Those of us who work in communications hear a lot about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is going to eat our lunch by wiping out our jobs and taking over ‘everything’.
As is usually the case with sweeping statements like this, the reality is somewhat different.
It’s true, AI is rapidly reshaping corporate communications. But while it will take over some tasks, others are still up for grabs.
Yes, AI is going to take over low-value, labour-intensive activities, there is not much question about that. But it will drive communicators to more valuable, strategic tasks.
As automation takes over routine things, like drafting press releases, managing distribution lists, and carrying out a lot of template-driven work, communicators will be freed up to focus on higher‑value work, such as advising executives how to root communications in their values and business strategy, and focusing on driving stakeholder engagement and trust.
AI-driven content generation does make us more efficient. It speeds up everything from drafting press releases to optimising headlines and search engine optimisation (SEO). This also ensures messaging is consistently refined for maximum engagement.
At the same time, hyper‑personalization allows companies to move beyond broad, generic outreach. Communications can now be tailored to individual preferences, behaviours, and contexts, at scale.
Predictive analytics is becoming a cornerstone of modern reputation management. With real‑time monitoring and trend forecasting, organizations can anticipate issues before they escalate, shifting from reactive crisis response to proactive reputation stewardship.
AI also enhances operational efficiency by automating scheduling, reporting, and meeting summaries, freeing communicators to focus on strategy and creativity.
Global teams benefit from real‑time multilingual translation tools such as DeepL, which eliminate language barriers and support seamless cross‑cultural collaboration. And as audiences increasingly rely on AI-generated answers, visibility will depend on appearing in AI-powered search results, a step beyond traditional SEO.
What does all this mean for communicators?
It’s mainly good news. Communications teams will need fewer people. But the jobs on offer will be more valuable, more strategic. Human judgment, such as context, nuance, and emotional intelligence, remains irreplaceable, even as AI handles tactical execution. New skills will emerge as essential: AI literacy, data interpretation, and ethical oversight.
AI isn’t replacing communicators, it’s elevating us. Those who embrace this partnership will, I believe, lead the next era of corporate storytelling.
Corporate communications continues to play a vital role in organisations of every size because the ability to create shared understanding has become one of the few true competitive advantages left.
In an environment defined by rapid change, information overload, and rising expectations for transparency, communication is no longer a support function.
Instead, it has become the glue that holds strategy, culture, and reputation together. Even the smallest organizations now operate in a world where stakeholders expect clarity, consistency, and values‑driven behaviour, and where silence or ambiguity can quickly erode trust.
The argument that communications is becoming less relevant because “everyone can publish” misunderstands what the function actually does.
The challenge today is not producing more messages; it is making meaning out of complexity. Employees need to understand why their organisation is changing and how their work connects to a larger purpose. Customers want to know what a company stands for, not just what it sells. Investors look for coherent narratives that explain long‑term direction.
Communications is the discipline that translates strategy into language people can believe in, and that translation is essential whether a company has 20 employees or 200,000.
AI is not going to change these needs. If anything, the rise of AI and digital tools has only reinforced this demand.
Technology can accelerate production, but it cannot replace the judgment required to decide what should be said, when, and why. It cannot navigate the nuances of reputation, values, or human emotion. As organisations face more scrutiny and more channels than ever before, the ability to craft credible, empathetic, and consistent communication becomes a form of organisational resilience.
Ultimately, corporate communications endures because organisations depend on people, and people depend on understanding. As long as leaders need to align teams, earn trust, and move groups of humans toward a shared goal, communication will remain a strategic force at the centre of how organisations succeed.
Ocean rowing has always occupied that curious space between heroic endeavour and complete madness. For years it was the preserve of a few hardy souls who thought nothing of spending weeks in a tiny boat, eating freeze‑dried food and talking to themselves somewhere between the Canary Islands and Antigua. Admirable, yes. Mainstream? Not quite.
But something has shifted. The sport is no longer a remote curiosity followed by a handful of enthusiasts refreshing race trackers at odd hours. Thanks to Starlink, ocean rowing has become a spectator event, one that people can actually follow, understand and, increasingly, aspire to.
Guy Dresser mid-Atlantic in 2019
The change is simple but profound: connectivity. Until recently, rowers vanished the moment they left the harbour.
Updates were sporadic, satellite phones unreliable, and footage almost non‑existent.
Now, with Starlink bolted to the stern, crews livestream squalls, post videos of dolphins pacing the bow, and send daily dispatches from the middle of nowhere.
The Atlantic, once a vast communications void, has become strangely chatty.
This has done wonders for the visibility of the World’s Toughest Row. Races that used to unfold in near‑silence now generate real‑time drama. Followers can watch crews battle headwinds, celebrate milestones, or attempt to fix an oarlock at 3am.
Sponsors, once wary of investing in something that disappeared for six weeks, suddenly see value in a sport that can deliver content every day. And for the rowers themselves, the psychological lift of being able to speak to family, or simply know they’re not shouting into the void is no small thing.
Of course, purists grumble that constant connectivity dilutes the essence of the challenge. But the race itself remains unchanged: the ocean is still enormous, the boats still tiny, and the rowing still brutally hard. What’s different is that the rest of the world can finally witness what we see as rowers.
Starlink hasn’t made ocean rowing easier; it has made it visible. And in doing so, it has nudged a once‑obscure pursuit into the edges of the mainstream, where it may yet find the wider audience it deserves.
Every communications adviser knows there are moments when their job shifts from shaping a message to quietly bracing for impact. I have a real-life example from early in my communications career.
A senior executive stood in front of a room full of his employees, announced they were – sadly – all being made redundant, and then, beaming, shared that he’d just been promoted.
“Every cloud has a silver lining,” he added, as if delivering a line from a corporate pantomime. It was a pure David Brent moment: excruciating, tone‑deaf and instantly unforgettable. (David Brent, if you don’t know, is the hapless, out-of-his-depth corporate manager portrayed in Ricky Gervais’s excoriating series The Office, also reshot for the US market with the brilliant Steve Carell in the lead.)
What makes these gaffes so damaging is that they reveal something PR can’t fix: character. A poorly worded memo can be rewritten. A clumsy interview can be reframed. But when an executive publicly displays a catastrophic lack of empathy, the problem isn’t the message, it’s the messenger. No amount of media training can retrofit emotional intelligence into someone who doesn’t instinctively understand the weight of their words.
These moments also spread with remarkable speed. Employees these days could record them and share them on social media. Fortunately my example took place long before 4G and iphones became a thing.
Still, our executive’s faux pas was leaked to the Guardian newspaper and was published long before the communications team had even drafted a holding statement. By the time PR arrived to mop up, the story had already become a symbol: of arrogance, of detachment, of leadership gone wrong. And symbols are far harder to manage than stories.
The deeper issue is that executives often underestimate how closely people watch them. In times of uncertainty, every gesture is amplified. A misplaced joke becomes a verdict on leadership. A careless aside becomes evidence of indifference. When livelihoods are at stake, humour is not a bridge, it’s a trapdoor.
This is why the most effective protection for executives isn’t spin; it’s self‑awareness. The ability to read a room, to understand the emotional temperature, to recognise when silence is wiser than wit. PR can polish, guide and prepare, but it cannot save someone determined to sabotage themselves in public.
The lesson is simple: leaders don’t just communicate strategy, they communicate values. And when those values appear hollow, no adviser on earth can put them back together.
First, a full confession: I used to write about tech startups in the dotcom boom. I met hundreds of internet entrepreneurs, financiers, self-styled tech wizards and gurus. Some were brilliant and deserved their eventual success, while others I thought were ‘fake it till you make it’ pretenders still managed to extract funding from desperate venture capitalists before their businesses went belly up.
I know better than most what goes wrong when journalists are trying to write in boom times. As in all gold rushes, media coverage can veer from the excited to the positively breathless. I’ve seen reporters get carried away. And, after the bubble bursts (which they all do), everything changes, the media sharpens its claws, and everyone associated with the boom gets a kicking, all of them tarred with the same brush, whether they deserve it or not.
So far, so dotcom boom.
Back in the UK in 2000 after the ‘correction’ in tech company valuations, things soured to the point that Lastminute.com’s founders Martha Lane Fox and Brent Hoberman, who I interviewed several times, briefly became totemic figures for public and investor disillusionment with the tech sector.
Once, mid-way through an interview some time after the oversubscribed Lastminute IPO and the subsequent crash in tech stocks, a weary Hoberman told me he wouldn’t have minded so much if journalists just slagged off the company. Much of the media animus directed at him and Lane Fox, however, was so personal that it was as if reporters thought there was something wrong with them as individuals.
Unquestioning coverage helps no one, fair coverage does
How things changed over the following years. Media coverage of tech startups resumed its previous unquestioning stance. In the US this trend was particularly notable. Partly driven by their owners’ demands for page views and that other all-important commercial driver, ‘reader engagement’, journalists outdid each other in their glowing coverage of the people and companies coming out of Silicon Valley.
Elizabeth Holmes rode this wave like a pro. In 2003 the then 19-year-old founded the company that would become Theranos, eventually raising more than $700 million from investors and commanding a heady $9 billion valuation within a decade. It took till 2015 before the Wall Street Journal (behind paywall) published the first damaging revelations about Theranos’s technology, leading to legal challenges on all fronts and the company’s eventual collapse.
With Holmes’s conviction yesterday on four charges of fraud, including conspiracy to defraud investors, the question has to be asked: why did it take so long to uncover what the US Securities and Exchange Commission described as a “years-long fraud”?
Puffing up Elizabeth Holmes
The media has a lot to answer for. It puffed up Elizabeth Holmes. Hailed her as a guru. Lapped her up and promoted her as the great fresh face of tech entrepreneurs. She became one of the most idolised, most revered female entrepreneurs in the tech industry.
Her image graced the covers of business magazines and fashion titles alike. Even her dress sense, which aped Steve Jobs and his signature black turtleneck jumpers, was somehow seen as a sign of excellence.
Now, post Theranos, journalists seem to be belatedly regaining their credentials as people who realise they have to hold companies and their leaders to account. Critics will say this is no more than ‘doing a reverse ferret’, journalese to describe an abrupt reversal in an organisation’s editorial or political line on a particular issue
The media does now seem to acknowledge that the tech industry is not a just a world populated by aspirational and well-meaning geeks who run startups from the spare bedroom of their parents’ houses. But it’s a very late-in-the-day realisation that some of these people do wield real world power, whether it’s through commercializing our personal data, facilitating those who undermine elections, or what some might paraphrase as ‘doing stupid stuff’.
Many of the journalists who wrote flattering articles about Holmes back in the day clearly regret it now, even if they don’t say so. Fortune Magazine, to cite just one culprit, wrote this generous profile back in 2014 and published this creditable and lengthy mea culpa a year later. Wired did this one – but try finding their mea culpa or those of others.
So why did the media swallow Holmes’s hype? I’d argue subsconscious bias may have been at work.
Did male journalists just get carried away with this female CEO?
The male/female dynamic is far too simplistic an explanation.
Holmes certainly looked the part. She dressed the part. She talked the talk. She had big name investors. She amassed a star-studded board of directors. She did also tick a lot of the boxes for the many male, often middle-aged business journalists out there looking for a ‘good story’: Blonde. Female. Charismatic. Dropped out of a prestigious university to launch her business. Dressed like Jobs. Had a deep voice (honestly, even that’s been questioned). Made journalists feel special by maintaining extraordinary eye contact (seriously, there are even articles about how she likely taught herself to do this). Oh, and the technology her business did sounded sort of cool and game-changing.
But the reality is that at one time all journalists, whatever their gender, were gushing about her.
Some argue that Holmes’s ought not to be the only conviction here. The media is also guilty – of monstrous hype. Of misleading its audiences. Perhaps even of overlooking a fraud through its failure to probe sufficiently and ask hard questions.
Will it learn any lessons? Could the media make the same mistake again? We could be charitable and hope some lessons can be learned from the Theranos saga. Maybe, then, the next time a big investor wave comes along the media won’t just sweep us along in their excitement. We can but hope. But there are few signs to be all that confident.
guy dresser 