A year ago, I built an ambitious – and hopefully inspiring – call‑to‑action slide for my new Verbatim workshops.

The message to communications teams was blunt: don’t ignore your earned‑first superpower as the industry faces what I then termed the Great Communications Reset.

Prepping for a workshop this week, I pulled that original slide back up. A lot has shifted in the world of AI over the last twelve months, but the message to communicators hasn’t.

The argument is simple. Earned attention is the bridge between human discovery and machine discovery. And inside most organisations, no one is better placed to build that bridge than the communications team.

AI models don’t rank press releases. They rank what other credible humans have already said about you – in coverage, in commentary, in owned channels, and in the long tail of citations that earned‑first work has been quietly producing for decades. The signal generative search uses to decide whether your organisation is trustworthy is the same signal communications practitioners have been honing for years.

And this comes with benefits. The reset is not only an elevation opportunity for the comms function inside its own organisation. It is also a level‑setter. Teams without the biggest budgets are often the ones more prepared – or forced – to experiment and get creative, and they are the ones who will see the biggest return, where communications drives not just brand awareness but also attributable commercial outcomes.

To all current and future communications leaders: don’t wait to be invited into the generative search conversation. And don’t forget your earned‑first superpower.