault for the explosion. In other words, this wasn’t here is the evidence, help me analyze it and determine what happened. It was much closer to here is the conclusion. Help me build the argument that supports it. And we know this because his ChatGPT conversations became part of the legal discovery process. The prompts reveal something else rather astonishing. Autenrieth reportedly has about 20 years’ experience in gas detection. Yet at one point he uploaded a photograph of a gas detector to ChatGPT and asked, What am I looking at? According to one of the plaintiff’s lawyers, that detector was central to the entire case. There are obvious questions here about professional standards, disclosure, and the appropriate use of generative AI in expert testimony. But I think that’s a bigger question for organizations. AI can make it extraordinarily easy to construct a persuasive argument for something you’ve already decided to believe. Give it enough documents, tell it the conclusion you want, and ask it to assemble the strongest case. That’s not necessarily analysis, it can be automated confirmation bias. And if organizations increasingly use AI to support decisions, strategies, investigations, and recommendations, how do we distinguish between using AI to help us discover what the evidence says and using it to manufacture a convincing justification for what we already want the answer to be? And one more thought if your AI conversations might eventually be discoverable, perhaps we should start thinking about prompts, not simply as instructions to a machine. But as records of our reasoning. There’s an awful lot to unpack here, Shel, it seems to me.

Shel Holtz: There certainly is. And at its core, this is a governance story. I don’t know if

Neville Hobson: Mm.

Shel Holtz: This expert witness was an independent contractor or if he worked for somebody. But at some level you need to have that governance that gives you the rules about how to use this and what you are going to retain. I mean this is why legal needs to play a part in that whole governance conversations because they understand the rules of discovery from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and they understand what kind of challenges can arise when in a lawsuit the other party has access to all of those prompts, all of those conversations that you’ve had with a large language model. So you need to have governance around this to begin with. The other issue that leaps to mind is that output could be three pages of highly polished slop that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, but because it answered the question he set out to have it answer, he’s perfectly happy with it. I wonder if he challenged it at all. Did he put it through a any kind of a red team? I’ve I spent days creating a communications red team skill in ChatGPT. And I can run anything through this. I can run a detailed communication strategy through it. I can run a three-paragraph email we’re sending out on behalf of the CEO through this. And it puts it through all of these various levels in order to challenge what I’m saying here. What’s a fact and what’s an assumption? How are different audiences within the organization likely to react to this and so on and so forth. So I think, you know, first of all. Front loading the outcome that you’re looking for is dangerous enough. Leaving that paper trail there for a belligerent legal team to find is another level of bad. But then just assuming that the output is perfect and relying on that without putting it through some kind of challenge, I think is dangerous. I think this was a disaster waiting to happen from the get-go.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. The thing I find extraordinary, frankly, is did anybody at the client check any of this? Was there a human client in the loop? I wonder. There’s something else too to mention that the Futurism also reported on this as well as 404 Media. They’re they reported that over three hundred and fifty pages Of ChatGPT activity were turned over in the discovery process. And I’m thinking to myself, what this suggests to me, apart from the obvious things, is that this was someone who didn’t quite understand how ChatGPT works in terms of what it retains, how it retains it. And the other side did. So when they did the discovery, they knew what to look for and how to ask for it. So it still comes back to Probably the legal team at three N. Did they not rehearse this? Did they not know what this expert witness was going to be asking or going to be presenting? I from reading the four media report, this all came out during the presentation of by the expert witness in the lawsuit. So it came unknown to anyone. I mean, goodness me, that’s no way to run a defense in a lawsuit of this magnitude, it seems to me. So, I’m surprised it’s not got more coverage than it has, actually, but it is extraordinary that this actually happened, it seems to me.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I’m not surprised it hasn’t gotten more attention because it’s, my God, another law story where somebody used ChatGPT and it bit in the ass. You know, we hear those pretty frequently. The difference here though is that it’s expert witness testimony, and

Neville Hobson: Right.

Shel Holtz: How discovery played a part, that I think should get people to pay attention to this. And you know, why would 3M not dig into it deeper? I can imagine, I’m just making this up. I don’t know if this is true, but I can imagine, you know, you’ve worked with an expert witness for decades. They’re great. They have helped you win multiple cases. And now this person has discovered ChatGPT. You don’t know this as the legal team. You’ve been working with this guy for years. He’s been

Neville Hobson: Mm.

Shel Holtz: Fine. So you just accept the outputs that he produces based on that experience and the trust that has built up. The only difference being now he’s made life easier for himself by employing a large language model. And there the trouble begins. So I think we’re gonna need to start needing to ask for disclosure from people that we have worked with a lot. Hey, you know, we’ve been working together since before there was generative artificial intelligence. Are you using it? How are you using it? Let’s go over this to make sure that we’re covered. I think you’re gonna need to ask that of pretty much every supplier these days.

Neville Hobson: I totally agree with that, Shel. I think it hasn’t happened. Obviously they didn’t ask any of those questions. So you’ve got a kind of fault, if you will, at the client for not asking those kinds of questions. Maybe a maybe it’s a comfort thing that think everything’s fine and we don’t need to worry about this. But you’ve raised the point quite well, I think, that the time has arrived now where you need to audit everything. You need to be clear in your mind. So you’ve got to go through the what if. You’ve got to, you know, what’s the what could happen if that will guide you in terms of what you need to do with the people you do business with or who you hire to help you do something such as an expert witness in a lawsuit, where the consequences are not minor at all, the outcome of this if it goes against you. And use an all an expert witness who. Is great because you’ve worked with him before, but is completely current with the right way of doing all this is an ethical issue here too. So that’s something I think you need to add to-do list to make sure that you are clear with the people you’ve hired to work with you that they are on board with the right way to do this. That may well come into play in terms of your own policies about third parties working for you as contractors or some other manner, that how they use AI needs to be declared. And you also then the obvious, you need to put in place the checks and balances that the human in the loop activity we’ve talked about a lot on this show.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, it’s a vendor AI audit is a new requirement. That’s inventory all the vendors we work with and check on their AI practices. I mean, what if you work with a freelance writer to supplement your own staff’s ability to crank out copy? You’ve been working with them for years. They’ve only recently started using AI. They need to disclose to you how they’re doing that so that you know what you need to be looking for when you’re reviewing their content.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. Boy, this opens up a

Shel Holtz: What it comes down to.

Neville Hobson: This opens up a an eyebrow raising area, it seems to me, because I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that hardly anyone’s doing that.

Shel Holtz: I would be surprised if I surveyed twenty c communicators, if I found one whose organization was auditing all of their suppliers and vendors for AI practices, that would that would surprise me. I don’t think this is one

Neville Hobson: Boy, boy.

Shel Holtz: That has seen the light of day yet in terms of general awareness.

Neville Hobson: No, my I agree.

Shel Holtz: Yep. Well, Neutrogena is in a genuine crisis right now. The kind of almost impossible to game out in a tabletop exercise because it didn’t start with anything the company did, you know, yesterday or this week. It started with something that has been on the record for some time, discoverable with a two minute search. It’s been up there for more than a decade. You may have known Hayden Panettieree from a TV series called Heroes. I didn’t. I guess I’m cultural culturally illiterate or maybe I’m just old. But I saw my daughter had

Neville Hobson: You’re not a you’re not a you’re not a you’re not you’re not a Gen Z shell, that’s the point.

Shel Holtz: That’s a problem. I’ve you know, I think I’m glad I’m not. I hope I just didn’t offend all the Gen Z Gen Zers in our audience. But my daughter had posted an RIP to Hayden on Instagram. So as I was reading about all of this with Neutrogena, I had to reach out to my daughter and say, Okay, tell me who this person was. One thing she was, though, was the face of Neutrogena, the spokesperson for about 10 years from 2005 to 2015. Not long after she gave birth to her daughter, she went on live with Kelly and Michael and talked openly about her postpartum depression. Panettieree said that what that’s what got her dropped by Neutrogena. They said that they viewed her disclosure of her postpartum depression as a violation of their morals clause in their contract. She told the story again this past May while promoting her memoir, generating some mild but manageable backlash at the time. Then she died on August 16th at the age of 36. She was found unresponsive at a residence in Greenville, South Carolina. There were no signs of trauma, no signs of foul play. The cause of death, last I checked, was still pending, although there are indications of some kind of overdose. The internet, though, went straight back to that interview. And within days, the phrase Neutrogena boycott was trending, and the stock of its parent company, Kenvue, that used to be a Johnson unit, took a real, but not necessarily a substantial, hit. But for four days, Neutrogena didn’t say anything. And this is interesting because they responded within hours to an unrelated advertising flap involving Tate McCrae. And no, I don’t know who he is either. Shameful. I know. But the point is that this wasn’t a company that doesn’t know how to move fast. It just chose not to on this one topic where speed and empathy probably mattered most. And by the way, postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis are front and center in the news right now with the trial of Lindsay Clancy making headline news. She’s the former news nurse who killed her three children, then tried to kill herself, paralyzing herself in the process. She sought help for a rapidly worsening postpartum mental health crisis, and the system failed to identify and treat the psychosis that ultimately overwhelmed her. And of course, society here in the US is kind of polarized over this case. But with that going on, Neutrogena should have been able to see how its firing. Of the celebrity back in 2015 might have sparked renewed attention. Anyway, this past Thursday, Neutrogena finally posted a statement on Instagram. They were deeply saddened. They were proud to have partnered with her. And the line getting the most attention, we understand that we made her feel unsupported during a very difficult time. And then they promised a significant investment to a postpartum support health partner. Details to come. And notably, they turned off comments on the post itself. So, what do crisis professionals make of all of this? Molly McPherson of NBC News said that it isn’t a press release problem, it’s an action problem. The company faced one of these unknowns in crisis management, but still could have planned to be empathetic. It cost Neutrogena four days of the narrative being written entirely by other people. Two LinkedIn reactions from communicators get exactly what’s wrong with the response. Jerry Corbett, former chair and CEO of PRSA and now CEO of Red Flag, and a past guest on FIR, wrote for Strategic Magazine the day before Neutrogena broke its silence that a corporate crisis does not always begin with a new event. Sometimes an old decision returns under circumstances that give it new meaning. His point. Was that the silence itself became the story. And Erica Cardina, a PR manager, went further on LinkedIn. Her critique, the moment to acknowledge this was in May when she was still there to receive that acknowledgement. We were proud to partner with her. Ring’s pretty hollow given why the partnership reportedly ended, and we understand why we made her feel unsupported is corporate cushion cushioning. Her suggested fix, just say we failed to support her because that’s what it was. Then there’s the comments being switched off. And as Erica put it, you can’t publish a statement about accountability and immediately shut up shut the door on the conversation. By August, she argued it read less like accountability and more like a brand trying to contain damage. And people can tell the difference. Communicator

Neville Hobson: Mm.

Shel Holtz: Lacey Haynes commenting on Jerry Corbett’s post raised a related gap. The donation pledge is easy money unless it’s a really substantial amount and backed by real executive commitment. And what would actually reassure people is a stated policy on how Neutrogena will support its spokespeople going forward, not just a one time gesture because of something we did in the past. So, what’s the lesson for us? Real quickly, three things. One, your discoverable history is your risk profile. Assume anything a public figure has said about your brand anywhere at any time is going to resurface at the worst possible moment and plan for it before that moment arrives. Two, silence is never neutral, and neither is turning off comments on the statement meant to address it. Both say we’re managing this and not we’re listening. And three, soft language reads as evasion. If your statement needs a phrase like we understand we made someone feel X. Ask whether the plain version we failed her is the one you’re actually avoiding and why you’re avoiding it.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, it’s a very sad tale, itself. But these revelations about Neutrogena and going back just over a decade to what they did to literally get rid of her, how they reacted at that time, and then now all this has come out and the lack of response. So they are in trouble in the court of public opinion without any doubt. Cynics would argue does it’s it all blow over. Does it really matter? Well, yes, it does matter. You’re if you’re a public listed company in particular, it could affect your stock price, which you notice their parent company has taken the hit. But it will have a negative effect on people’s perception of you and your brands. When they’re out in the pharmacy or wherever buying products and they’ll r recall this perhaps if they’re fans, they definitely will have a negative reaction to you. So I just found it Extraordinary. Some of the things you said, Shel, such as publish what they did and then turn off all the comments. There’s one of the reports I read, I think it’s in the independent newspaper, talked about posts on Reddit that have attracted thousands of r responses and likes and so forth and upvotes, all that. That’s there for all to see for time immemorial, I would say. And they’re not part of the conversation. So I’m not gonna try and second guess what they might have done in crisis communication planning, except to say it doesn’t look they had a plan ready for this eventuality.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, we say this pretty much every time we do a crisis communication story about a company that blew it. We ask was a communicator in the room when any of these decisions were made? Did they just choose to not listen? But to those who would say that this will all just blow over, and we hear this a lot is you know, all crises are transient in nature. Well, remember this is now part of your permanent record too. So in five years, when Neutrogena gets into some sort of a dust up with another spokesperson or an influencer or a creator that they’re paying, people are gonna remember this. And if they don’t remember, they’re gonna do a quick search and they’re gonna find it and it’s gonna re-emerge and just add fuel to the fire. You see, they did this before to this woman, and they bought everybody off by making a contribution to a nonprofit that deals with postpartum issues. And then they went along their merry way and now they’ve abused another person that they had on their on their payroll because they didn’t change their policy to how they treat their spokespeople when they went through this before. So it’s

Neville Hobson: Yeah. Well

Shel Holtz: Just waiting to happen again.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. I just performed a completely unscientific experiment. I just opened up Google and typed in Neutrogena. We’ve got sponsored results is the first item that appears in the in the in the in Chrome from Neutrogena. Explore our range, as it says, and link to something provided skincare results. Then the very next thing is Neutrogena responds backlash after Hayden Panettiere dies. And then there’s links galore to media stories about this. And that’s just entering the word Neutrogena. And beyond that, you know, it’s got it’s got a link the way Google’s now doing all this. More news, you click on that, and you get pages of this stuff. Then further down, if you scroll, you’ll then start seeing links to some of their products. But If you land on the page and the first thing you see is the is what happened with this woman and how they dealt with it, you’re likely to kind of explore that a bit, I suspect. Not a good look for them at all.

Shel Holtz: No, it’s not. It’s a classic crisis communication. Is it existential for Neutrogena? Probably not. But I can see that the particularly among this actress’s fan base, there are probably people who are simply going to switch to a competitor’s product a and be done with Neutrogena. At this point. So you’re gonna you’re gonna lose some faith with some of your existing fans, you’re gonna lose trust. And you’ve pretty much established an approach that you’ve taken to this sort of thing that I think is underwhelming and unsatisfactory for a lot of people who are looking for more from an organization like this.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I agree. So, the obvious question I’d ask you is if you were advising Neutrogena, what would you advise him to do now?

Shel Holtz: Well, now it’s all reactive and it’s I mean this is after

Neville Hobson: It is

Shel Holtz: The proverbial horses left the pu proverbial barn. But at this point I would I would come right out and say the our previous statement was inadequate. We take full responsibility For our actions. We should not have there clearly somebody suffering postpartum depression is not a violation of a morals clause. That was inappropriate. Here is what we are doing by way of our policies with spokespeople going forward to make sure that we treat our spokespeople fairly i in the future. And this is what we are doing in order to support. People who are suffering through postpartum issues and challenges, because we wanna play a part in this in order to try to make up for our transgressions thus far.

Neville Hobson: So neutrogen, if you’re listening, there’s some good advice there for you.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, they w they’re not listening.

Neville Hobson: Well, I mentioned Reddit in that story, and that’s the heart of our next story, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. So, 20 years ago, when companies were first trying to figure out social media, we used to give them some fairly simple advice. Don’t walk into somebody else’s community and immediately start talking about yourself. Listen first, learn the culture, understand why people are there. And if you eventually join the conversation, contribute something useful. That holds true today, as it did 20 odd years ago, but apparently we’re having to learn all that again, it seems to me. Because marketers have suddenly fallen in love with Reddit, according to the Journal. And there’s a p very particular reason why. According to the Journal’s report, Reddit has gone from being something of an afterthought in many companies’ digital strategies to one of the places marketers desperately want their brands to appear. We’ve talked about this a number of times on FIR o over the past year, the rise of Reddit as a literally a number one place to see discussions about you and your brand. It’s interesting what the Journal says, and the reason for it is not simply because consumers use Reddit, but because AI does. Reddit conversations turn up extensively in the material that AI systems use to answer questions. So if somebody asks ChatGPT or Claude which running shoes to buy, which software to use, or whether a particular company is trustworthy, what people have been saying on Reddit could help shape the answer. Naturally enough, marketers have spotted that opportunity. Unfortunately for them, Redditors have spotted it too. When jewelry company Brilliant Earth have advertised for a Reddit strategy manager whose job included shaping conversations. That would cascade across search engines, LLMs, and customer decision making, moderators of the jewelry subreddit immediately raise the alarm. One described Reddit as possibly the very last place on the internet for genuine company reviews and feedback. And that gets to the fascinating contradiction here. The more valuable authentic human conversation becomes to AI, the greater the commercial incentive to manipulate that conversation. And the more brands try to manipulate it, the less authentic and therefore potentially less valuable it becomes. Some marketers have already approached are already approaching Reddit exactly as you might fear. So those old behaviors have never ever gone away. The journal found agencies operating brands dozens of Reddit mentions every month, using accounts that appear to be legitimate community members, and even promising services involving negative comments. But some companies have discovered another approach. Don’t market. Audio equipment manufacturer, Sonos, built goodwill by having an identifiable company representative help people with technical problems and translate corporate announcements into ordinary language. There in itself, by the way, is a lesson for communicators. How about trying to communicate in the first place in ordinary language? So investment solutions and services firm Fidelity created communities around useful financial discussion and information. And Reddit itself says brands should arrive with three things: utility, humility, and respect. Which sounds remarkably like the advice we were giving companies at the beginning of social media over 20 years ago. There’s an AI story here, certainly. There’s a marketing story. There’s also a communication story about authenticity, community, and trust. But as AI makes genuine human conversation increasingly valuable as a source of information, are we about to see an escalating contest between the people creating those conversations and the organizations trying to influence what those conversations tell the machines? And if marketers succeed too well, do they ultimately destroy the very thing they’re trying to exploit? Welcome back to social media circa two thousand six.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, which is exactly the same as social media twenty years ago in terms of what organizations should be doing. Of course, what organizations should be doing and what they do frequently are misaligned. But i every couple of years we report on a story that leads me to invoke Christopher Barger and the time that he spent at General Motors running their social media team. Because if anybody understood how to do this well, it was Christopher. And this was long enough ago that social media was basically the blogosphere. This predates all the social networks. But what Chris did was he had members of his team assigned to the various car blogs that wielded a certain amount of influence. I remember Jalopnik was one of these. There were there were several of them. But the instructions they had were very clear. He says, You’re not parachuting in from GM. I’m here to help. I’m going to tell you why you’re wrong with what you just said about one of our vehicles. Their role was first to listen, second, to participate in conversations where they had expertise that had nothing to do with General Motors, just be a member of the community and participate and build the connection with the other people in the community. And when GM comes up, At that point, you’re already known. You’re trusted. You’re not the spokesperson from GM. You’re Bob, right? And now you can comment, and people are going to listen to you because you are on equal footing with other members of that community. That’s the way to do this. Dell was another great example. They had that, you remember that, that listening center. I don’t know if anybody still has these, but those. High-tech futuristic mission control like social media listening centers would use an algorithm to surface discussions that were taken to the appropriate department in the organization for action. And then the person who was in that community would be able to solicit more information, then come back and say, okay, we’ve listened to you. There was one particular case where there was a lot of discussion about why this particular Dell laptop cost so much more than a different model when the only difference was that it had been loaded with bloatware. And you know, they took it to the team that was the product management team for that for that particular product and they looked at the argument and they said, you know what, they’ve got a point. And so they dropped the price and they were able to go into the community and say, Well, thank you for this conversation. It’s been really enlightening. You’re absolutely right. And we’re taking action, we’re lowering the price. How do you imagine the community reacted to that? I mean, 100% positively. So there is a way to engage in these communities. Should your organization be on Reddit? I don’t know, is your Community on Reddit? Are your fans on Reddit? Are your customers on Reddit or other stakeholders or thought leaders and influencers? Is there a good strategic reason to be there with your brand or your organization? Maybe. Should you be there just for the GEO? I don’t think so. And in fact, this was just in the news. From July 18th through August 7th of this year, Reddit accounted for an average of 3. 83% of ChatGPT search citations. By August 14th, that had fallen below 1%, averaging just 0. 52% through this past Monday. That’s an 86. 4% drop. So according to the Axios piece where I read this, they’re suggesting that you shouldn’t pin all your GEO hopes. On one mythical unicorn. Now, who called it a mythical unicorn? Our friend Steve Rubel, who is an executive vice president for Media Insights and Measurement at Burson these days. That mythical unicorn, he says, doesn’t exist. It’s a long game, and brands need to be engaged on many different channels. Some will go up, some will go down based on citations. But doing yourself reputational damage by misbehaving in a social network. Just because you think that’s where your citations in AI results are gonna come from, man, that’s just dumb.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. I mean I would say, you know, if you’re not already on Reddit or another place that’s relevant to where conversations are happening about your brand that’s relevant to you, it’s gonna present you with a with a huge hill to climb to establish a credible presence now. I’ve already seen some examples, I’m not gonna mention any names, of companies who are doing this, going about this utterly the wrong way. Going, doing literally what you said not to do earlier. You know, hey, I’m here from X, company, not X, but Company X or whatever. Let me know what’s bothering you and try and help, that kind of thing. Whereas it would be better if you are Bob from X. Who’s got a who’s got a passion and a strong interest in whatever the topic might be, that’s relevant to that community, joins that community and doesn’t do anything for three months except listen to what people are saying. Might like something or upvote something, and he’s already filled out a comprehensive profile describing himself, where the focus is on him and his passion, not Him and who he works for. And it’s kind of like a by the way, I also I work for so and so. But these are this is just me here. Either way, that was what I would recommend to anybody. And with the with the caveat, it’s gonna be hard work to establish a presence now if you haven’t already done one. And if it’s kind of not perceived to be the kind of behavior you would expect from your company, your work is even harder in that case. But Flip it over and say it’s never too late, indeed, better too late than never. So I would say you know, it this is worth listening to what these examples show and look back at two thousand six to see what people are doing, and join the conversation the right way.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, the other example that we can take from back in the Jurassic era of social media would be Frank Eliason in the Comcast Cares account on Twitter, where they were actively searching

Neville Hobson: Yep, another good example.

Shel Holtz: For people complaining about Comcast, and then not going in to tell them they’re wrong, but going in to tell them, let me see if I can help you with that. You some people were a little creeped out, you know. You’re monitoring me. But most people

Neville Hobson: Yeah.

Shel Holtz: Were delighted that somebody was being proactive, not waiting for. Me to pick up the phone and deal with the labyrinth of customer support and instead reaching out when you’ve identified that i’m having a problem with a solution yeah i think most people are very grateful for that so

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I agree. So there’s lessons to be learned here from just twenty years ago, but even that, this isn’t like was invented twenty years ago. This has been since the days of forums, that this was good behavior to exhibit on those old forums that were control freakery writ large, those forums. But if you were there you as Bob from Company X Hey, you know, it’s chatting with people about the things they’re interested in, you would have stood good stead in building relationships. So the medium may ch the mediums may have changed and social attitudes certainly have changed. But the these fundamentals of listening, getting to understand people’s issues, making an effort to come across as genuinely interested in helping them. Stan we’ll stand you in good stead no matter what.

Shel Holtz: Well, thanks, Dan. Yeah, I’ve been reading all about the LinkedIn option now. A little pull-down menu from the three dots that you can signal that you think that something is AI slop. I haven’t used it. The only thing I use there on a regular basis is not interested, as LinkedIn seems to be populated more and more bipartisan political posts that have absolutely no connection to business whatsoever. I don’t mind a political post on either side of the aisle as long as there’s a connection to business because that’s what LinkedIn is for. But if it’s just a blatant partisan attack, I don’t yeah, and I do this with people who are posting positions I agree with. I am on LinkedIn for the business connections, for the business thought leadership, for the business reporting. And if it’s if there’s no connection at all, I’m not interested. And I find that I’m able to adjust my feed. The more I click that, the less of that type of thing I see. And LinkedIn goes back to being what I joined it for in the first place. But I have not yet clicked the one that allows you to identify this as AI slop. Have you done that yet?

Neville Hobson: No, I’ve not encountered I’ve not actually encountered anything that made me search for something to report it at all. I tend to ignore all of this stuff, Sean, to be frank. I rarely proactively do anything only. If I get a pop-up saying, Do you like this? Sometimes I might. Particularly no, there’s one thing I do is report stuff. Please block this. I’ve seen this too often. And I asked me a reason why. Often it’s just not of interest to me or I see it too often. I always get fine, we’ve taken it off, won’t appear on your feed anymore. Great. I should do that more often now that I think about it. But you know, it’s fine. And I see as Dan mentioned, i in one of the I think it’s TechCrunch he refers to, reporting that this seems to be working. Now I’ve not looked into any more detail about how do they know it’s working, but I mean, hey, great. If it is, it’s good. But I think it’s so arbitrary, isn’t it? I mean, a button, this is AI slop. I mean that is so generic.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I saw dashes, it must be AI slop.

Neville Hobson: Amazing.

Shel Holtz: All right. On Tuesday this past week, Meta went to trial in Oakland, facing a coalition of 29 state attorneys general. This is being led by the attorneys general from my state. This is Rob Bonta, the attorney general from California, also Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey. These are the lead plaintiffs. They’re claiming that Facebook and Instagram were deliberately designed to hook kids, and that Meta knew it and hid it. Meta itself told the told the court the penalty calculation could run as high as $1. 4 trillion if they are found liable for everything that they’re being accused of. Mark Zuckerberg is expected to testify. I’m sure that’ll go extremely well. So is Instagram’s Adam Mosseri. The dollar figure is mind-boggling. I mean, I mean, imagine if Meta had actually wind up paying Over a trillion dollars. I mean, what would that do to the organization’s future, its finances? But there’s a lot more at stake here than the existential threat to Meta. This isn’t a personal injury case, it’s a consumer protection case, which means the states aren’t just asking for money, they’re asking the judge to order Meta to actually rip features out of the product. We’re talking about infinite scroll, video autoplay, disappearing stories, beauty filters, algorithmic feeds for minors. And this isn’t happening in a vacuum. A Los Angeles jury already found Meta and Google negligent in a similar case back in March. They awarded six million dollars in damages. And California’s attorney general said flatly that Meta is just first in line. YouTube and Snap are already facing their own lawsuits. So, what do people who study this think will actually change? Well, Kate Winnick, a principal analyst at Forrester, called this potentially the end of social media as we knew as we know it, and drew the comparison a lot of people are drawing to the big tobacco settlements of the 90s. Her prediction isn’t that social media will disappear, it’s that the product gets harder for young people to access and the cultural conversation around it shifts the way it did with cigarettes. She also expects competitors like Snap to make preemptive changes rather than wait to be sued themselves. Analysts covering the advertising side of this are already sounding a warning. A Storyboard 18 analysis this week made the point that engagement has always been the currency of social advertising. More time in app means more advertising inventory, more data, more monetizable moments. If courts start forcing platforms to strip out The very features that maximize engagement, that inventory shrinks, particularly for younger audiences. DesignRush put it even more bluntly for marketers. Platform risk is becoming brand risk, and agencies need to start factoring regulatory exposure into media planning the same way they’d factor in a supply chain risk. So practically, what should you be doing right now? Social is a centerpiece of your strategy. Well, stress test your channel mix before you’re forced to. Don’t wait for a verdict to ask what happens to your plan if Instagram Stories or infinite scrolls simply isn’t there anymore. Start modeling these things now. You also should be shifting your measurements of success. The engagement as currency model, time spent, scroll depth, session length, is exactly what’s on trial. Start building your reporting around qualified reach, completed views, and actual brand lift, not raw time on platform. So your metrics don’t collapse the moment the underlying mechanics change. Also, if your brand targets younger audiences at all, start scenario planning for tighter age verification and access restrictions now, rather than reacting when a court order lands. This isn’t hypothetical. It’s exactly what the states are asking for. And fourth, and here’s the one that I think is particularly comms specific, not just marketing specific. Get ahead of your own internal conversation about platform dependency. If your organization’s quietly let one platform become the backbone of both your marketing and your external communications, the trial is your prompt to ask leadership: what’s our plan B?

Neville Hobson: Mm.

Shel Holtz: And are we building it now, or are we just waiting for the verdict to force our hand? Obviously, we don’t know how this trial ends. It just started. It’s expected to go on, I think, six weeks, is what I heard. But the lawyers, the analysts, and Meta’s own court filings all agree on one thing. Whichever way it goes, it’s a signal event for the whole industry, not just for Meta.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. That makes sense. I agree. It’s got a lot of attention over here too. And I think that’s partly or primarily it’s because it’s Meta. And it’s Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, the whole parade of apps behind it that everyone uses in one way or another. So the speculation my god, is this the end of Instagram? I see people talking about that. But I add a dose of cynicism to some of this shelf, to be honest. In that we’ve been here before with threats of lawsuits, that’s the end of this or whatever it might be. I can’t imagine that Meta is going to go down the tubes with a one trillion dollar financial penalty. I just couldn’t see it happening. Look at look at what happened with Cambridge Analytica back in twenty eighteen. I mean, that was a scandal beyond the pale. Nothing really happened to them. I mean it was business as usual and they repeated some of the bad things that they did. Not long ago, even. So it needs something a lot more existential threat like than a trillion dollar fine. Petty cash. It’s not even you know, it’s only twenty five percent of the US national debt under Trump, so it’s not a big deal

Shel Holtz: Ha.

Neville Hobson: Really, you know. So it’s it’s nevertheless it is serious without doubt. And one good thing of it is it’s drawing attention to some of the things that you know Meta are now talking about we’re gonna do something about. Here in Europe and specifically in the UK, there’s a lot of talk. It’s constant, although it’s died down in intensity in recent weeks, about the damage to young people, particularly preteens who are active on these platforms. And I saw a news story the other day that OpenAI is rolling out a version of its chatbot called ChatGPT for teens, for users under 18, that they say has stronger built-in safety protections. I mean, I don’t know what message they’re trying to get out here, but why haven’t you done this before then? With stronger built-in safety protections? Why isn’t that in place for everyone doing this? So I think from a comms point of view, Meta and everyone else who are suddenly scrambling to make announcements what they can do. Be wary of talking about that we’re doing this dedicated thing to address you know concerns about safety protections all that kind of stuff because that’s what you’ve been resisting for decades. And Sally don’t now try and play the good guy. You’re not the good guy. This lawsuit demonstrates that quite clearly. And I think it’s interesting to observe what happens. That could this spread out into something mega, I mean truly mega. In parallel I see other interesting things going on. I saw a story just the other day saying that in the midst of all this, it’s rumored that MySpace is about to make a comeback. Now

Shel Holtz: I saw that.

Neville Hobson: If they yeah, if they are looking to do something like they did back in the day, that might appeal now, actually. I’ve still got a MySpace account by the way. I haven’t visited it in a long time. But So this is kind of in the midst of one of the reasons I think why it’s getting attention, in the midst of society level concerns that we’re seeing manifesting itself in some of the opinions pressure groups have here in the UK, certainly, often run by women who you can’t truly genuinely argue against what they’re saying. Although some of them are argue against it. That there’s no proof, where’s the evidence? And you know, it doesn’t match our data, all that kind of stuff. And I think it will need a groundswell, I think, of public opinion to be behind some of the criticisms. Again, cynicism kicks in here because we’ve seen this before and nothing really happened. So I’m not sure whether this will make any difference, again, depending on what happens. And as you say, this is only just kicked off. So I did see because one of the TV station the news channels here, Sky News, covered the opening of the trial outside the courthouse in where is it in LA or somewhere in California, is it? It might have been new yeah, San Francisco. Okay.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I think I think it’s up here. I th I think it’s in Oakland. Yeah.

Neville Hobson: So and it showed there’s a picture of the courthouse. It had all these rosettes, red, white, and blue, hanging off the balconies. And it gave the razzmatazz show that’s very American. You wouldn’t see that happening over here. But all these women talking about and strong opinions, and they were credible in some of the things they were saying. It wasn’t, you know, misery being on display here. These were people who had strong opinions. They can see an opportunity to highlight their case and I think they’ll get attention if they do it the right way. So add that to the mix. I Other than that, we don’t really know much more because it’s only just starting. So but it will be definitely an interesting story to keep an eye on.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, even if the court fines one hundred percent for the plaintiffs in this case and one hundred percent against Meta, they’ll appeal. And the appeal will take a couple of years and then that can be appealed. And you know, how many times can you appeal? This will be years before there’s a resolution. But I

Neville Hobson: Yeah.

Shel Holtz: Can see you know, when all of this plays out, that the change to social media could be substantial. And it’s the analogy to tobacco that I think makes me feel that way because it took forever to change attitudes about tobacco. But it is not socially acceptable now. After

Neville Hobson: No.

Shel Holtz: Piecemeal laws, I mean it was first you can’t smoke in bars and restaurants and people were up in arms about that. And but you take that for granted now. You’ve you get rid of the advertising that’s aimed at kids, Joe Camel, for example. You get rid of the cartoons, the cool camel smoking an unfiltered cigarette. And you’ve really shifted societal attitudes about tobacco. And I could see the same thing happening over the long term with the same type of approach taken. So if it starts with not letting kids take advantage of the features in the social networks that they like, you know, just removing those, making it harder for them to access some of this stuff or just removing it from the platform altogether, then those platforms become less desirable, the kids aren’t there. Who’s left? You know, us. Yeah, how appealing are we to marketers as a target? And everything sort of snowballs from there. So yeah, I over the long term I can see this having an implication. Do I think in

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I

Shel Holtz: Six weeks there’s going to be a finding and suddenly social media as we know it is gone? No, I think that’s absurd. But I do agree with you. Meta’s not the good guy in this case. I think in the previous cases that have been tried, and there was the one in California earlier, there was also a bigger one. I think it was in Arizona or New Mexico or Colorado. Where it was literally hundreds of millions of dollars that they had to pay, that the Discovery found emails that supported the case, that they knew that this is what they were doing. They did it deliberately and they didn’t care that they were addicting kids to these platforms. And I assume that same evidence is going to be introduced in the current trial. So yeah I’d be surprised

Neville Hobson: Mm.

Shel Holtz: If this one suddenly and miraculously goes Meta’s way. So I think this could be the start of some significant changes

Neville Hobson: No. Yeah.

Shel Holtz: To the way social media is offered to people and the kind of influence this that it’ll have. And by the way, could be excellent timing for MySpace’s return to come and say, hey, you know, we’re back. We’re the social media that always took safety seriously.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, exactly.

Shel Holtz: And if what you have been hearing about Facebook troubles you. Rejoin us and come visit MySpace Island in Second Life too, you know. So

Neville Hobson: It’s funny, I was watching about a month or so back now, a video I’ve got. You’ve seen this, I know. Thank you for smoking,

Shel Holtz: Mm-hmm.

Neville Hobson: About the lobbying industry of tobacco, booze, and I’ve forgotten the other one, firearms. It got me thinking, and mentioned it popped into my mind again as we were discussing this, that I seen recently here in the UK editorial articles or maybe placed media. I haven’t paid too close attention to it. About the upcoming likelihood that the only product, the only tobacco product that doesn’t carry any health warnings on them at all is cigars. And that’s about to change. And

Shel Holtz: Hmm.

Neville Hobson: These ugly announcements about cigar smoking will kill you. Stop smoking now, all that in black letters on a white background that obscure the packaging. The interesting argument I’m seeing though is that the it’s to arguing about this is such a shame because some of the designs on cigar packaging is iconic from a century ago. And we’re gonna lose all this, and this is bad. I’m thinking I see a lobby event happening here. And I wonder what they’re gonna crank up in Meta’s defense, specifically relating to social media, how they’re gonna address this. But be sure this is gonna crank up.

Shel Holtz: When I when I was a kid, we all kept our little memorabilia in cigar boxes and they’re gorgeous. The designs are spectacular. And

Neville Hobson: Beautiful.

Shel Holtz: I don’t know where I got them from because my dad did not smoke cigars. He was a cigarette man. Lucky Strikes, I remember that very, very well. But yeah, we all had cigar boxes

Neville Hobson: Boy, boy.

Shel Holtz: And that’s where we kept our little collectibles.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, as you do.

Shel Holtz: Yeah.

Neville Hobson: Well, that was that’s an interesting story though, Shel, nevertheless. I think it’s only just starting, as you point out. The trial is just getting underway and revelations are going to emerge and see how it develops. So I’ve got an interesting one here that the title of it, well, what can I say? I mean, the as I wrote about it on LinkedIn, it’s an AI story that stopped me in my tracks. That’s the only way to describe it. When I came across it just a few days ago. And I and I want to put an important caveat around it before I introduce the topic. So It originated in a post on X. I haven’t been able to independently verify that every detail happened exactly as described. It may be entirely literal, it may be embellished or maybe partly be intended as a cautionary tale. But the organizational behavior it describes is absolutely worth talking about. The author of the tweet says he joined a meeting with his company’s talent acquisition team to discuss their new AI-driven. Resume screening system. And apparently it was working brilliantly. The team reported that the software had reduced time to hire by 60% in a month. Think about that as a management KPI for a moment. 60%. If you’re sitting in the executive suite looking at a dashboard, that’s a sort of number that gets people’s attention. The technology investment is working. Productivity is up. Hiring is faster. Great result. Except the author asked another question. What exactly had they told the AI to optimize for? The answer was digital natives with high runway potential and a useful energy. So he asked them to look at the demographics of the candidates the system had rejected. According to his account, it had rejected 100% of applicants who had graduated from university before 2010. Suddenly that spectacular 60% productivity improvement looks rather different. But there’s a line later in the story that I think is even more revealing. When the potential discrimination problem was pointed out, because that’s really what you’re talking about, age discrimination. The HR manager apparently argued that the AI made the decision, not her. So the company was insulated from liability. We’ve delegated the decision, therefore we’ve delegated the responsibility. And that to me is one of the most dangerous misconceptions organizations can have about AI. And if this example is typical, this is not uncommon. I bet you that is the case. It’s really dreadful. You can delegate a task to an AI system. We’ve talked about this on the show before, Shel. You can automate a process, you can allow an algorithm to make recommendations or even decisions, but you cannot automate away accountability. There’s another aspect of this that I think should concern communicators in particular. Look at the language supposedly used to instruct the AI system. Digital natives, high runway potential, useful energy. Those are exactly the kinds of expressions that can float around organizations sounding like harmless jargon or management shorthand. Put them into an AI system, making consequential decisions about real people, though, and suddenly language isn’t just describing organizational culture. It’s operationalizing it. The machine is turning the euphemism into a decision rule. And there’s something else here that connects to a much wider problem we’re starting to see with AI adoption. When an AI system produces an unexpectedly good result, our instinct is to celebrate it. Perhaps our instinct should sometimes be to investigate it. If productivity jumps 60%, what happened? What trade offs produced that number? Who benefited? Who didn’t? What did the system learn to optimize away? Because automation doesn’t necessarily eliminate discrimination, bad judgment, or flawed organizational assumptions, it makes them scalable. And here’s a final comment from the tweet author. I’m currently drafting a memo to halt all hiring until we manually review 4, 000 resumes, those ones that the system had rejected. So here’s the question I’d put on the table, Shel. If an AI system delivers a spectacular improvement in a business KPI, Whose job is it to ask what the system had to do to achieve it?

Shel Holtz: I think that needs to be baked into the governance, doesn’t it? We’re right back to that

Neville Hobson: Yeah, it does.

Shel Holtz: Governance model and the policies. I mean, we’ve talked about this recently. I mean, my productivity could absolutely skyrocket because I delegated a report, let’s say, to AI. I gave it a thin prompt. It gave me this highly polished five page report. I give it a quick once over and I send it along. And I’m now able to take the time that I would have spent researching and writing that report, doing other high value things for the organization, and the organization can now tout that we’ve had this productivity gain. Meanwhile, the department that I sent that report to is looking at this and going, wait a minute, this reads real well, but there’s no substance here. I need to validate whether there are things that are accurate here. So what happened, I merely shifted. The work to the department that received my output rather than me creating a useful, rel well-researched, well-written document. So, yeah, the first thing I want to question is how are they measuring productivity? The second question is, what are these people doing with their time? Now that they have saved that time by using AI? Is it just more you know, mundane rote work doing, you know, more AI agent management. Or they actually, I mean, you know, we talk about where I work, and I’m on the AI committee. We just wrapped up an AI survey of our entire employee population. And what we have found is that out in the field on the actual construction projects, the people who are saving time with AI are one, spending more time with the client, engaging with the owners, building that relationship, building the trust, and they’re spending more time out on the project, walking the project, doing safety walks, doing project walks, talking to the subcontractors. This is high value stuff that an AI can’t do. So we were really happy to see that in our survey results. We can say okay that what they’re spending that saved time doing is high value strategic stuff that matters to the organization. So yeah, I think, you know, what are you measuring and how are you measuring it need needs to be part of this conversation.

Neville Hobson: Okay, yeah, I d I don’t disagree with that at all. I think though what concerns me about this is the fact that you had an employee involved in the recruitment process who with a straight face argued that AI made the decision, not me, so hey, you know, what can I do? And the author of the tweet Did the right thing, I think, which is investigate the re rejects to see, you know, what clues can he as to why they we were rejected. Yet he knows the answer because the prompt they were given was, you know, those high runway potential digital natives useful energy. And so that’s what it worked on. And I think the what I find strange, if this is a true story, and I have no reason to doubt it’s not, even though this. Only this tweet that you have to go on. No one asked and again I can’t say more than that because I don’t know what the structure is of this organization. Where the kind of curiosity was that would have produced things like what happened if it’s productivity this productivity jump, this is extraordinary. What trade-offs produced that? Who benefited? Who didn’t? What did the system learn to optimize away? They didn’t have anything to guide them on that by the looks of it. So this comes back precisely to the point you made. This is a governance issue. There’s things they should have in place that clearly are not. If this guy hadn’t accidentally encountered this, I mean, I shudder to think if he hadn’t had that conversation with that talent acquisition person in his team. This would have remained undiscovered and they would have blissfully gone about, wow, this is fantastic, this productivity gain. And yet there’s something fundamentally flawed, it seems, that you give this kind of prompt, you get the behavior we understand that it did to reject all these other applicants and produce the outcome that it gave. No one questioned anything, it seemed to me. So there you got a problem at the high level in the organization. And this is a pattern we see in many of the stories we’re reporting, Shel, over the past few months, where you look at the story that developed that led us to talk about it, and you think there’s something missing here at a at a management level in the organization that shouldn’t be missing. And we’ve had the obvious one about the human in the loop, but this goes deeper than that. This is fundamental and this is worrying.

Shel Holtz: It is. And I mean we could we could spend a whole show talking about talent acquisition and AI being used to screen resumes and the like, which is problematic i in its own right. I mean, what do most organizations using the AI to find. It’s the candidates who have the appropriate degree from the right university, that they’ve got the right keywords in their CV, they have the appropriate technical skills. None of these things are predictors of success in the organization, in life. I’m reading a book right now, by the way, highly, highly recommend this book. It’s having a profound impact on my thinking. It’s called Robot Proof by Vivian Ming. She’s a fascinating character. But this book is extraordinary in the approach that it takes to ensuring that humanity remains relevant and thrives when AI is there handling all of these routine tasks that humans are no longer required to perform. So she points out through her work in recruiting and in education, the predictors of success are things like social intelligence, perspective taking, communication and collaboration, the ability to solve novel problems, comfort with uncertainty, and deeply human capacities that increase in value as AI gets smarter. These are things that are predictors of success and wealth and happiness and the ability to be creative and innovative on behalf of an organization. And we’re not looking for those things. So I mean, these are all conversations that I think we need to be having out there is, you know, I mean, just an AI that is faster at looking for the wrong things that recruiters have been looking for decades and decades. That’s not the approach we need to be taking. We need to be rethinking all of this stuff based on the data that’s available to us. And that’s what Vivian Ming has and shares in this book is the data that she has processed through machine learning tools since long before there was a ChatGPT. Highly recommend this book. And by the way, the book also has the best footnotes I have ever read.

Neville Hobson: There’s also much think of you know the HR person saying that the AI made the decision, not me, of something that

Shel Holtz: You made a decision to use the AI, right?

Neville Hobson: Well back in April, February and April, in fact, Sylvia Cambi and I ran a couple of workshops for IBC on ethics in AI. And we gave some case study examples, and one of them is very relevant to this conversation, this is the example of Workday that is involved in a lawsuit where the plaintiffs who were suing Workday allege that AI systems used in talent acquisition resulted in discriminatory outcomes. It’s the concern isn’t simply bias in one decision, it’s systemic exclusion embedded in the design of it. How ranking, filtering, and screening models operate at scale. So what happened, just as one little example, is that someone who was studying all this that came up with the details discovered that there are examples where someone applied for a job and within literally a minute they got a reject email. And there are examples where the reject emails are sent at 2 a. M. In their time zone. That lawsuit is still going on. It’s raised questions about oversight, fairness, transparency, and even vendor liability. So it’s certainly relevant to this story if you’ve got someone arguing that the AI made the decision. But it’s discriminatory and arguably from what we know, the human was behind it, yet the AI made that decision. That’s not really what happened, but that’s how it appears. So this is quite serious, and the Workday one I think is even more serious, the way it’s it seems to be playing out. But nevertheless, these indicate again, as I mentioned earlier, that we’ve got examples in organizations where things aren’t working right, things aren’t being done well, and you kind of wonder what else is going to emerge that we didn’t know about until someone discovered it. So these are things from a leadership point of view. That we need to pay attention to be proactive in setting in place the ground rules for this. So it’s not about guidelines or any of that kind of thing. It is about the fundamentals of AI leadership.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, and you know, at the end of the day, we’re probably not getting the best candidates in the door at the same time, which ultimately that’s what we want. And the way these things are working right now, they’re creating problems and probably leaving us with less than the optimum new hires. Well, retail has a new marketing playbook, and brands are turning their own employees into influencers. Gap. Is the clearest example. In January, it opened its year-old creator program. It had previously been reserved for outside influencers with at least a thousand followers. They’ve opened it up to its own corporate distribution and store staff. Employees can now earn commission and free product for posting about Old Navy Gap, Athleta and Banana Republic. Those are the Gap brands. Gap says the original program had already reached 154 million people across nearly 30, 000 posts. David’s Bridal did something similar. They launched David’s Style Squad, these are store associates, earning the same 5 to 15% commission as outside creators, with top performers up to 20%. A progress update from Modern Retail in April said the program had grown past 250 active ambassadors with roughly 500 applications. Starbucks has gone even further still, building the Green Apron Creators program from scratch and piloting a custom TikTok tool to share ad revenue with baristas. And Staples got here almost by accident. A store associate who went viral talking about their printing services became such an asset that the company leaned into it rather than shutting it down. And you may remember that we talked several years ago about a guy who worked for a paint company who was doing, I think it was either Instagram or TikTok videos, and they fired him for doing that, even though he was a hardcore brand ambassador who was getting people to buy the product. And he ended up getting hired by a competitor, Go figure. But why are brands suddenly taking this position of inviting their employees to become creators. Why now? And the answer is trust. Audiences are tuning out anything that smells like an ad. And the most credible person a brand has is someone who already works there. We’ve told you this for years and years that your employees are your most credible spokespeople and that it comes out in the Edelman Trust Barometer too. Employees almost also come cheaper. Than an outside creator roster. And the content has a built-in supply chain. A barista or a store so you can film something in 10 minutes with product that’s already just sitting there on the shelf. But the people covering this are flagging real problems. Digiday’s reporting this month points out that you can’t just flip a switch. There’s no consistent model for whether content happens on the clock or off the clock. Or what happens when a store manager needs someone running the register instead of chasing down that viral shot? One marketing exec told Digiday, most employee content is unusable, and finding the ones who are actually good at it is like panning for diamonds. There’s precedent for how badly this can go too. Amazon’s FC ambassadors, which was launched in 2018, to put warehouse workers on social media during a labor conditions controversy. Drew accusations of astroturfing and questions about whether some accounts were even real employees. Then there’s the legal exposure. Employment attorney Mark Conkl said that the moment a company starts directing what employees post or ties compensation to participation, it’s no longer enthusiasm, it’s work. And every employment law that applies to work applies to that too. That includes the FLSA. Filming, editing, and monitoring comments at nine at night can be compensable time, voluntary label or not. It includes overtime math, if stipends or engagement bonuses aren’t folded into the regular rate correctly. It includes discrimination risk if creators get picked because they look good on camera rather than by documented objective criteria. And it includes labor law, a creator policy That reads as don’t say anything negative can legally chill employees’ protected right to discuss wages and working conditions.

Neville Hobson: Mm.

Shel Holtz: So here’s my advice, and it splits two ways depending on which hat you’re wearing. If marketing is building one of these programs, your job is to get legal HR and marketing in the same room before it launches, not after the first viral post. Sort out compensation, selection criteria, and IP ownership up front. If you’re the one being asked to sell this internally, be honest with employees about what they’re actually signing up for. Real hours, real tax and wage implications, and a real trade-off between building the brand’s audience and building their own. And if marketing pitches you a program without any of that groundwork done, that’s the time to push back loudly, before it launches, not after that first lawsuit.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, quite interesting, isn’t it, Shel? We’ve talked about this before, some time ago. And that example of the paint company is interesting. I think attitudes, strategies and so forth have will have changed quite a bit since then. I think the paint company was Sherwin-Williams, if I’m not wrong. Yeah. It could be.

Shel Holtz: Think so. Although that may have been the one he ended up going to. I could look it up. I don’t remember.

Neville Hobson: Could be. Yeah, could be. I it reading the story in one of the links you shared in Retail Dive that talks about Gap and David’s Bridal, it’s actually quite interesting. This is now, this is not a kind of a an aside, like a little aside project. This is a this is a significant aspect to their to their brand management and general marketing, where employees are part of the process that rewards them for their actions. It makes sense. I don’t have any critiques on this at all, even. I can understand some concerns certainly surrounding people saying we do authentic storytelling. You know you can say that, but you need to convince people that is the case, authentic storytelling. I think there’s a difference between people with passion who happen to be employees of your company. Talking about your brands out in the marketplace, as opposed to people with passion or employees, you’re now gonna pay to do this. So that’s kind of losing something in the picture, it seems to me. So there’s a fine line to walk, I think, in how you communicate authentic storytelling. Because is it authentic because you’re paying them? Because When they’re doing this before and now they’re being rewarded. So I’m not saying that’s not a not a good thing. You need to be clear in how this is perceived.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, sure. This is not an employee advocacy program. To be clear,

Neville Hobson: No.

Shel Holtz: This is not an opportunity for employees to share content and to put their own spin on it in their networks. Employee advocacy programs have been around a long time. They can be very effective. We have one. We use one of the tools that’s available out there to manage it. But nobody gets paid for these. I mean, some of them, you know, y you have leaderboards and you may have campaigns with prizes for who’s on top of the leaderboard each week during the campaign. That’s not the same thing. The creator programs

Neville Hobson: No, it’s not.

Shel Holtz: That we’re talking about grew out of the whole influencer movement where these people get paid to promote the product. And basically what they’re doing is saying, hey, we’re gonna give our employees the same opportunity we’re giving the creator community out there. And it just doesn’t shake out that way because of employment law and because of everything else that I mentioned. And by the way, that was Tony Piloseno. He was an Ohio college student and a Sherwin-Williams employee, so good memory. He built a huge TikTok following posting paint mixing videos using Sherwin-Williams products. And in 2020 they fired him, citing misuse of company materials and creating content on company time. And he was hired by Florida Paints, which embraced his social media creativity and gave him a role producing content for the brand. So that was that story.

Neville Hobson: Show and Williams loss, without question. They missed the point entirely. But to be fair, that was back then and that was probably a common view. You’re wasting time on our dime and we’re gonna fire you. But you know, I was reading the retail dive piece that I mentioned on Gap as well. And interestingly, the VP of marketing, his comments about why they’re doing this. Our employees know our brands, our products and customers better than anyone. Absolutely. By expanding the program to eligible employees across our offices, we’re giving them a way to become influencers, earning commission and product while sharing what they love and bringing our brands to life through authentic storytelling. That doesn’t gel with me at all, that description, I have to say. It’s it’s forced this is a marketing activity basically. So y the word authentic doesn’t work well there, I think. Anyway, they have had some success without doubt. They talk about the program has now reached nearly hundred and fifty-four million consumers across thirty thousand posts, according to the press release that the GAP issued. I mean, that’s no small beer, without doubt. So it’s a good result. So I guess the answer is to for me, I’d want to take a look at this in six months’ time to see what it’s looking like.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, but in the meantime, I think the advice stands. There are labor, legal, and HR implications in doing this. And if you just let marketing launch it without having looked into that and addressed it and invited HR legal and y any labor relations specialists

Neville Hobson: Presume they did all that.

Shel Holtz: Into the room, I don’t know. Could have just been marketing. God knows we’ve seen plenty of examples of that. Where marketing just releases

Neville Hobson: It’s true, yeah.

Shel Holtz: Something to the wild, right? Like snatch up these bargains faster than a gator can snatch up a child, you know?

Neville Hobson: Extreme example. That was amazing, wasn’t it? Well, I think it I think it’s interseeing.

Shel Holtz: Yep. That’s stuck in my mind.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. It’s good seeing all this, I have to say. And as long as they’re doing it in a way that isn’t gonna bite back at them, as it were, all to the good, but need to see more evidence of success and that word authentic being used properly.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I’d be very interested if any listeners work for organizations or have clients that are have embarked on this kind of a program. I’d love to know what kind of safeguards were applied to that, what kind of conversations were held with HR and Legal and how it’s going. So let us know. So our next monthly episode of FIR, our long-form monthly episode for September, will drop on September twenty-eighth. Monday, September twenty-eighth, which means Neville, you and I will record it on Saturday, September twenty-sixth. We will be here with our

Neville Hobson: Yep.

Shel Holtz: Short form midweek episodes beginning not this Monday, but next Monday. In between those monthly episodes. So we hope that you will all watch for those announcements and or just subscribe to the podcast and they’ll show up in your podcast player. And until we see you on our next episode, that will be a 30 for immediate release.

The post FIR #527: Delegating Hiring Decisions to AI appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Anthropic’s watermark scheme is the focus of so much discussion that you could be excused for thinking there was nothing else to talk about. For many, it’s the solution to identifying all those evil-doers who offload their writing to large language models. But we are wasting far too much time trying to determine whether (and to what degree) AI was involved in creating content. Much more important is determining whether the content was crafted with respect for the reader, and whether the creator can stand by every word. That’s the idea behind the new AI writing policy from the software company Clay, which makes far more sense than trying to detect a watermark.

Links from this episode:

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR is tentatively scheduled to drop on Monday, August 24.

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

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

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

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

Raw Transcript:

Neville Hobson: Hi, everyone, and welcome to For Immediate Release. This is episode 526. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz: And I’m Shel Holtz. In the last episode of FIR, we talked about workslop and the implications workslop brings to the workplace. We’re going to continue down that path today.

I’m sure you’ve all seen the headlines about Anthropic putting an invisible watermark on anything Claude writes. I want to separate what that actually does from what people have been claiming.

First, you won’t see this watermark. It’s not a “written by Claude” tag. It’s machine-readable. It survives copy and paste, and it may even survive some editing. The reason Anthropic came up with this is to comply with the transparency rules under the EU AI Act, and it applies everywhere Claude runs: the app, the API, Claude Code, Cowork, cloud providers — you name it.

You can’t paste text into a public detector and expose someone yet. Anthropic says detection tools are coming, but it hasn’t released any of them.

Here’s roughly how it works: Every time Claude generates text, it’s choosing between several equally good next words — say, “gray” or “overcast.” Normally, that choice is random. With watermarking, though, a secret cryptographic key nudges that randomness in a consistent way.

No single word looks suspicious, but across a couple hundred word choices in an article, the pattern becomes statistically detectable if you have the cryptographic key.

That’s completely different from tools like Pangram, which look for writing patterns that seem AI-like — you know, em dashes, overuse of words like “delve” or “tapestry” or “underscore,” constantly grouping things in threes. These are all things real writers do, by the way. The rule of three is nothing unique to AI, nor are em dashes. That’s why I don’t put much stock in these tools.

Anthropic’s detector doesn’t guess. It tests whether the text matches the pattern its own cryptographic key would produce.

Now, it’s particularly important to understand that a detected watermark means the content was processed by Claude. It doesn’t mean Claude wrote it. You could write something yourself, have Claude clean up the grammar, and it would still carry that watermark. Axios flagged exactly this risk for communications teams that polish a human-written press release with Claude.

It also works in reverse, by the way. Heavily edit, paraphrase, translate, or blend the text with other writing, and that watermark can disappear. Short passages may not carry enough signal to be detected at all.

So this isn’t a foolproof “Did a human use AI?” detector. Picture a reporter running a company statement through a detector and calling it AI-generated when your team actually wrote it and just had Claude do the final polish.

The watermark tells you about processing. It can’t tell you who did the thinking.

And that brings me to Clay, the software company, which just rolled out an AI writing policy. I think this is actually more important than a watermarking system.

The policy had its origins in Clay’s engineering department, but it has since gone company-wide. It’s not a ban. Brainstorming with AI, drafting, proofreading — all that’s fine.

Instead, the policy has four principles.

First, stand behind every idea and every sentence.

Second, writing is thinking.

Third, spend more time creating a document than you expect someone to spend reading it.

And fourth, longer isn’t better. And AI, by the way, notoriously pads its content.

I like this policy a lot. I like it a lot more than “Don’t use AI to write.”

Because sometimes AI writing is exactly the right call. Plenty of people are great at their jobs and bad at writing. Engineers are a great example. I’ve used engineers as an example of this before. If AI helps these people organize their explanation and turn an incomprehensible email into something readable, that’s good for everyone.

The problem is AI can make bad thinking look like good writing. This is what we were talking about last week with workslop. You give the model a thin prompt, it hands back three polished pages, and now you’ve just shifted the work of figuring out what you meant onto everyone else who has to read it. The prose looks finished, so the creator of that content feels like they’ve finished, but the thinking never actually happened.

That was how we defined workslop last week when we talked about it.

So companies don’t need an AI policy that’s focused on AI. They need one that’s focused on accountability, quality, and respect for the reader.

Cover the basics, for sure. List the approved tools. Talk about confidential information and how it gets used. Talk about fact-checking and human review and brand voice and blah, blah, blah.

But add that Clay test: Can you defend every sentence? Does it represent what you actually think? Did you verify the facts? Did you cut the padding? And did AI make the communication better, or did you just shift your effort onto your audience?

For communicators, that last question is the one to focus on. The watermark debate is going to tempt organizations to obsess over detection: Was AI used? Can we prove it? Should we disclose it?

Yeah, sometimes, I guess, that’s a fair question. But the better ones are: Is the thinking ours? Is it accurate? Does it serve the reader? And is a human willing to stand behind every word?

If we can get those things right, I’m not too worried about whether Claude helped fix a few sentences along the way, watermark or no watermark.

Neville Hobson: Hmm. We have talked about this before — this kind of weird obsession so many people seem to have with trying to figure out whether someone used AI to write a piece so they can exclaim with great glee, “Yeah, this guy wrote this. It’s 96 percent AI. He didn’t write it at all. It’s a scam, it’s fake,” blah, blah, blah.

Shel Holtz: Yeah.

Neville Hobson: We’re already seeing it happen with this. Someone wrote the other day about this, “Finally, a way to get rid of AI slop.”

What? I mean, isn’t —

Shel Holtz: No.

Neville Hobson: It isn’t going to do that. This obsession isn’t going to stop, I don’t think.

And, in fact, maybe the best thing out of the Clay principles is taking the focus away from that and moving it to the writing, to authorship, to accountability, as you point out.

The caution, I would say, is don’t obsess about this. Don’t set concrete rules that are so inflexible that you’re going to end up with writing that isn’t flexible at all.

The point, I guess, is to concentrate on the actual writing. Think about what it is that you’re writing.

So let’s move away from “Did you use AI to write this?” to something like, “What was your contribution to this?”

That, to me, is a healthier discussion to have.

There are still going to be lots of people who do the “gotcha” talk. I saw one today on LinkedIn: “I would never hire someone who uses AI to copywrite. That kind of approach isn’t for my team,” and stuff like that.

I think asking what your contribution was encourages accountability, whereas “Did you use AI to write this?” is all about concealment and policing — discovering that someone did and assuming or implying that they’ve cheated somehow.

That said, I think the point that you need to stand behind every idea and sentence is absolutely spot on. And that’s not new. We should have been doing that all along.

That’s probably the right way to approach it.

For example, don’t ask Claude to write something: “Here’s a topic. Write a 1,200-word piece arguing that communicators need to take responsibility for AI governance.”

Claude produces it, you might edit two or three sentences, and you’re done. You publish it under your name. That is substantially AI-generated writing, and the watermark is relevant.

But for what, though? So someone could say, “Gotcha”?

You don’t know what that was for. You don’t know what’s wrong with that. Has someone deceived you? I suppose, by implication, if it’s under their name, they have deceived you in that they wrote it. They didn’t; the AI wrote it.

But what’s the difference between that and, as a comparison, Grammarly or something like that, which suggests paragraph changes and you accept every single one of its recommendations? You end up with something that’s then 70 to 80 percent Grammarly, as opposed to you.

Better, though, to avoid ethical issues and accusations and all that stuff, is that you do the writing. Don’t dump the stuff on the AI. You do the writing and introduce your own thinking to this.

Have the AI — Claude or whatever it might be — check it. Ask it to proofread it. Ask it, “Is there any other angle I could have incorporated in this?” or “Do you think this is the right approach?”

I do that a lot with the stuff that I write. And I must admit, probably two out of three times, I’ll accept some of the recommendations the chatbot comes back with.

Sorry, the AI assistant comes back with. I don’t call it chatbot.

Shel Holtz: Ha ha ha.

Neville Hobson: And there I just slipped up. I did.

So I think we’ll have to weather the gotchas all the time, and so be it. But if you are confident in doing the writing, using your AI assistant as the guide for you — as, in a sense, the editor that sits by your side, the critiquer that tells you what it thinks and where you could improve this or don’t say that — follow guidelines such as Clay has done, and you should be okay.

Shel Holtz: Yeah. The piece on Clay’s writing policy makes the point, as I mentioned, that writing is thinking. Writing is the way we process our thoughts and test our thoughts.

And this is a point that I think a lot of people have made. In fact, I just read this in The New York Times. I think it was over the weekend. I think it was an op-ed that was exhorting people to please, for God’s sake, write your own stuff because we don’t want to lose the ability to think.

The problem is, I think most of these proclamations come from writers. You and I are writers, and the communities that we interact with on LinkedIn in particular are probably also writers. We’re connected to people who are engaged in communications, and hence you get the opposition to using AI to write.

But again, what about an accountant? What about an engineer?

There are so many jobs out there where being a really good writer was never a requirement when these folks were earning their degrees or their certificates. And now, because they’re in the business world, they have to communicate effectively.

So how do you go about the thinking process?

No, you don’t want to delegate it to AI. You don’t want to say, “Write an email about X” or “Write a blog post about X.” You want to think it through.

But does that mean you think it through by writing? Well, not if you’re not a writer, necessarily.

You may think it through by creating an outline, by doing a brain dump. It could even be — this is something Chris Penn talks about a lot — just recording your thoughts as audio and then uploading that file and saying, “These are my thoughts. Now turn this into a coherent email to this audience designed to produce this result.”

Then you go back and you review it and edit it so that you can defend every sentence, every word.

Again, I think this is all about respect for the reader. And if the way you demonstrate respect for the reader, knowing that you’re a terrible writer, is using AI, that’s appropriate.

If you just knock out this email, people are going to go, “What is he talking about? I don’t know what he’s trying to get at here.”

Respect for the reader is using the AI to make that message clearer, more cogent, more understandable, and more actionable.

So, again, I really like those four pillars.

And I think there undoubtedly will be ways to defeat the Claude watermark. People will come up with them. Anything that is designed to catch people is something somebody else is going to come up with a way to circumvent.

In the meantime, though, as you say, this is not a surefire way to catch somebody. It’s going to identify that Claude processed this, not that Claude wrote it.

So I think people need to calm down and start thinking about this tool in a way that provides the high-quality content that you’re trying to deliver to people — not just something polished that makes them have to figure out what you intended because it’s polished but no thinking went into it.

The thinking still has to go into it, whether Claude’s going to do the lion’s share of the writing or not.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. I mean, I think the interesting distinction is between AI-generated and AI-assisted writing. Although I add my own caveat to that, which is: Who cares?

I mean, truly, do I want to get into a discussion about that? No, I do not.

So I know the difference. I’m not evangelizing that everyone should understand and follow the difference, although it’s helpful to.

For example, using Claude, you give Claude a short prompt — it’s not Cowork, by the way; this is just the chat — and it produces an article.

You tell it, “I want to write about X, and the topic is this, and I want to achieve this. These are the points I want to make.” Maybe not even as much as that. And Claude produces, you know, a 600-word draft, and you lightly edit it.

Lightly meaning maybe you change not the syntax so much, but certain expressive words that you might use. If that’s your bag, sure. Although you would have given —

Shel Holtz: Or adding the Oxford comma.

Neville Hobson: — your AI assistant the guidance about your preference on the Oxford comma.

Shel Holtz: Presumably, yeah.

Neville Hobson: It would know.

So you do that. On the other hand, if you’ve already developed the argument, you’ve already got a clear picture in your mind, you’ve researched it, you’ve used Claude to challenge or improve your thinking, and you make the editorial decisions yourself, that’s another matter entirely.

That, I believe, is AI-assisted writing.

So, as we mentioned earlier in the discussion, the better question isn’t, “Did you use AI?” but, “What was your intellectual contribution?”

So, writing is thinking. Yeah, I don’t disagree with that. Although, again, I don’t want to get hung up on having definitions all over the place about this.

The danger is real of turning this into another policing technology, which many people are already starting to do.

I did see in Anthropic’s FAQ about watermarking where they say, in answer to the question, “How do I check if a piece of text was written by Claude?”, “We will soon be offering a watermark detection API. We’re in the process of working out the details of its implementation.”

So that’s coming.

That’ll give those gotcha people a lot more ammo to say “gotcha” a lot more, I bet. It just takes attention away from what really matters with all of this.

But, you know, like a lot of things that are new, we have to go through all this.

So my recommendation is: Don’t give it too much attention. Be sure in your own mind that what you’re doing is, in your definition, the right way of going about it. You feel confident that it is. You have guidelines to follow, such as Clay’s, for instance, so you are able to say, “Yep, these four things — I do these things in all my approaches to this.”

In which case, you can wave two fingers at the gotchas.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, and I can’t emphasize this enough: The detection is not going to be focused on whether Claude wrote this. It’s whether it processed it.

So you could have written it and then sent it through Claude for grammar, spelling, and punctuation, and the watermark will show up, even though you wrote it.

So the gotcha is, I think, a little disingenuous in a lot of cases.

I mean, it could be that somebody used it to write, for sure, but it’s not a sure thing. It’s not a lock that if the detector says, “Yes, Claude processed this,” then, “Aha! You wrote this with AI.”

Not necessarily. It doesn’t mean that at all.

Neville Hobson: But even if he did, so what? If someone says that, do I care? Not at all.

Shel Holtz: Well, and again, I come back to the engineer or the accountant who wants to be understood and is not a writer.

I think that’s where this tool shines and where we have opportunities for better clarity and better understanding in the workplace.

Do I expect my professional writers to write? Yeah, absolutely.

Do I expect my accountants to write? My lawyers? Not necessarily.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. I mean, I think there’s one other thing about this, too.

I did read Anthropic’s technical paper describing what this is and how it works. I’m going to have to actually ask Claude to simplify this — give it to me in simple terms so I can understand it well.

Shel Holtz: Ask Claude. No, better yet, ask ChatGPT to do it.

Neville Hobson: Because it talks about, for instance, let’s say you asked Claude to write a piece. You briefed Claude, it did that, you edited it, passed it back to Claude, it made some recommendations, which you implemented, including removing a chunk. You passed it back to Claude again.

You went to and fro a bit, and you might then have — let’s say it’s an article for an academic journal, for instance — passed it to a colleague, saying, “Can you review this and give me your opinion?”

They did, and you made some further changes as a result.

The end result of all of that is so muddy that Claude would have — or rather, the watermarking wouldn’t be clear as to who wrote which bits and so forth.

You could pinpoint where the words came from, but you couldn’t pinpoint who the author was.

In which case, the gotcha folks are not going to be happy with that. But, you know, just get on with it, for God’s sake, and stop all this stuff.

Shel Holtz: Yeah. And you don’t know which words it selected to accommodate this watermarking. If your edit changes them, then the watermark vanishes.

So again, no guarantees here at all.

This is compliance with the EU AI law. That’s all it is.

By the way, I think you can expect to see the other frontier models follow suit, also to be in compliance with the EU AI law.

So the fact that only Anthropic is doing this so far —

Neville Hobson: Undoubtedly.

Shel Holtz: — doesn’t mean that you won’t see it in ChatGPT and Gemini and even maybe Grok. We’ll see.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. I mean, they talk about retrofitting this to earlier versions of Claude, and that makes total sense to me.

You are right. I believe it would make no sense if Claude was the only one doing this. So we’ll expect news from the others.

But in the meantime, my suggestion to everyone is: Don’t worry about this. Be true to yourself.

Read Clay’s guidelines — what are they called? I can’t remember. It’s kind of a policy, writing policy.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, policy. Writing policy. AI writing policy, yeah.

Neville Hobson: Okay.

And there’ll be others adding to this and saying, “Here’s my version,” and so forth. So you can pick what’s best.

But just focus on your writing.

One of the points that comes out of this is absolutely right: You do the writing. Don’t just say, “Give me a 1,200-word article on whatever topic.”

That’s the best approach, and that has been the case since before this topic emerged.

Shel Holtz: And that will be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #526: Forget Anthropic’s AI Watermark. Can You Defend Every Sentence? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

We have been hearing about work slop for a while now, and evidence is mounting that it can create long-term problems for companies. Yet we are hearing very little (if anything) about what businesses are doing about it. There’s new research, which Neville and Shel discuss in this episode, along with some thoughts about actions companies can take.

Links from this episode:

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR is tentatively scheduled to drop on Monday, August 24.

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

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

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

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

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz

Hi, everybody, and welcome to episode number 525 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.

Neville Hobson

And I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz

And Neville, it is great to have you back on the show. You’re well enough to record again.

Neville Hobson

Yeah, it’s certainly been an interesting few weeks, including the kind of disconnection that I did from just about literally everything with this heat exhaustion that I suffered, which was quite profound and far more serious than I thought, according to the doctor.

And then the R&R, as I described it—the rest and recuperation—slotted in nicely with our existing family plans here to spend some time in Novato, Marin County, in California, which we did last week. And as some listeners will know, you and I and the family, in fact, all met together, had lunch in a delightful restaurant in San Francisco last Thursday, and took some pictures, which is what people saw.

So I’m back in the UK now. It was a worthwhile visit, and, well, here we are doing FIR again. It feels like déjà vu all over again. That’s great.

Shel Holtz

It is back to normal. I should tell people that if you’re curious about the wonderful restaurant we ate at in San Francisco, it’s called Waterbar, and my company, Webcor, built the building that it’s in. So it was fun to have you there and to say, “We built this.”

Neville Hobson

Yeah, it was. I agree. The hospitality was really good in that restaurant. Very nice service, friendly people, excellent food, of course. It’s focused on fish, so if you’re a fish connoisseur, this is the place to go in San Francisco, I would say. Yeah, really nice.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, and right on the water. You get a view of the Bay Bridge and a good part of San Francisco Bay. So, yeah, it was great to see you in person. It’s been since 2019.

Neville Hobson

Yeah, a long time.

Shel Holtz

And here we are looking at each other over Riverside, but that’s not the same.

Neville Hobson

No, the next best thing, but not the same.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, being together in real life really matters. But today’s topic is one that we were planning to discuss just before you took ill, so we’re going to return to it.

Neville Hobson

Yeah.

Shel Holtz

We’re going to return to it.

Neville Hobson

We are. And this is based on an article that caught my eye a few weeks ago in the Harvard Business Review. It was actually published back in January, but having returned to it, I think it’s even more relevant than it was then.

The title of the article is “Why People Create AI ‘Workslop’—and How to Stop It.” Timely topic, I’d say. The authors use the term “workslop” to describe low-effort, AI-generated work that looks polished on the surface but ends up shifting the real work onto whoever receives it.

We’ve probably all seen examples: reports full of generic language, presentations that say a great deal without saying very much, emails that are technically fine but leave you wondering what the sender actually thinks.

Since that article appeared, the wider idea of AI slop has become much more prominent. We’re hearing the term applied to the flood of cheap, AI-generated material appearing on social networks, in publishing, marketing, and elsewhere. There’s even research suggesting that people increasingly use “AI slop” as a judgment about authenticity. Something doesn’t necessarily have to be AI-generated to be dismissed as slop; it just has to feel like it.

Perhaps the most useful new evidence comes from research by the Society for Human Resource Management, SHRM, the world’s largest professional association dedicated to the practice of human resources management. Published in June, SHRM’s Navigating AI in the Workplace: 2026, based on more than 5,000 U.S. workers, found that 41% use AI at work, and 44% of those users describe at least some of their output as AI slop. Early-career employees feel the greatest pressure to adopt AI. SHRM also found greater engagement and commitment where organizations take an open approach to AI integration.

What interested me most about the HBR article was its argument about why workslop happens inside organizations. The authors suggest that it isn’t fundamentally an AI problem at all. It’s a leadership problem.

Many organizations are telling employees simply to use AI without defining what success looks like, without giving people sufficient guidance or confidence, and without creating an environment where it’s safe to experiment, ask questions, or admit uncertainty.

In that environment, people can end up optimizing for appearing to use AI rather than actually using it well. Putting it simply, the article says it’s the result of unclear AI mandates and overwhelmed teams. Leaders are issuing vague directives for employees to start using extremely powerful tools, while many of those employees are overburdened, psychologically depleted, and operating in environments where it doesn’t feel safe to admit uncertainty or ask for help.

Evidence published since the HBR article seems to reinforce rather than undermine that argument. We’re seeing more research showing significant numbers of employees encountering poor-quality, AI-generated work while, at the same time, employees are under increasing pressure to demonstrate that they’re using AI.

There’s another dimension to this that I think is particularly interesting: productivity.

Imagine that something that previously took me two hours to produce now takes me 20 minutes with AI. That’s a significant productivity gain for me. But suppose I send it to Shel—to you—and you then spend an hour trying to understand what I mean, checking my claims, and correcting some mistakes that I hadn’t spotted. Have we actually improved productivity, or have I simply transferred the cost of my work to Shel?

That’s essentially what workslop does. And some recent research into AI-assisted work describes this as a kind of tragedy of the commons. Individuals can appear more productive while imposing additional costs on everybody else.

If an organization measures AI adoption, output volume, or individual efficiency rather than the performance of the whole system, workslop might actually look like successful AI transformation.

That struck a chord because it echoes something we’ve discussed on FIR more than once. Whenever we hear stories about AI failing in organizations, the technology itself often isn’t the real issue. AI has a remarkable ability to expose weaknesses that were already there: unclear leadership, poor communication, lack of trust, unrealistic expectations, and organizations measuring activity rather than outcomes.

And there’s an important question of individual responsibility here, too. Poor leadership may create the conditions for workslop, but that doesn’t absolve the person who sends it. If I knowingly send something I haven’t properly considered or checked simply because an AI produced it, that’s also a failure of professional judgment.

So perhaps workslop isn’t really the diagnosis at all. Perhaps it’s a symptom.

Is AI creating a new workplace problem, or is it simply shining a very bright light on old management problems? What happens when leaders measure AI adoption instead of better decisions, better collaboration, and better business outcomes? And as AI makes producing apparently polished work almost effortless, does human judgment actually become more important rather than less?

The Harvard Business Review article may now be seven months old, but the questions it raises are becoming more urgent, not less. Shel?

Shel Holtz

Without question. And there—

Neville Hobson

Mm.

Shel Holtz

—there is newer research. I found work done by the Work AI Institute. They did a 2026 research project called The Work AI Index. And in addition to workslop, they have a new term in there called “botshitting.” I kid you not.

Neville Hobson

Ha ha ha.

Shel Holtz

Botshitting describes employees knowingly shipping AI output they believe is wrong. And 12% of employees who were surveyed for this research admit to doing this. Interestingly, when they are basically caught, they blame AI. They say, “The AI did this.” Forty percent of workers blame the AI rather than themselves.

There was also a study in January 2026 from Workday. Some 3,200 leaders found that 37% of AI productivity gains are immediately lost to rework because the workslop isn’t adequate, with employees spending an average of six hours a week correcting or rewriting flawed AI content.

Built In reported workslop now affects roughly 40% of employees and costs about $186 per worker per month. And there was a more recent study—BetterUp sourced this figure—that found that 66% of workers are spending six-plus hours every week fixing AI errors. So this is serious stuff.

And by the—

Neville Hobson

Mm.

Shel Holtz

—way, nearly every recent report on workslop ties this to layoffs associated with AI. Workers and outlets are connecting 2026 tech job cuts to premature AI-driven headcount reduction. And the workers who are left behind are absorbing that workslop rework burden. So we cut people to use AI; now the survivors are—

Neville Hobson

Mm.

Shel Holtz

—cleaning up after it. That’s an important framing to look at.

And one last thing I’ll mention from some research—this was just from June of this year. They found that the errors in workslop go beyond the work that somebody else needs to do to correct it. It moves downstream through teams and into the organization’s collective knowledge base. And that knowledge base just deteriorates.

So it’s not just individual wasted hours, but this slow erosion of what the organization actually knows to be true. This is a very serious problem, and I don’t see a lot being said about measures that organizations are taking to address it. I think some measures need to be taken pretty soon, or this is going to get out of control.

Neville Hobson

Yeah. The Harvard Business Review article does have some suggestions about what organizations can do to address it, which I’ll mention in a minute. But they also include some examples. I found these rather interesting. Not a whole lot—three only—but nevertheless, they talk about the toxic effect workslop can have on workplace dynamics, breeding mistrust and leading team members to think less of the sender’s intelligence and trustworthiness, among other traits.

They talk about their ongoing research, where they’ve heard a number of examples of workslop seeding ill will, eroding trust, and generally having a corrosive effect on workplace morale.

There’s one where I thought, I can imagine this. One example they give is an employee at a technology company who told the Harvard Business Review that he’d noticed the tone in his performance review was unlike his manager, and that the document recycled content from his self-evaluation. The experience made him feel unvalued and underappreciated, and he gave up all hope that he would ever be promoted.

So, reading between the lines, what happened? Whoever did that grabbed some of the employee’s self-evaluation and had an AI produce the review. I bet that’s what happened there.

We don’t know the details behind that, but that’s a really good example of what you could see happening in an environment where there is a lack of clarity, all those things the Harvard Business Review points out, and the pressure to deliver in some form or another.

So, for instance, doing an employee evaluation would come into that area where the manager has cut corners and used AI to do it. And I could imagine that is happening a lot.

And in relation to the examples that the Harvard Business Review piece includes, they say something quite interesting. Many of the responses focused on the productivity costs—the time people wasted dealing with each instance of workslop that crossed their desks. But they note that what should really worry leaders is the impact workslop can have on human relationships.

And I think that’s a point to hammer home. It’s a kind of soft thing. You don’t necessarily see it, but it’s there. And some of these examples make that very clear indeed. So that’s a manifestation of the management failure behind all of this, Shel, don’t you think?

Shel Holtz

I do. And I think it’s because we’ve been rushing headlong into this rather than pausing to strategize it.

And I think we’ve talked about that deterioration of human relationships once before. The situation is that people are not picking up the phone or sending an email off to the local subject-matter expert because Claude has the answer. ChatGPT has the answer. So you’re getting less of that interaction within the organization.

This is causing people to assume some of the work that is outside their area of expertise, outside their lane, if you will, instead of reaching out to the people in the organization who actually have that expertise so they can do the work that previously was part of their job.

Another interesting thing you noted was that somebody felt this was leading to a lack of promotion opportunity.

Neville Hobson

Mm.

Shel Holtz

I’m reading a book right now, an excellent book. We were talking about it before we started recording. It’s called Robot-Proof. And one of the things she talks about is this economic phenomenon of deprofessionalization, where AI takes on a certain amount of the work, and therefore you, as the professional, don’t need to know or do as much as you did before.

And it lowers your overall value. It pushes the wage down for people who are doing that. The author, Vivienne Ming, uses an analogy of Jiffy Lube, which in the U.S. is a place where people take their cars to have their oil changed.

And she says, “What if colonoscopies worked that way?” You don’t need a doctor to do a lot of this work because a lot of the work in a colonoscopy is pretty routine and AI can do that. Now you need just the Jiffy Lube guy there to take the hose and do—

Neville Hobson

Yeah.

Shel Holtz

—the insertion, looking at the camera to make sure it’s right. But that’s more of a technical skill than a deep medical skill that is taught in medical school and then honed over years of experience and practice.

And this is the road I think we’re headed down if we don’t take some steps to fix it. The people who were brought into an organization based on education and years of experience and subject-matter expertise, and perhaps even thought leadership, no longer need all that stuff. They just need to do the base-level effort that is required by a human following the instructions of the AI.

So I think organizations need to look at this very seriously: how this work gets done, what is required of the outputs, and having guardrails in place to make sure that people aren’t skirting around it.

Because let’s face it, if the cost of producing this stuff continues to drop, there’s an incentive on the part of the organization to go ahead and use this because the cost is lower. It’s hard to see the impact of that on sales and reputation in the short term. In the long term, I think it absolutely will have that impact.

Neville Hobson

Yeah, I’d say you’re right. I mean, one thing that I’ve been talking about all year in everything I’ve written or said about artificial intelligence in organizations is that it’s about the people, not the technology.

If we’re implementing AI or doing a rollout or planning it, or telling people, “Use AI,” as a leader, you have the responsibility to make that as crystal clear as possible and focus on the people.

So one of the things I did like about the Harvard piece was the concluding remarks they make, starting with this: “The greatest irony of all is, to make AI work at work, we need to get better at being human.”

Absolutely spot on.

Leaders need to make space for the unpolished, slower but more rewarding work of human collaboration. Without organizational changes that enable agency and trust rather than AI mandates for overburdened teams, we’ll all drown in the sludge of workslop.

A very well-put concluding statement, I think. But the serious element of that is something that, in my opinion, I’m amazed that leaders don’t seem to get at all.

They talk about efficiencies. They talk about cost savings. They talk about all these things, and yet there’s nothing about: How do we help employees become more productive themselves and develop themselves, too? How do we help them, in a sense, augment their skills using AI?

Now, that’s not to say—and I’m not suggesting for a second—that AI leaders generally just don’t think about that at all. I believe they do, but it’s way down the priority list in terms of how they communicate this. They need to get that to the top of the priority list.

But more than just talk about it, they need to put these things in place. And there are many things they can do. There’s, in a sense, rebuilding trust with people.

We’ve talked about examples in recent episodes of layoffs that are very clear to see. People are talking about them all the time, and that is happening. We talked about a really great one a few episodes back about what Ford Motor Company is doing with the graybeards. Lovely name. We’ll pass on the age—

Shel Holtz

Mm-hmm.

Neville Hobson

—thing on that. But it’s about the organizational collective memory people have of how things are done and what worked in the past, among people who were laid off and are gone.

So they rehired a whole bunch, and they’ve benefited hugely, as the articles we cited go into in some detail, including, I believe, if I recall, Shel, they were the number-one automaker for a particular reason that they attribute directly to rehiring all these graybeards.

So that is a great way of doing it. But it’s just one example. There are undoubtedly more fundamental things organizationally that people can do to rebuild this connection between the organization and the people who make up that organization—the employees, mostly.

So there’s a lot of work to be done. And yet none of this is rocket science to leaders at all, I don’t believe. Just because we’ve got this newfangled technology on the scene, you’re telling people to start using it without giving them the proper guidance.

So these, to me, are Leadership 101 things. And if no one’s doing this, then communicators, let’s step up to the plate and help. That’s what I think we should be doing.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, absolutely. And I have been reading more and more research that talks about what happens when you delegate your thinking to AI.

Rather than doing the research yourself and the writing yourself, which helps you think through the issue, it actually has an impact on your ability to think and to learn. So there are a lot of reasons I think that we need to take this seriously.

I think the first thing communicators need to do inside their organizations is raise the alarm. Because I think this may be an issue where everybody’s heard “slop” and everybody’s heard “workslop,” but I don’t know that everybody in the organization—especially the decision-makers—is up to speed on what the research is saying about all of this and the deleterious impact it can have on our organizations and the outputs that we produce.

So, yeah, I think sharing this data—and we will have links to the research in the show notes—and making the people who make the decisions aware of what this could mean to the future reputation and earnings of the organization is the place to start.

Neville Hobson

Yeah, I agree.

So, simply, there are good tips in this discussion. The links to the articles—please read them. They’re really, really useful. You’ll find a lot of insights in all the ones that we’ll have in the show notes. So there you’ve got your route map, I would say.

Shel Holtz

And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #525: The Consequences Businesses Will Face from Work Slop appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Most companies are experiencing some level of turmoil over their adoption of Artificial Intelligence. They should be able to lean on their managers to interpret these issues at the ground level. Research, however, finds that training has left managers out. They may be getting some of the same training all employees are getting, but nothing to help them guide their teams. That will become more and more problematic as challenges continue to mount—like the two issues that have emerged recently: companies shifting the models they’re using, and employees stepping out of their areas of expertise because AI can give them information they would normally turn to internal subject matter experts for.

Links from this episode:

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR is tentatively scheduled to drop on Monday, August 24.

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

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

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

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

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz:

When companies change something they’ve been extolling for the last six months, managers are expected to support that change. When employees step outside their lane, managers are supposed to manage that. But can managers do these things when they haven’t been prepared?

That’s the case with some of the fallout from the introduction of artificial intelligence in organizations. The details are coming up in this short midweek episode of For Immediate Release.

Hi, everybody, and welcome to episode 524 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz, and you’ve got just me again this week.

I have three artificial intelligence stories to share with you. Organizational communicators are going to have to live at the intersection of all three of these issues, whether we’re ready or not, so let’s tackle them as parts of a bigger whole.

I’ll dive into these stories right after this.

Let’s start with the whiplash.

For the past year or so, companies have been in what some have come to call the “token-maxing era”: Throw AI at everything, reward employees for burning through as many tokens as possible, and worry about the ROI later.

Nvidia’s Jensen Huang was quoted as saying that if your half-million-dollar engineer isn’t burning $250,000 in tokens, something’s amiss. Meta reportedly ran an internal competition rewarding token usage.

That was the mood last spring.

Summer’s mood is different.

The Associated Press—and, by the way, this same reporting ran in The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and elsewhere—describes companies now hitting a wall. Costs went up, productivity didn’t keep pace, and the bill is coming due.

We covered this in episode 517 back in early June, but just as a reminder: Uber blew through its entire annual AI budget in four months, according to its CTO, and has since rolled out spending tiers starting at $1,500 a month per employee.

Some companies aren’t just tightening budgets; they’re switching platforms entirely. One AI startup called Lindy moved 100% of its traffic off Claude and onto DeepSeek, the cheaper Chinese alternative. Its CEO told CNBC that the cost curve “crashed to the ground.”

Multiply that kind of switch across every company currently having the same conversation, and you’ve got a specific communication problem: How do you explain to a workforce that, after spending months enthusiastically evangelizing one tool, you’re now moving employees to a different one—possibly overnight—for reasons that are mostly financial and don’t actually involve the employees who have been building things on the original tool?

That’s problem number one.

Problem number two is going to make problem number one look simple, because it’s not just about which tool people use. It’s about what people are allowed to do with it.

Axios got an exclusive look at new OpenAI research drawn from more than 800,000 work-related ChatGPT messages from business users. The finding is that workers are routinely doing other people’s jobs.

Roughly 44% of occupation-specific requests involve tasks typically associated with a different profession. After stripping out generic activities such as drafting emails, customer service employees, designers, and HR professionals are the biggest boundary crossers. Something like three-quarters of their profession-specific prompts touch work that belongs to somebody else’s job title.

People are using ChatGPT to draft marketing materials, troubleshoot software, run financial calculations, and interpret regulations—jobs that used to require reaching out to a specialist for help.

OpenAI’s chief economist told Axios that the boundaries between jobs are already becoming more flexible because of this.

Now, if you’re in communications, you can probably already hear the governance questions stacking up.

Who’s accountable when a well-meaning employee uses AI to draft something that touches legal, financial, or regulatory territory in which they have no training?

What happens to your carefully built subject-matter-expert review process when everyone feels like a generalist?

And when something goes wrong because of bad advice, off-brand sentiment, or a compliance miss, who owns that failure? Is it the employee, the tool, or the manager for not seeing it coming?

That brings us to the third piece, and honestly, it’s the one that worries me most.

HR Dive reported on new research from Indeed and YouGov. The headline number is that 43% of managers say they feel poorly equipped—or not equipped at all—to lead a workforce that’s fluent in AI.

More than half of workers say they’re not getting the AI training they need. Employer expectations for what workers should be doing with AI are running two or three times ahead of what workers actually feel comfortable doing.

Indeed pointed out that companies have spent two years building AI-ready workforces. The next challenge—and arguably the harder one—is building AI-ready leaders.

Now, put these three stories together and you get a pretty clear picture.

Companies are going to keep switching models and vendors as the economics shift. Employees are going to keep wandering across job boundaries because the tools make that easy and, honestly, tempting.

The people standing in the middle of both trends—the frontline managers who must explain the switch, catch the boundary problems, and answer the “Wait, am I even allowed to do this?” questions in real time—are the group companies have prepared the least.

That is a communication problem, and it’s ours to fix.

If managers don’t understand why the company moved off the model they spent six months championing, they can’t credibly explain it to their teams. They’ll either go silent, which breeds suspicion, or they’ll improvise, which is worse.

If managers don’t have clear guardrails explaining what kinds of AI-assisted work outside someone’s lane are acceptable and what kinds require a specialist’s involvement, they’ll either rubber-stamp everything or block everything. Neither option serves the business.

And if leadership training lags this far behind workforce adoption, managers become the bottleneck at exactly the moment the company needs them to be the translators and interpreters.

Here are three things I’d be pushing for internally right now:

First, build the change narrative for platform and model switches before you need it. Develop a plain-language explanation of why these decisions happen that managers can use without having to invent their own justification on the spot.

Second, give managers an actual decision framework for cross-boundary AI use. Provide a simple test for determining when an employee’s AI-assisted work needs specialist review so managers aren’t left guessing.

Third, take the Indeed numbers to leadership. Make the case that you can’t roll out AI training for the frontline while skipping the people who manage the frontline.

It’s the difference between an AI rollout that sticks and one that quietly falls apart at the manager layer.

Thanks for putting up with a lone voice again this week. With luck, Neville will be back in the saddle next week.

As I mentioned last week, Neville and I are set to have lunch in San Francisco on Thursday. It’s the first time we’ll have seen each other face-to-face in almost seven years, if I’m remembering correctly. I’m looking forward to that. Watch for photos.

And that’s a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #524: Are Managers Ready to Lead an AI-Fluent Workforce? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Neville has been ill and unable to record, so Shel is on his own in this episode (except for Dan York’s Tech Report). This shorter-than-usual monthly long-form episode includes reports on rethinking thought leadership, maintaining “brand sovereignty” in the AI era, and whether hedging in your communication can serve a useful purpose. Dan’s report was recorded in Vienna, Austria, where AI was front and center at the 126th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force. Dan also reports on Bluesky’s Attie AI feature, Instagram’s plans to charge for AI access, Beehiv’s new community feature, WordPress’s plans for version 7.1, and some UK social media regulatory updates.

xx

Links from this episode:

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR is tentatively scheduled to drop on Monday, August 24.

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

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

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

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

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz

It’s an unusual FIR episode today, with just me and three reports for this long-form installment.

Thought leadership isn’t what it used to be—or at least it shouldn’t be what it used to be. With AI summaries increasingly becoming the way people get the information they’re looking for, how do you maintain your brand’s sovereignty over the information that gets shared about it?

And do you hedge in your communications? There’s actually research into whether hedging is a good or a bad thing.

That’s what’s coming your way in this shorter-than-usual monthly long-form episode of For Immediate Release.

Hi, everybody, and welcome to episode number 523 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz in Concord, California. This is our monthly long-form episode for July 2026, and I am on my own.

You may have noticed that we didn’t post a short midweek episode last week. Neville has been quite ill, with an infection in his chest and some other issues, some of them related to the ridiculously intense heat they have been suffering in England. It has kept him from being able to record.

He is planning a trip to the U.S.—here to the Bay Area, in fact. We are scheduled to have lunch on my birthday while he’s here, and right now he is focused on doing everything his doctor has told him to do so he can make that trip. That’s a decision I fully support.

It has been way too long since Neville and I have seen each other face to face in the same room. I am really, really looking forward to it. I hope you’ll join me in wishing him a speedy recovery.

Rather than skip this episode, I’ve decided to do it on my own. We used to do this fairly routinely back in the day, when both of us were full-time consultants and traveled a lot to meet with clients.

Frequently, one of us wouldn’t be available on the day we were recording. The other would record solo, or occasionally, if I had enough notice, I would find a guest co-host.

But today, you get just me.

At this point, we usually start with Neville providing a wrap-up of the episodes we’ve recorded since our last monthly long-form installment. I will take that on, along with a comment or two we have received related to those episodes.

Episode 520 was our long-form episode for June. It covered the PR meltdown that was going on among the big AI frontier labs.

There were five other topics, including one about Wowcher, a U.K. coupon company that sent an email with a promotional statement that upset just about everybody.

It was related to a young child who had been picked up and put into a crocodile enclosure and was in critical condition, the last I heard. Wowcher’s email said, “Snap up these deals quicker than a croc can catch a kid.”

Yes, if you didn’t hear the episode and you’re hearing this for the first time, this is not a joke. This is not The Onion. This was a real promotional message from the company, and it got hammered over it.

Tim Sutton left a comment saying:

“Your closing line is the whole thing, Shel. The ‘AI approved it’ defense itself is never enough. An approval step is not bureaucracy. It’s where a human asks the question no machine thinks to ask: How does this read on the worst possible day? Strip it out to move faster, and you have not saved time; you have removed the brake. I have seen the aftermath.”

Episode 521 focused on Ford rehiring people it had previously let go, ostensibly because AI would be able to do their jobs. AI was not able to do their jobs.

Rick Segal found it interesting that Microsoft, his alma mater from the 1990s, had decided to let the graybeards and their institutional knowledge walk out the door through early retirement rather than undertake the hard-core and honest “Oops, we overhired” cuts.

The decades of knowledge walking out Redmond’s door, he said, are going to be felt eventually.

Eric Carroll replied to Rick, saying:

“They will pay for replacing expertise with engines of mass satisficing. Just as you say, how long will the blast take to propagate? From what I am hearing and seeing, the return on misinvestment is way faster than I expected.”

Episode 522 was about Podcasting 2.0, a new set of protocols Adam Curry is working on with an engineering colleague named Dave Jones.

We talked about whether this would be good for podcasting and podcast listeners, the likelihood of widespread adoption, and some of the obstacles standing in its way.

Vincent Bruneau wrote:

“The slower-than-hoped-for adoption is the most interesting part of the Podcasting 2.0 story. Richer metadata, transcripts, chapters, and better accessibility are genuinely useful features. So why hasn’t it moved faster? That gap between good technology and actual adoption is always where the real communication lesson lives.”

Juraj Schaefer, a podcast producer and editor, wrote:

“Interesting perspective. As podcasting evolves, ownership, discoverability, and meaningful connections will become even more important.”

And Dakshina Senadheera, a podcast editor and manager, shared this thought:

“Interesting conversation, especially around keeping podcasting open while improving the listener experience.”

Thanks to everybody who commented on our previous episodes. You are always welcome to comment.

You can leave comments on LinkedIn, where we announce the episodes, as everybody whose comment I read today did.

You can also send us an audio or text comment by email at [email protected]. You can record a comment directly from the FIR website, FIRPodcastNetwork.com, by clicking the “Send Voicemail” button on the right-hand side of the screen.

Or you can leave a comment in our show notes. There are all kinds of ways you can comment and participate in the show.

I also want to let you know that the interview we did with Pete Blackshaw about the Answer Economy is now available.

It has been getting some really good reactions. People have found real value in this discussion about how AI answers are now the answers people are getting about your product, regardless of where the information the frontier models accumulated came from.

You can find that in FIR Interviews.

The latest episode of Circle of Fellows is also available. Episode 131 is about the evolving media landscape and what it means for media relations.

Our panelists included Diana Degan, a new IABC Fellow from the 2026 class of Fellows, along with Ned Lundquist, Martha Muzychka, and Jennifer Wah.

They talked about whom we reach out to when there are fewer reporters available to tell our stories through the mainstream and trade press we have been accustomed to.

The next episode, coming up on the third Thursday in August at 6 p.m. Eastern, is about AI and the kinds of pivots communicators will have to make as AI becomes a more widely used tool in the communication toolkit.

The panelists will be Bonnie Caver, Adrian Cropley, Theomary Karamanis, and Mike Klein. I’m looking forward to that.

Now I have three reports, as I usually do in the monthly long-form episode of FIR. You just don’t get three from Neville.

As I mentioned earlier, this is going to be a shorter episode than usual.

Two pieces landed in the search press recently that I think belong together, even though they were written a few weeks apart by people who probably weren’t talking to each other.

The first is by Bill Hunt at Search Engine Journal. Search Engine Journal has been around a long time and has been a great source of information about search and adjacent topics.

Hunt points out that, for 20 years, digital strategy meant driving people to webpages. We deliberately fragmented our information across dozens of pages, each optimized for a different stage of consideration.

The example Hunt uses is Ford and its F-150 pickup truck.

The homepage sells the lifestyle. Model pages introduce the trim levels. A configurator lets you picture yourself owning it. Feature pages handle towing and off-road performance. Specifications live even deeper in the site, next to regional offers and financing.

For a human being, that architecture is beautiful. Every page does a job.

For a machine, it’s just friction.

When an AI can’t find a dense, complete answer on your own domain, it doesn’t give up. It assembles the best answer it can from whatever is easiest to retrieve.

Consider the story that broke last week about an OpenAI model escaping from its sandbox and hacking its way into Hugging Face.

What was it looking for? It was looking for the answer sheet—the cheat sheet for the test it had been told to solve.

Rather than do the work to solve the test, it went hunting for the cheat sheet that had all the answers in one place.

That’s no different from this.

Hunt searched for the gas mileage of an F-150 Raptor. The AI Overview built its answer from Reddit, an automotive publisher, and a local dealership. It never touched the Ford website.

Ford has that number. Ford has every number.

Gemini just found it easier to assemble an answer from somewhere else where all that information was in one place.

Hunt calls the thing you’re trying to protect “brand sovereignty”: your ability to remain the authoritative source about your own products, services, and expertise, no matter where the answer eventually gets delivered.

He is emphatic that this is not a search engine optimization problem. It is a governance problem, because no single team owns the whole picture.

Product information, documentation, customer support, legal policy, and commerce are all owned by different parts of the organization. All of them shape how your organization gets represented, and they have been evolving independently for years.

His summary line is one I would hang on my wall: Your website is no longer your digital asset. Your knowledge is.

Communicators have spent 30 years arguing that the corporate website is the front door.

Hunt’s case is that the front door is now a machine reading whatever knowledge it can find. If yours is scattered across content management systems, PDFs, and support portals, the machine will find the gaps—and it will fill them from Reddit.

Meanwhile, Gaetano DiNardi, writing in Search Engine Land—not Search Engine Journal, but another great, longstanding search-focused publication—looked at what is being sold to companies that want to fix exactly this problem.

Once the industry decided that off-site brand mentions drive AI visibility, a market miraculously appeared to sell them. He audited several highly rated vendors selling brand-mention services.

What they are selling turns out to be variations on one thing: renting space on websites nobody reads.

Some of it involves placement on what the SEO world calls private blog networks. These are clusters of sites that exist for no purpose except to sell mentions and links to whoever is willing to pay for them.

DiNardi found those going for 10 to 15 times what a comparable link cost in the old SEO market.

Some of it involves placement on sites with no actual subject-matter focus.

One example he cites has a page about learning-management software sitting alongside listicles ranking the best crypto wallets. That is basically a billboard that will print anything.

Some of it is Reddit astroturfing.

Agencies use what are called aged accounts—profiles built up over months so they look like real community members—and use them to post brand mentions in subreddits that have nothing to do with the brand.

Those posts are frequently removed within 30 days for violating community rules, which tells you exactly what the communities make of them.

Then there are the mechanics.

There is a Slack workflow. The agency generates a placement opportunity. A junior marketing assistant with no way to evaluate whether the publisher is legitimate approves a fee.

In DiNardi’s example, that fee is $250 to add the mention. The agency pays the publisher and then invoices the client to recover it, on top of the retainer.

The Federal Trade Commission’s endorsement guides—and that is a U.S. agency, so these are applicable only in the U.S.—require clear disclosure of paid placements.

These pages generally are not updated to say that the mention was purchased.

Lily Ray, who is quoted in the piece, says this is another evolution of spammy link-building. We have seen this movie before, going back to Google’s first Penguin update in 2012.

The reason it appears to work right now is that large language model citation systems are still immature compared with Google’s spam detection.

Volume from low-quality sources may be rewarded in ways it would not be in old-school search.

DiNardi puts that window at perhaps one to two years before the platforms build countermeasures. He also notes that marketers chasing volume may be confusing the models about their own entities in the process.

Here is why I mashed these two stories together: They are the legitimate and illegitimate answers to exactly the same question.

Who controls what the machine says about us?

One answer says: Organize your knowledge so you are the most useful source available.

The other says: Pay strangers to say your name.

The first is a governance project, and it is the one you should be focusing on rather than waiting to be invited to participate.

Nobody else in the building has responsibility for how the organization is represented as a whole. That is within the purview of the communication function.

The second is going to show up on your desk as a pitch or proposal, probably coming from the marketing department, probably with a persuasive percentage attached to it, along with a deadline.

When it does, the questions you should ask are the old ones.

Is it disclosed?

Would we be comfortable if a reporter published the invoice?

Are we buying a spot on a page that also sells spots to our competitors?

We spent a couple of decades getting pay-for-play out of media relations. I would hate to watch us import it into AI visibility just because the metric is new.

Dan York

Greetings, Shel, Neville, and FIR listeners all around the world. It’s Dan York coming at you from Vienna, Austria, where I’ve been attending the 126th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force, or IETF.

These are the engineers and others who make the internet work through all the various protocols—HTTP, email, and all those kinds of things.

One of the big topics this week, of course, was AI. There were a number of sessions looking at what kind of work needs to be done.

For instance, in a world where everybody talks about “agentic, agentic, agentic, agentic,” do we need new protocols for communicating when an agent goes to book airfare and interact with all sorts of systems? Are new protocols needed?

Part of the genius of the internet is that it is built from small building blocks that can be used to do things and then reused in many different ways.

One of the things people are finding is that many of the existing protocols work well. But we are still trying to figure out, in this new world, what is happening and what new things are needed.

One thing happening in the standards world is the same thing we are seeing throughout the rest of the communication world: a lot of slop.

There is a positive side to this. The IETF conducts all of its work and develops all of its standards in English. If you are not an English speaker, or English is not your primary language, it can be challenging to help create new standards.

Back in the early 2000s, before we had all these new tools, I helped some people for whom English was not their primary language. It was painful because they were trying to create standards and describe how they worked, but their English was difficult to read. I helped them improve it.

Now, with these tools, people can contribute in English. They can put their material into the large language model of their choice and get good English back in the format of an internet draft or standard.

That is the positive side. Suddenly, millions or billions more people around the world are able to participate in the standards process in English.

The negative side, of course, is that people are generating so many contributions that they take a long time to triage. This creates a tremendous amount of work for reviewers, leaders within the IETF, and others. Everything is taking much longer.

We have seen this in many other areas. Put up a job advertisement and you get a bazillion applications. Publish a blog post and you get a ton of comments. All these things are happening.

One thing I had not paid as much attention to was the fact that all these email tools now have a feature that says, essentially, “Write a better email.”

People are using that feature, turning what might have been short, not particularly well-worded emails into big, voluminously long messages. That is generating a lot more traffic on the email lists people use within the IETF.

It gets us back to the situation we have seen many times: You have five bullets, feed them into an LLM, and it generates a long block of text. Then the text is too long for someone to read, so they use another LLM to turn it back into five bullets.

There we are, with the snake eating its tail.

There have been a lot of interesting conversations. We’ll see where all this goes.

Speaking of AI, a couple of other things have happened in the broader industry.

First, you may or may not have noticed that Bluesky announced Attie—A-T-T-I-E—its AI assistant. It started as something you could use to build social feeds within the Atmosphere, the broader AT Protocol ecosystem.

You could use Attie to create these feeds. Bluesky has now announced that it is expanding Attie into more of a chatbot that you can ask for information and news from across the broader Bluesky network—the Atmosphere, as it is called.

I don’t have access yet. I’m on the waiting list.

They say these are not chats. They are “quests.” Yes, you heard that right. They are quests—a new way to explore the Atmosphere.

You could ask questions such as, “What’s trending in my network today?” “Who’s worth following in climate tech?” or “Put together a daily briefing on indie game development.”

We will have to see what this looks like, how it works, and all those kinds of things. But it is another example of AI coming into the Bluesky space.

AI systems, of course, cost money to operate. Instagram chief Adam Mosseri has said this is really expensive and that the company will eventually have to throttle people or ask them to pay.

If you are a communicator who has been using Instagram’s built-in AI to generate campaign content, create images, or perform similar tasks, casual use is still free right now.

At some point, however, if you use it at high volume, you will probably wind up being charged for credits or have to take those costs into account.

Stay tuned on that.

Switching to newsletters—but remaining on the subject of AI—Beehiiv, B-E-E-H-I-I-V, one of Substack’s competitors, had a major release this month.

It rolled out something called Communities, which lets you create a community around your newsletter that people can join, where they can chat with one another and do those kinds of things.

At the same time, Beehiiv added AI components, including an AI assistant that can help you examine your content and subscribers, particularly on the administrative side.

Again, we are seeing more AI appearing in different places.

Speaking of AI—as that seems to be the theme of my report this month—I’ll also tell you that WordPress 7.1 is currently scheduled to arrive on August 19, before my next report. The timing aligns with WordCamp US here in the States.

The release will bring a number of new features, including more of the collaboration functionality that was part of the original plan for WordPress 7.0.

It will include notes and other features, along with more collaboration and AI elements. That is coming on August 19.

Finally, let me close with a policy topic.

The U.K.’s Ofcom is pursuing two different initiatives. It has announced a forthcoming ban on anyone under 16 using social media. I’m not entirely sure what that means in practice.

It has also announced that it is investigating TikTok’s compliance because it does not believe the platform did enough to prevent people under 13 from using it.

This will be a test of the U.K.’s law, so we will see where it goes when it reaches the courts.

There is also a proposal under which people younger than 16 would be banned from social media, while 16- and 17-year-olds would somehow magically be blocked from using social media between midnight and 6 a.m.

It remains to be seen how any of that can be turned into reality.

The other problem people have pointed out is that all you are doing is blocking children from seeing some of the harmful material. You are not actually getting rid of the terrible content on the internet.

Everybody else is still exposed to it, including seniors and others who may have as many issues and challenges with it—if not more—than some of the young people in that space.

Anyway, that’s all from here, Shel. I think I’ll go get some Wiener schnitzel and a beer.

Until next month, that’s all. Back to you.

Bye for now.

Shel Holtz

Thanks, Dan. I really enjoyed that report. I was particularly struck by two of the items that you reported on. The first was Addy for Blue Sky. I just really like the idea of using AI this way within social networks. That would come in so handy if I could do that with, say, LinkedIn, rather than use the current search tool, which is fundamentally worthless unless I’m just looking for a person.

Or a company, but if I’m looking for threads around certain topics, it’s really tough, and something like that would be very useful. I’m not on Bluesky enough to really make a difference, but you know, on LinkedIn, maybe even Facebook, that would be awesome. Maybe they’ll pay attention to this and follow suit. Also, beehive with the communities, I think, is terrific because building a community around a newsletter can be tough.

And I think this might signal a way that Substack and Ghost and the others might be able to play in that space. So it was all interesting, Dan, but those were the two that stood out for me.

We talk about thought leadership from time to time on FIR. It has been a tried-and-true content marketing tool for a long time.

It has also been a source of some cynicism.

A stack of research has landed over the past few months that says two things at once: Thought leadership is producing measurable financial value, and most of what organizations are publishing under the label of thought leadership is utterly worthless.

Since two things can be true at the same time, both of those things are true.

The gap between them is where the opportunity lies for those of us who do this kind of work.

Let me start with the number from Axios that got my attention in the first place.

In April, Axios reported on a study from a firm called Cardinal 40 that found high-quality CEO thought leadership was associated with an average of $367 million in shareholder value in a single week.

Here is how the researchers got to that number.

They analyzed more than 1,000 examples of CEO thought leadership from S&P 500 companies and measured each against abnormal stock returns, deliberately excluding anything tied to market-moving news or disclosures.

They were trying to isolate the effect of the words themselves.

Then they did something really interesting.

They tested more than 60 common writing traits—tone, readability, and the kinds of things we all obsess over when we are editing copy.

They found nothing that explained why some pieces outperformed.

So they used AI, because of course they did.

They compared each document with a curated canon of genuinely standout thought leadership and found that communications that sat semantically closer to that canon were associated with stronger returns.

The gap between top-tier and bottom-tier thought leadership worked out to about a nine-tenths-of-a-percentage-point swing in stock performance the following week.

For the biggest companies, that is not a rounding error.

The report estimates as much as $25 billion across the Magnificent Seven—the seven megacap U.S. technology companies: Nvidia, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Tesla.

The research also found that more thought leadership does not produce more value.

Weak or low-quality communications correlated with neutral or negative outcomes. In the age of AI slop, volume is not merely useless. It can cost you.

Compare that with The Harris Poll’s research on the ROI of thought leadership.

Nine in 10 executives say thought leadership is critical to building authority, and only 20 percent say theirs is actually effective.

Executives in that study estimated a 14-times return on investment, and Fortune 100 executives put the annual value at about $3.6 million.

I need to hedge here a little.

The Harris fieldwork was conducted in May 2022 among 500 U.S. employees at the director level or above. It is still being cited in 2026 as though it is fresh, and it is not.

Second—and this applies across the board—nearly every organization publishing research on the value of thought leadership sells thought leadership.

Harris has a thought-leadership practice. IBM’s Institute for Business Value is a thought-leadership shop. Cardinal 40 evaluates thought leadership for a living.

That does not invalidate the work, but it should temper any enthusiasm you feel about the research.

For what it is worth, IBM’s research is the most consistent of the batch.

Eighty-eight percent of executives consume thought leadership, 87 percent say it shaped a purchase decision within the previous 90 days, and about half of C-suite leaders credit it with driving revenue growth.

One more data point from the Axios piece is something I cannot stop thinking about.

Mentions of “storytelling,” “narrative,” and “storyteller” on corporate earnings and investor calls are up 65 percent since 2020, according to AlphaSense.

The language of our discipline has migrated into the language of capital markets.

It is important to treat the dollar figures as directional rather than literal. Correlation is doing a lot of work in these studies.

Coherent, original executive communication may well be a proxy for a well-run company rather than a cause of its performance.

But the through line across all this research is consistent, and it is the one you can actually act on: Quality is doing the work, and quantity is doing damage.

If the value is real, why is only 20 percent of it working?

The Content Marketing Institute brought together a group of practitioners in July to work through exactly that question: Jill Roberson from Dataweavers, Andrea Ames from Eaton, Lindsey Hagen from Conductor, and the Content Marketing Institute’s own Robert Rose, one of my favorite people to read and listen to.

I love This Old Marketing with Robert Rose and Joe Pulizzi.

Jill Roberson made a point that stood out for me: We have to reset expectations for what thought leadership even is.

Hagen’s point was that the bar has simply risen.

You have to be useful and unique now, and the standard for what qualifies as valuable is much higher than it was.

Roberson recommended putting the hypothesis at the beginning of a thought-leadership piece and making it unmistakable, then delivering on it immediately.

If people are not getting the insight they came for, and getting it quickly, they are gone.

But delivering quickly is not the same as creating quickly.

Ames’s advice was to slow down and be genuinely intentional about the topic.

Robert Rose made the observation that I suspect a lot of you have been waiting for someone senior to say out loud: Our industry has convinced itself that speed is its foundational value, and it just isn’t.

Then there is gating.

Ames said Eaton does not require contact information for its content. There are no forms you have to fill out before you get the download link.

Her reasoning is the reasoning of 2026: She wants large language models to be able to include Eaton’s thought-leadership pieces in the results they produce.

Being exclusionary, she argues, mostly hurts you.

That means the lead-capture form—which has always been a tax on distribution—is now also a tax on being cited by the systems your buyers are querying before they ever contact you.

The Content Marketing Institute also ran a piece in the fall by Abid Rahman, written with Kate Houston, who runs executive thought leadership at Amazon Web Services.

Their diagnosis is pretty blunt.

AI can draft, polish, and structure this content with remarkable efficiency, but it cannot supply credibility, lived experience, or judgment.

It reads as though anyone could have prompted it because anyone could have prompted it.

They offer three ingredients for the real thing.

The first is credible experience.

I talk about “genuine lived experience” somewhat derisively because I read people on LinkedIn saying, “AI has no lived experience,” and then I look at the kinds of things they are writing, which required absolutely no lived experience.

But in the case of thought leadership, it really does matter.

You have to have credible experience to support your ability to make these proclamations.

You also need a genuine audience need and an insight that not many other people can provide.

Then you apply a five-step framework: Define the goal. Choose the focus. Shape between one and three core themes. Build a voice ecosystem of leaders, customers, and advocates who actually have some standing. And map the stories to the right channels.

Their measurement point is one I would like to tattoo on a few people’s foreheads: Thought leadership is not an engine for marketing-qualified leads.

In one of their programs, they do not blast out content at all. They put a CEO in credible venues.

Under those circumstances, brand awareness among the ideal customer profile rose from 17 percent to 51 percent in one year, and request-for-proposal volume increased three-and-a-half times.

Could they attribute a single article to a single lead?

Of course not.

That is the honest answer most of us should be giving.

Now, a different angle.

Yogesh Shah, writing in Entrepreneur—and this goes back to January—argues that the problem is not the thinking. It is the container.

We are in a zero-click world. Audiences do not leave the platform they are on.

Roughly 90 percent of decision-makers say they are more receptive to companies producing high-quality thought leadership, yet engagement keeps declining anyway.

His question is: If a report can be summarized in ChatGPT in seconds, why would anyone read it?

His answer is what he calls experiential thought leadership.

Turn the insight into something people are in rather than something they open.

Think of a live discussion, a workshop-style webinar, a tightly curated roundtable, or a podcast that puts listeners inside a recognizable scenario instead of offering an expert monologue.

He is emphatic that this does not require a large budget. It requires one well-designed moment in which attention is protected.

You can see the tension between these two pieces of advice.

The Content Marketing Institute says to slow down and do the deep work. Entrepreneur says the document is the wrong delivery mechanism.

I do not think those ideas conflict.

There is a line in a Savanta piece from June that I think captures the entire argument in 12 words: You can replicate a product, but you can’t copy a point of view.

The case study from the author of that piece, Matthew Mott, is aimed at technology companies, but I think it applies elsewhere.

A competitor can reverse-engineer your features, match your pricing, copy your positioning, and even hire your people.

What it cannot copy is a track record of saying interesting things that turned out to be correct.

That builds slowly, and it compounds.

His second observation is that buyers cannot really evaluate an AI product.

The technology is opaque, and every vendor’s claims sound alike. Buyers stop assessing the product and start assessing the people behind it, looking for evidence of judgment.

They are conducting that assessment before they ever talk to you.

The sales conversation does not start from zero. It starts from whatever reputation you have already built.

He also argues that relatively few companies are publishing practical, original research on AI right now.

Most of what exists is either so hedged that it is useless or so optimistic that it is not credible.

In a few years, everyone will have a program, and standing out will cost far more.

So, if you are already publishing thought leadership or planning to, what does all this mean for you?

I have a list.

Of course I have a list.

First, audit your top pieces from last quarter and apply the swap test.

If a competitor could have published the same piece with its logo on it, you did not produce thought leadership. You just cranked out content.

Second, find your proprietary data.

This is where I think communicators sell themselves short.

You have more than you think: your own operational data, customer-service logs, field observations, and the ability to conduct surveys.

Survey your employees. Survey your customers. Survey the industry.

The Content Marketing Institute’s Jasmine Williams makes the case for treating thought leadership as a platform rather than a campaign.

One flagship study becomes the hub, and articles, webinars, sales enablement, and employee advocacy become the spokes.

That is a repeatable model.

Third, put the thesis in the first 60 seconds.

Not the context. Not the setup.

Put the claim in the first 60 seconds.

Fourth, reopen the gating conversation and reframe it.

It is no longer lead capture versus reach. It is lead capture versus being cited by the machines your buyers consult first.

Segment your library.

Some assets should stay gated because a download genuinely signals buying intent. But your flagship research probably should not be among them.

Fifth, take one asset you published this year and turn it into an experience: a roundtable, a working session, or a recorded session with someone who disagrees with you.

I think we call that a debate.

Sixth, change what you are measuring—and change it before someone asks you to defend it.

Measure speaking invitations. Measure journalists citing your framework. Measure analysts referencing your numbers. Measure employees sharing the work without being asked.

Denise Brosseau of the Thought Leadership Lab calls the underlying discipline “stick-to-itiveness”: the willingness to keep showing up long enough for any of that to accumulate.

Seventh, protect the executive’s actual voice.

This is the piece only we can do.

AI is a genuinely useful accelerant. It can turn an interview into an article, sharpen the structure, and catch the flabby paragraph.

What it cannot do is have a point of view.

If your CEO’s byline reads like a competent prompt response, you put your CEO’s and your company’s credibility at risk.

Let me end this segment with a little history.

The term “thought leader” is generally credited to a fellow named Joel Kurtzman, who was editing Strategy+Business back in 1994.

He meant something specific: someone addressing the questions senior executives were actually wrestling with.

More than 30 years later, the term has become a punchline.

It became one because we industrialized it. We turned a description of rare people into a content category with a production quota.

The research that came out this year is essentially the market telling us it can still tell the difference—and that it is willing to pay for the real thing.

That is not a bad position for communicators to be in, is it?

Now for another awkward transition to my final report.

I’m going to end with something a little lighter, although there is a real point buried in it.

Knowledge at Wharton wrote up a new research study published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology titled “Effectively Communicating Uncertainty: The Persuasive Impact of Different Types of Hedges.”

You know hedges: “That could work.” “That might be a good approach.”

We all hedge.

Yet most communication training treats hedging as a bug to be trained out of us.

Jonah Berger’s research team ran seven studies and split hedging into two dimensions.

The first is likelihood.

Is your hedge low-probability—“might,” “could,” or “it feels like”—or higher-probability—“likely,” “should,” or “arguably”?

The second is perspective.

Is the hedge floating free, as in, “It sounds like”? Or is it attached to a human being, as in, “In my opinion,” or “It sounds likely to me”?

All seven studies agreed: Higher-likelihood hedges and personal-perspective hedges are more persuasive because they make the speaker seem more confident.

Berger’s example is a mechanic saying, “The repair might work,” versus, “I believe this repair will solve the problem.”

Both statements convey uncertainty, but they have a completely different effect.

The personal version means someone is taking ownership.

Berger describes this as a communication sweet spot. You get the protection of not overclaiming without paying the credibility tax.

It is important to point out that the effect weakened when the communicator was a brand rather than a person, because confidence mattered less.

That is one more argument for having actual humans deliver your message.

I went looking for research that either supports or contradicts this, and it turns out the findings land right between two camps that do not agree.

On one side are decades of work on what is called powerless language: hedges, hesitations, and tag questions.

This research suggested that hedges may be the most damaging of all the powerless markers.

Researchers found something genuinely alarming: When a topic mattered to people, powerless markers did not merely make the speaker less appealing. They flattened the arguments.

Strong arguments performed no better than weak ones once the hedges were added.

On the other side are the uncertainty-communication researchers.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge’s Winton Centre have spent years studying how to convey uncertainty in facts and numbers.

Another study involving more than 10,000 participants found that putting a numeric uncertainty range around COVID statistics slightly reduced trust in the number itself but had no effect whatsoever on trust in the source.

Being candid cost the communicator nothing.

A meta-analysis published this year finds the overall effect small and highly dependent on how uncertainty is expressed, with verbal hedges doing more damage than numbers.

Put all of this together, and here is my take: The problem was never uncertainty. It is vagueness.

Saying, “Here is what we know, here is what we do not know, and here is what would change my mind,” reads as confidence.

Mumbling, “It could go sort of either way,” reads as evasion.

It is the same actual state of knowledge, but the way it is expressed produces the opposite effect.

I would argue that this matters more for us now than it has in years, because the machines drafting our first drafts hedge constantly—and they hedge in the weak way: low likelihood, no perspective, and nobody’s name attached.

You may have noticed that Neville and I hedge our way through every episode of this podcast.

We say things like, “This is correlation, and correlation is not causation.” We say that you should treat a figure as directional.

We note, as I did just a few minutes ago, that a survey being cited is four years old.

It turns out that hedging might have been the right call.

Or let me try that again.

In my view, that was almost certainly the right call.

I would love to tell you when the next monthly episode will be, but Neville and I have not settled on that yet.

Nor do I know when he will be up for recording a short midweek episode.

I may do one solo. We’ll see how it goes. We’ll see what kind of news or research crosses the transom.

Until I get answers to all those questions, that will be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #523: No Brand Is An Island appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Podcasting 2.0 is the open-source movement launched by Adam Curry and Dave Jones to preserve and extend podcasting’s open, RSS-based ecosystem. In this episode, Shel and Neville explore the initiative’s core features — including the Podcast Index, enhanced RSS metadata, transcripts, chapters, podrolls, live notifications, and listener-supported “Value for Value” payments — while weighing its potential to reduce dependence on dominant platforms such as Spotify, Apple, Amazon, and YouTube. The discussion also addresses obstacles to adoption, including limited awareness, uneven support across hosting providers and apps, added complexity, and the need to demonstrate clear benefits to listeners. For communicators, the larger implications involve channel ownership, accessibility, content reuse, AI discoverability, resilience, and the risk of building audiences entirely on rented platforms.

Links from this episode:

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, July 27.

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

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

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

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

Raw Transcript:

Neville Hobson: Hi everyone, and welcome to For Immediate Release. This is episode 522. I’m Neville Hobson

Shel Holtz: I’m Shel Holtz, and Neville, we’ve been doing this show for more than 21 years. When we started, there were maybe 400 podcasts. There was no Apple Podcasts to help people find and subscribe to shows, and every podcaster was what today they seem to be calling an indie podcaster. What’s not an indie podcaster? That would be Joe Rogan, for example, on Spotify collecting money. He’s not an indie, he’s mainstream media. So I try to follow the podcast industry. I subscribe to some newsletters. I read some people who talk about it. But somehow I only recently encountered Podcasting 2.0. This thing has been around since 2020. Despite the name, it’s not a new audio format. It’s not a new app or a replacement for RSS. It’s an open source movement launched by, guess who? Adam Curry, the podcasting pioneer, along with a developer named Dave Jones. God, there’s a lot of Dave Joneses out there. Its mission is to preserve, protect, and extend the open podcasting ecosystem. Now, that word open matters. Traditional podcasting works because creators like us publish an RSS feed that many different apps can read. Nobody has to upload a separate master copy to each player. But over time, discovery and listening have become concentrated in large corporate directories and platforms like Apple, increasingly Spotify, Amazon, and YouTube, but there are others. These companies set their own rules for their own services. Spotify’s rules explicitly say that it can remove content and suspend or terminate accounts. You can call that moderation, deplatforming, censorship. There’s no denying the underlying power these services have. Spotify can remove a podcast from its service. If the creator independently controls the RSS feed and hosting, Spotify can’t erase the podcast from the entire internet. The danger comes when creators and audiences become so dependent on one proprietary platform that removal there is effectively removal from public view. Podcasting 2.0 was designed to reduce that gatekeeper risk. Its answer isn’t that every app has to carry every show, it’s that no single app or company should be able to make a show disappear everywhere. Now, the initiative has several major pieces. The Podcast Index is an open directory that apps can use instead of depending on one company’s catalog. I checked, and FIR is listed, as are our other active shows on the FIR Podcast Network. The podcast namespace adds new backward-compatible tags to RSS feeds. Those tags can provide creator-controlled transcripts, richer chapters, information about hosts and guests, live stream notifications, alternate audio and video versions, licensing information, and a podroll of shows creators recommend. Remember blog rolls? This is podrolls. There’s also PodPing which alerts apps quickly when a feed changes, and there’s a really much-discussed thing called Value for Value. It’s a model that lets listeners support creators directly, often through tiny Bitcoin payments called sats, S-A-T-S, and attach messages known as boosts or boostagrams. And, yeah, I was listening to the Podcasting 2.0 show with Curry and Jones, and they were shouting out everybody who gave them a boost the Bitcoin element gets disproportionate attention, but it’s optional. Podcasting 2.0 is much broader than cryptocurrency. And by the way, there’s a vertical market application of Podcasting 2.0 called Godcaster. That’s a defined community of religious podcasters who have embraced Podcasting 2.0. The question is whether this model could work for, say, corporate ecosystems, universities, trade groups, nonprofits, and the like. And that explains why communicators should care or at least know about all this, because this really is a conversation about channel ownership, interoperability, accessibility, and resilience. Accurate transcripts improve access and make our content easier to search and reuse. Chapters and person tags make expertise more discoverable. Podrolls let organizations recommend trusted voices without surrendering discovery to Spotify or YouTube and their algorithms. And open distribution reduces the risk of building an audience on rented space. Now, there are caveats. Support remains uneven. I didn’t even learn about it until a couple weeks ago. Hosts like Libsyn, which hosts FIR, and podcasting apps implement different subsets of the standards. Open infrastructure doesn’t eliminate legal obligations. It doesn’t change hosting company policies. There are other choke points. And decentralization doesn’t automatically make the content accurate, ethical, or responsible. But the core idea is important, and that’s that podcasting began as an open medium, not a collection of corporate content silos. Podcasting 2.0 is an effort to modernize that open model without giving up what made podcasting distinctive in the first place. For communicators, the lesson extends well beyond audio. Distribute widely, but retain control of the source, the identity, and the relationship with the audience

Neville Hobson: Yeah, it’s quite a story, Shel, I think. Like you, I hadn’t really heard of this other than the fact I did come across Podcasting 2.0 website when Adam Curry launched it back in, what was it, 2021, 20- 2020. But since then, no, haven’t heard anything about this at all really other than some kind of, aside comments here and there on on a couple of tech podcasts. And I’m thinking what you’ve outlined or makes complete sense to me. So why hasn’t this been thought about before even? I think it has in part. I’ve read people talking about this online, particularly on making content more easily consumable as they see it and there we’re talking about an idea that’s not new. Apple’s been offering this for a while, which is chapters, splitting up your content into chapters. But that’s only Apple. It doesn’t transport, and therein lies one of the issues with this, I think. How could you put it? There are some concerns I can see. I’ll come onto the pros in a minute. But I think is this not fragmentation of something that’s going to require quite a bit of a learning curve to figure out what to do with this? I’m also thinking that, is this going to open another standards race? Open standards only work if enough people adopt them, otherwise there is becoming another well-intentioned technical layer that only enthusiasts use. We’ve seen that. But, A broader, top-level question is, are we looking at the next stage in podcasting’s evolution, or are these features primarily serving podcast creators rather than podcast listeners? In other words, who’s getting the greatest benefit? That’s what I’m wondering. And I think it, it does… The fragmentation issue I think creates complexity. Features, bolting on new features more metadata doesn’t compensate for weak storytelling, and you have to have that sorted out. And I think there’s a risk of enthusiasts becoming excited by all this, while listeners simply want worthwhile content. The interesting thing, though, a-and you pointed this out in your intro, that the where we’re at now with podcasting is the marketplace is largely controlled or dominated by big platforms. You mentioned Spotify, you mentioned Apple. If we go to look at the analytics on Libsyn as to where, how people get our content, there’s a long list of 20-plus podcast platforms. Some of them, some of them never even heard of, yet there’s, you can imagine an episode has got, six downloads on that platform and 200-and-something on another platform. So it’s like we like to say, “Listen to us wherever you get your podcasts.” So how do we introduce this into that landscape in a way that literally isn’t complexity from the fragmentation? Because it will be fragmentation. And not– And who’s not– who’s to say that Spotify and the others aren’t going to respond not in a positive way to this, ’cause this is their control slipping away. So this is what I spot as some of the issues. I think the… Another standards race is maybe- more concern one of podcasting’s great strengths has always been its relative simplicity. Wasn’t like that when we started, mind you, but that’s how it is today. This introduces another layer of standard, certification, and implementation. We’ve seen this before. Social media standards, RSS extensions, schema markup, countless proprietary platform features. So it’s not a pretty looking landscape, I would say. Plus as we are talk– We’ve talked about this ourselves, but others are talking about this. This is podcasting’s time. It’s going to play a bigger role in organizational communication, particularly as podcasts play a growing role in organizational and employee communication. So how does this all work, where you’ve suddenly got these things that sound appealing to very appealing to creators? I think probably not so much from listeners whose sense complexity is what they’d be looking at. So you’ve have to make it very easy and simple. That said, I think there are some big advantages from it. You’ve mentioned some. One that strikes me immediately, richer, more accessible content. It turns an audio file into a more complete communications asset, it seems to me. So transcripts, chapters, structured metadata makes a podcast easier, and this is a big appeal, Shel I would say. Easier to search, easier to quote, easier to repurpose, easier to reference internally, and make accessible to people who cannot or don’t want to listen to something. So you make it broader. So you could also say, many organizations already struggle to maximize the value of long-form content. These features make it much easier to reuse a single conversation across newsletters, blogs, social posts, knowledge bases, internal communication. We’re always talking about content reuse as communicators. Podcasting 2.0 makes that much easier because the structure is built into the episode itself. There’s tons more we could talk about in this vein, but I think that’s enough for now. I think there are some major cons that would worry me if I were thinking about, let’s see how we can take advantage of this. It’s got a homebrew feel about it, which isn’t a criticism by any means. That’s how podcasting started. The landscape’s way different now. I could see a big role for AI in constructing the landscape, if you like, constructing it and helping you bring this into your plans. But this again it’s big work to get this done, it seems to me.

Shel Holtz: yeah, I think the biggest challenge that Curry and Jones face with this is building awareness and support. If I’m a podcaster for 21 years and hadn’t heard of it, you heard about it when it launched and heard nothing since then there’s a serious awareness problem here. And that’s what’s going to keep this from adoption. I’m not worried about fragmentation. Podcasting started with the RSS feed. This is something that Dave Winer came up with working in hand-in-hand with Adam Curry, who developed the podcatcher that would recognize that extension that Winer created. This did not render those RSS feeds useless to the RSS newsreaders that were out there. They still got them. They just ignored that extension because they didn’t have any way of playing a media file. So they still saw it. I have to believe that an RSS feed with all the new stuff in it is still going to be an effective RSS feed. The problem is that you have the hosting services, as I mentioned, we have been hosted with Libsyn, not since the very beginning, but pretty darn close

Neville Hobson: Yeah

Shel Holtz: Right. Let me start that thought again. The problem is convenience. If you make Spotify the place you go for podcasts and they’re listening to FIR and we say something offensive and they decide to take us off they’re not going to go look for us elsewhere. They’re just going to find other podcasts because they use Spotify. If you do a deal with Spotify, and you have to be pretty good, pretty famous guarantee a lot of downloads. But if you do a deal with Spotify, that’s the only place people are going to find that podcast. And again, you do something that violates the terms of service or their standards and they take you off, then you’re off. You’re gone everywhere. So I like the idea of this standard. I would just like to see some agreement across all of the hosting platforms and the discovery platforms that we will enable all of these on our platform so that listeners get the benefit. And you articulated some of those benefits to the listener. They don’t have to know that’s courtesy of Podcasting 2.0 any more than they need to understand that there’s an extension in the RSS feed in Podcasting 1.0. They just know that this is what they get when they subscribe to a podcast. But I love the idea of they’re not having to go to the show notes on our website to get the transcript. And frankly, I like the idea of people who love the show being able to support it with a micropayment that sends a message to us. I think that enhances the listener-podcaster relationship more than just commenting on a LinkedIn post or on our website or whatever. So yeah, I think there’s a lot to, to recommend this, but I think there are lots of obstacles in the way. And as you mentioned, there are also issues that don’t get resolved because of this Yeah, and Dave Jones is a developer, so I’m sure he’s working on all of this and probably has answers to some of those questions. I think it’s largely in his and Adam Curry’s hands to get the word out about this. If I were them or if I were counseling them, I would suggest that the audience that you need to be aiming at is podcasters the creators. And the message is tell your hosting service that you want these features implemented. The more they hear this and the more they see their customers changing hosting platforms to one that does embrace all of this, the faster they’re going to adopt the standard, and this will work for everybody. But I don’t see that effort underway, and I would advise listeners if you’re curious about this, visit their Podcasting 2.0 website, but also give a listen to the Podcasting 2.0 podcast. It’s typical Adam Curry. There’s a lot of digression and a lot of talk about completely off-topic subjects. But when they do zero in on Podcasting 2.0 it’s really interesting to hear them talk about this and where it is and where it’s going.

Neville Hobson: I would say Libsyn, we’ll be in touch

Shel Holtz: You can count on it. And that’ll be a wrap for this episode of For Immediate Release

The post FIR #522: Is Podcasting 2.0 The Future of Podcasting? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shel Holtz (00:04)

Neville Hobson (00:09)

Shel Holtz (00:11)

Pete Blackshaw (00:21)

Yeah.

Shel Holtz (00:38)

Pete Blackshaw (00:57)

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

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

Neville Hobson (02:18)

Pete Blackshaw (02:22)

Neville Hobson (02:39)

Pete Blackshaw (02:45)

Neville Hobson (03:09)

Pete Blackshaw (03:29)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shel Holtz (08:06)

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

Pete Blackshaw (08:50)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neville Hobson (12:14)

Pete Blackshaw (12:15)

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

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

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

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

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

Neville Hobson (14:42)

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

Pete Blackshaw (15:28)

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

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

Shel Holtz (16:47)

Pete Blackshaw (16:51)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shel Holtz (19:32)

Pete Blackshaw (19:56)

Shel Holtz (20:01)

Pete Blackshaw (20:05)

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

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

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

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

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

Neville Hobson (22:53)

What will that look like, do you think?

Pete Blackshaw (23:23)

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

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

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

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

Shel Holtz (25:42)

Pete Blackshaw (25:44)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neville Hobson (29:05)

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

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

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

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

Pete Blackshaw (31:25)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neville Hobson (33:59)

Pete Blackshaw (34:12)

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

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

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

Shel Holtz (36:08)

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

Pete Blackshaw (36:33)

Shel Holtz (36:37)

Pete Blackshaw (36:55)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neville Hobson (40:17)

Pete Blackshaw (40:24)

Neville Hobson (40:51)

Pete Blackshaw (40:58)

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

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

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

Neville Hobson (41:55)

Pete Blackshaw (42:22)

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

Neville Hobson (43:08)

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

Pete Blackshaw (43:52)

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

Neville Hobson (44:05)

Pete Blackshaw (44:22)

Neville Hobson (44:34)

Pete Blackshaw (44:49)

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

Neville Hobson (44:59)

Pete Blackshaw (45:26)

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

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

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

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

Shel Holtz (47:24)

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

Pete Blackshaw (48:12)

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

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

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

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

Neville Hobson (49:54)

Pete Blackshaw (50:13)

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

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

Neville Hobson (51:24)

Pete Blackshaw (51:38)

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

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

Neville Hobson (52:35)

Pete Blackshaw (53:00)

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

Shel Holtz (53:43)

Pete Blackshaw (53:47)

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

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

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

Neville Hobson (54:55)

Pete Blackshaw (55:03)

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

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

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

Neville Hobson (56:44)

Pete Blackshaw (57:10)

Shel Holtz (57:30)

Neville Hobson (57:31)

Pete Blackshaw (57:48)

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

Shel Holtz (58:02)

Neville Hobson (58:04)

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

Pete Blackshaw (58:08)

I love that. And I

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

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

Neville Hobson (58:59)

Shel Holtz (59:04)

Pete Blackshaw (59:12)

Shel Holtz (59:19)

Neville Hobson (59:20)

Shel Holtz (59:21)

Pete Blackshaw (59:24)

Shel Holtz (59:53)

Pete Blackshaw (59:56)

Neville Hobson (1:00:16)

Yeah, likewise. That was good. Appreciate it.

Shel Holtz (1:00:22)

Pete Blackshaw (1:00:23)

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