Six rules for PR in the AI search era
How do we build earned credibility that survives in a world where machines increasingly do the summarising?
Just before Christmas, Arun Sudhaman wrote "Spectres at the feast," unpacking Sir Martin Sorrell's BBC Today programme commentary that "there's no such thing as PR anymore." Sudhaman's diagnosis cut deeper than Sorrell's provocation: the real problem isn't whether PR is dead, but whether the industry can reclaim authorship of its own mandate while better-resourced marketing players claim "scaled, digital storytelling" as their territory.
If you work in communications, this should have landed with more of a thud than the usual industry chatter. The strategic high ground of earned storytelling, surely the very thing PR was built to own, is being contested while we're still explaining what we do.
Rather than fuel the "dead or alive" argument, I've decided to treat this moment as a prompt. After 25+ years watching this industry evolve from "press release and prayer" (there is truth in this) to something far more sophisticated and multifaceted (which you and I both know it is), I keep returning to a simple future looking question: how do we build earned credibility that survives in a world where machines increasingly do the summarising?
