Wag the Dog: insights and perspectives
Bellwether. A fine old English word, originally used to describe a ram fitted with a bell relied upon to lead the rest of the flock, so shepherds could track the herd by sound alone. These days it refers to a person, thing, or event that acts as a leader or indicator of future trends. For many years, when presenting Edelman's Trust Barometer to clients and prospects, I would regularly use the term to explain why employee trust matters so much. Because if the people inside an organisation trust its leadership, strategy and conduct, then this is a strong bellwether signal to the outside world of just how credible and trustworthy that business is. This signal matters more than ever, because institutional trust is under intense pressure. In my home market, SenateSHJ's 2026 Togetherness Index found that 69% of Australians trust information from family and 64% trust friends. That compares with 39% for mainstream media, 34% for the federal government and 28% for large businesses. The learning, in the current climate, is that trust travels best via human relationships, credible voices and visible evidence, rather than institutional assertion alone. And this is just as relevant in the B2B ecosystem. Dentsu's Superpowers research , published late last year, found that 70% of buyers prefer content from industry voices, while 67% of C-suite respondents say content is more relevant when it comes from a person rather than a brand. For many organisations, this creates a challenge. Prospects not only want to see a polished firm proposition. They also want evidence that the people behind it understand their world, can explain complex issues clearly and have a perspective worth hearing. Which is why the external visibility of emerging leaders matters just as much as, if not more than, that of the small handful of rainmakers who have been the face of the firm until now. Their informed commentary, articles, presentations, media contributions and professional conversations are collectively the bellwether for the depth of expertise inside the firm. Not because they are corporate cheerleaders, but because they make genuine authority visible, and visibility builds credibility and trust. This is the reason Trevor Young and I created The Breakfast Club : to help emerging leaders identify what they should be known for, whom they need to reach and how to build credible authority without becoming a content machine. Being heard matters. Being seen as credible and trustworthy matters more.
In a new essay , Bill Gates makes the case for what he calls “Human Reserved” jobs: vocations we may deliberately choose to keep human-led, even where machines could technically perform elements of the work. The examples are unsurprising: healthcare, education and the roles that carry us through difficult moments, where empathy, responsibility and human connection matter most. It is an interesting framing because it challenges the usual AI debate. The question is not simply what machines can do. It is what we should want them to do, and where we still need a human being to exercise judgement, take responsibility and be accountable for the outcome. So, should communications be Human Reserved too? My answer is yes, at least in the ways that count. AI can take the production work This is not an argument for communicators to reject AI, nor to pretend that the technology will not reshape how we work. It should. AI can take care of parts of communications’ production layer: early research, monitoring, transcription, synthesis, first drafts, versioning, reporting and the more repetitive cycles of content development. It can help teams find patterns in large volumes of information, test an argument from different angles, turn a long report into an accessible summary and free people from the routine work that swallows disproportionate amounts of time. That is not a threat to good communications. It is an opportunity. For too long, parts of the industry have allowed themselves to be defined by the things easiest to count: the press release, the media list, the activity report, the deck, the volume of output. Those things have always had a place, but they were never the whole job. If we define our value as an output factory, we should not be surprised when the factory becomes easier to automate. The more useful question is what we do with the time and capacity that AI creates. The answer should be to move upstream: into interpretation, counsel, risk sensing, stakeholder understanding, narrative design and the hard work of helping organisations decide what is true, relevant and worth saying. The work that remains human At its best, communications is about judgement. It is understanding what matters, who needs to hear it, what should be said now, what should not be said at all, and how a message will land in a complex and often sceptical human environment. That last point is especially important. A machine can generate a plausible holding statement. It cannot take responsibility for the consequences of issuing it. It cannot sit with an executive team as a situation changes by the hour, assess the political, cultural and commercial implications, or tell a client that the instinct to say more is likely to make matters worse. Nor can it read a room in the fullest sense. You can give AI a detailed account of community opposition to a major project. You cannot send it to the town hall meeting, ask it to gauge the mood in the corridor, distinguish performative anger from genuine loss of trust, or understand the local history that makes a technically sound message feel tone-deaf. That work relies on cultural fluency, empathy, context and the accumulated pattern recognition that comes from working with people under real pressure. The same is true of leadership communications. A leader’s voice should not be a polished composite of what an algorithm thinks someone in their position might say. It needs to be rooted in what that individual knows, believes and has experienced—and it needs to withstand questions from employees, customers, regulators, journalists, investors and communities. That is communications as a human discipline: not simply making words sound better, but helping people make better decisions about what those words mean and what they commit the organisation to. Authority in a synthetic world We are now awash with synthesised content. It is increasingly easy to produce something that looks professional, sounds informed and follows the conventions of corporate language. That does not mean it is credible. In fact, the opposite may increasingly be true. As the volume of generic, over-polished content rises, people are becoming more sensitive to the difference between a manufactured opinion and a perspective with real substance behind it. They want evidence, expertise, and a point of view that can be tested. This is where personal authority becomes more valuable. Personal authority is not executive self-promotion or an endless feed of leadership posts. It is a distinct, defensible perspective grounded in the problems someone has solved, the body of work they have built, the decisions they have made, and the professional reputation they have earned over time. Trust compounds when it attaches to a person who can explain their thinking, defend their view in a room, and be held accountable for it. It is harder to manufacture and easier for audiences to recognise. The role of communications is to help leaders identify the intersection of their genuine expertise, the questions their audiences are asking, and the issues that are genuinely relevant to the business. It is then to help them express that perspective clearly, consistently, and credibly—not to invent authority where none exists. That distinction will matter even more as AI changes how people discover and evaluate organisations. When AI systems increasingly mediate early research, vendor selection and reputation, businesses need clear, coherent, and verifiable signals across earned, owned, and leadership channels. Trust is not simply a reputation score; it affects whether an organisation makes the shortlist, secures the meeting, or gets the benefit of the doubt. A more valuable mandate This is why communications should be more ambitious about its role in the AI era. Our task is to act as a conduit between what machines can process and what people can understand, believe, question and act upon. We help turn operational reality, governance, safety, product performance, customer outcomes, policy, risk and business strateg, into credible stories that can survive contact with sceptical audiences. That requires more than content skills. It requires curiosity, commercial fluency, cultural intelligence, scepticism and the confidence to challenge a neat narrative when it is not actually true. AI is prolific. It is not wise. Communications professionals should embrace the technology where it improves speed, quality and access to information. But we should be clearer about what it cannot replace: contextual understanding, cultural fluency, empathy, responsibility, the ability to read a room, and reputational judgement earned over time. Those are not peripheral parts of the job. They are the load-bearing parts. But I freely admit I am biased. PR is after all not ER.
AI isn't wrecking comms. It's deshittifying it.
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.
The way credible professionals get found and validated has shifted. Here's what's changed, and what it means for anyone building personal brand authority.
Media and communications is now the least in‑demand industry in the United States. Indeed’s April snapshot, surfaced in Christopher Penn’s Almost Timely newsletter, puts our field at the bottom of the table, with marketing sixth from the bottom and hiring demand for both more than 30% below February 2020 levels. Penn went further: he ran a director of product marketing job description through Trust Insights’ TRIPS framework and found 90% of the role can be reshaped by AI today; an account coordinator role at a PR firm came back at 82% consumable outright. If AI can substitute or accelerate 80–90% of what we have told boards our function is “for”, then this is not a technology shock. It is the price being paid for how we chose to define and justify our work. The production identity problem Elif Güvençer’s recent paper , The Two Clocks: A Framework for Communications in the Age of AI, calls this our “production identity”: a value proposition built on outputs. The release. The deck. The activity report. The tier‑one business profile. The reality is that the communications function was never just production. Our real contribution was always upstream: interpretation, risk sense‑making, pacing leadership through a crisis rather than amplifying it, reading cultural shifts before stakeholders felt them. However, upstream work is hard to label and harder to measure. So, we sold what was easy to count. A generation of comms leaders walked into boardrooms with KPIs that flattered activity and concealed worth. A generation of consultancies found it easier to take the brief than to challenge it. We built an industry around the proxy and let the actual value go unclaimed. AI has taken us at our word. If you define your function as an output factory, you do not get to act surprised when the factory is automated. Two clocks, one job Güvençer’s central claim is that two clocks are running simultaneously, and most communications functions only manage one. The “immediate clock” is outward‑facing: AI‑mediated monitoring, synthetic reputation, new governance surfaces. It is legitimate, urgent, and will absorb every hour the function has, including the hours AI hands back through automation. The “structural clock” is inward‑facing. It asks what communications needs to become, how it is positioned, what it is measured on, and which capabilities it keeps or kills. It has no external deadline. Nobody is scheduling that board conversation. It will not happen unless someone makes it happen. Run only the immediate clock and you become busier on shrinking territory. Run only the structural clock and you optimise for a world moving past you. Do both, or neither works. Trust as a commercial asset Güvençer argues that communications has a non‑substitutable role in AI governance because its object is coherence: the total picture, not the individual tactics. I agree. The reason that matters, however, is commercial, not just reputational, and this is where communications can finally demonstrate its long‑sought business value‑add. When a buyer asks an AI assistant which vendors to consider and gets three names, the firms that do not make the cut do not only lose reputation. They lose revenue. The signal architecture Güvençer describes – the coherence of what AI systems read about you across earned and owned surfaces – is a pipeline mechanism as much as a reputational one. Trust is what gets you onto the shortlist. Trust is what gets you through it. Trust is the asset that decides whether the meeting happens at all. Our industry has spent a long time talking about trust as if it were a sentiment score. It is more than that. It is the complex variable that decides whether commercial outcomes happen or do not, and reputation is the durable form it takes over time. The function best positioned to govern that asset is the one most at risk of being treated as overhead. That is the strategic absurdity at the heart of the Indeed numbers. Whoever governs the signal is, by definition, acting as a commercial leader. If comms does not claim that role, someone else will. Five moves, one direction I recently considered this existential problem from the “less talk, more action” point of view and outlined five operational moves a communications team can make this quarter to show up in a world where buyers are asking AI assistants who to consider. Earned‑first mindset. Stop treating earned as clips. Start treating it as strategic training data for AI shortlists, given most citations in generative answers come from non‑paid third‑party sources. Benchmark AI answers. Run a quarterly AI share‑of‑voice across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot on the questions your buyers actually ask. Track where and how you appear. Machine‑readable credibility. Sharpen about pages, bios and customer cases so models can lift a precise, consistent explanation of who you are, and make sure it exists in the places they trust. Prioritise LinkedIn. Treat it as front‑row input to generative search, not a side project. Your leaders’ presence is distribution infrastructure now, not a vanity exercise. Assign ownership and protect experiments. Make generative visibility someone’s job with a 90‑day mandate and ring‑fenced time and budget, not “something we are keeping an eye on”. The two pieces of work are the same project from opposite ends. Güvençer’s structural clock asks what the function is for. The five moves are the first steps – reflecting both the immediate and structural clocks – to ensure the communications function shows up where reputation and revenue are now mediated. Bottom line: you cannot credibly claim a seat at the AI governance table while still being measured on press releases. And you cannot redesign the function’s identity if you have no operational footprint in the channels that now decide who gets shortlisted. The courage gap BCG, cited in Güvençer’s paper, says 88% of corporate affairs and comms leaders do not feel prepared to lead an AI transformation in their function. That reads less like a skills problem and more like a courage gap. GlobeScan’s most recent annual corporate affairs survey with Oxford Saïd Business School tells a similar story. Ninety‑two per cent of Asia‑Pacific corporate affairs leaders say the function needs to change, eighteen points ahead of the global average. Around a third want clearer strategy and focus; a quarter flag impact measurement, data and AI capabilities as the priority gaps. The appetite for reinvention is loud. The follow‑through is what looks uncertain. Experienced communications professionals have known for years that output was not the whole sum of their parts. The real work was always upstream, but we have been timid in claiming this. We have also known the brief was sometimes wrong. We just would not necessarily say it – to clients, to boards, or to ourselves – because it was too hard and easier to go the vanity metrics route. As a result, the technology has not caused the demotion. The unwillingness to have the harder conversation did. Courage here is being prepared to turn down pure‑output retainers. It is rewriting the scorecard, so trust and visibility show up as commercial drivers alongside reputation. And it is convening the AI governance conversation rather than waiting to be invited. If we do not do this, the demotion will arrive through a series of reasonable‑looking decisions that you are not privy to. The AI committee that meets without you. The GEO plan written by marketing and sent over “for your awareness”. The leader who drafts their own AI‑assisted quote and asks you to tidy it up. All of it reshapes and shrinks the communications mandate, one missed invitation at a time. The Indeed data is not AI’s verdict on communications. It is the price being paid for decades of treating output as the value and leaving the upstream contribution unclaimed. The machines will keep doing their part. Now the real question to be answered is whether communicators will step up and seize the commercial mandate while there is still time to do so.