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  1. 2d ago

    ALP 314: Agency owners need to get their hands dirty with AI

    Some advisers are telling agency owners they don’t need to know AI all that well themselves. They suggest owners go deep on AI for a month or three, then pass the day-to-day to the team and move on with life. In this episode, Chip and Gini explain why that’s backwards, and how owners who step back from AI are making a mistake. Chip’s argument is that AI doesn’t fit the usual delegation model because it’s moving too fast and touching too much of the business to hand off after just a few months of study. Gini agrees, noting that advice which made sense six months ago is often stale today. Both connect this to credibility with the team: Chip compares the situation to a non-technical manager overseeing developers, who then gets disrespected because they don’t speak the language. Gini says her own coaching works because she’s in the tools constantly enough to give specific workable advice. They also describe pushing AI into something closer to a personal operating system than a work tool, from Chip wanting an assistant that catches him contradicting his own past positions, to Gini’s agent that calls her out when she takes on work she said she’d delegate, telling her flatly it’s not the best use of her time. The episode closes with the advice that staying curious personally is what keeps owners sharp enough to lead a team through a tool that keeps rewriting its own rules. [read the transcript] The post ALP 314: Agency owners need to get their hands dirty with AI appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

  2. 4d ago

    Circle of Fellows #132: AI and the Communication Leadership Moment

    Episode 132 of IABC’s Circle of Fellows examines what the newly released Reimagining Tomorrow 2026 report from the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management means for the profession. The report surveyed 536 communication professionals across six global regions and found a profession that has embraced AI in practice but not yet claimed AI governance in leadership: 95.9% of organizations now permit AI, yet only 8.6% have communication professionals leading the formal governance structure. One in four organizations discloses AI use to no one at all. Joining moderator Shel Holtz are Bonnie Caver and Adrian Cropley OAM, both Global Alliance board directors and the research partners behind the survey, as well as Mike Klein. (Theomary Karamanis was scheduled to be a panelist but laryngitis prevented her from participating.)  Together, they dig into what the data means for the profession, what it will take to move from adoption to accountability, and what it takes to be a leader in the AI era. Links from this episode: The Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management Reimagining Tomorrow 2026: The Report About the panel Bonnie Caver, SCMP, is the Founder and CEO of Reputation Lighthouse, a global change management and reputation consultancy with offices in Denver, Colorado, and Austin, Texas. The firm, which is 20 years old, focuses on leading companies to create, accelerate, and protect their corporate value. She has achieved the highest professional certification for a communication professional, the Strategic Communication Management Professional (SCMP), a distinction at the ANSI/ISO level. She is also a certified strategic change management professional (Kellogg School of Management), a certified crisis manager (Institute of Crisis Management). She holds an advanced certification for reputation through the Reputation Institute (now the RepTrak Company). She is a past chair of the global executive board for the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC). She currently serves on the board of directors for the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management, where she leads the North American Regional Council and is the New Technology Responsibility/AI Director. Caver is the Vice Chair for the Global Communication Certification Council (GCCC) and leads the IABC Change Management Special Interest Group, which has more than 1,300 members. In addition, she is heavily involved in the global conversation around ethical and responsible AI implementation and led the Global Alliance’s efforts in creating Ethical and Responsible AI Guidelines for the global profession. Adrian Cropley is the founder and director of the Centre for Strategic Communication Excellence, a global training and development organization. For over thirty years, Adrian has worked with clients worldwide, including Fortune 500 companies, on major change communication initiatives, internal communication reviews and strategies, professional development programs, and executive leadership and coaching. He is a non-executive director on several boards and advises some of the top CEOs and executives globally. Adrian is a past global chair of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC), where he implemented the IABC Career Road Map, kick-started a global ISO certification for the profession, and developed the IABC Academy. Adrian pioneered the Melcrum Internal Communication Black Belt program in Asia Pacific and is a sought-after facilitator, speaker, and thought leader. He has been a keynote speaker and workshop leader on strategic and change communication at international conferences in Canada, the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, Malaysia, Singapore, China, India, Hong Kong, Thailand, New Zealand, and Australia. He has received numerous awards, including IABC Gold Quill Awards for communication excellence, and his Agency received Boutique Agency of the Year 6 years running. Adrian is the Chair of the Industry Advisory Committee for the RMIT School of Media and Communication and a Fellow of the IABC and RSA. In 2017, he was awarded the Medal of Order of Australia for his contribution to the field of communication. Mike Klein is the Editor-in-Chief of Strategic Magazine, Founder of #WeLeadComms, and a communication consultant specializing in internal and social communication based in Reykjavik, Iceland. A former US political consultant, Mike shifted direction toward internal communication while pursuing his MBA at London Business School.  Since then, Mike has been one of the leading voices for empowering communication professionals, and advocating a focus on internal influence and social connection as drivers of communication, integration and performance. His 2011 book, From Lincoln to LinkedIn remains relevant as organizations recognize that personal credibility and connection are critical to communication success in a world where content volumes are increasing and instability flourishes. Raised in Chicago, Mike has lived and worked in seven different countries, and is also a Fellow of the Centre for Strategic Communication Excellence and the Institute of Internal Communication. Raw transcript  And we are live. Hi everybody, and welcome to Circle of Fellows. Uh, I am Shel Holtz. I am an IABC fellow. I am here with, uh, three of my IABC fellow colleagues, and we are going to talk about, uh, the leadership moment in artificial intelligence for the communication community. This is the first of two episodes where we will focus on this topic. This is based on the results of a survey that was conducted by the Global Alliance. Uh, both Bonnie and Adrian are heavily involved with the Global Alliance, and I’ll let them tell you how, uh, as we go around the horn and do introductions. Uh, before we get into that, though, I do wanna let everyone know that we hope that you will participate in this conversation by sharing your questions, your observations, your thoughts in the YouTube chat. I can see them right here in this sidebar panel, and we’ll share them on the screen, and we can bring you into the conversation that way. Uh, so let’s do introductions. We’ll go around, uh, clockwise in the order I see you. Uh, and that means we’re starting with you, Adrian. Thanks for that, Shel. It’s always good to be on the Circle of Fellows. Um, I’m Adrian Cropley. I am the co-founder of the Center for Strategic Communication based in Melbourne, Australia, past IABC chair, and now, uh, director on the board of the Global Alliance, and fortunately, um, a partner in the research. Bonnie has- Bonnie and I have done this now for the last couple of years with the, the Global Alliance, so it’s great to be on here sharing a little bit around that, uh, what it’s telling us about that leadership moment. Terrific. Glad to have you with us, Adrian. Bonnie, you’re up. Hi, I’m Bonnie Caver, and I am in Austin, Texas, and I run a company called Reputation Lighthouse, and that’s my day job. Um, of course, I’ve been involved with IABC a long time, and am the past chair of the Global Communication Certification Council and sat on the board of the Global Alliance where, for the last, uh, three years, I’ve been focused on responsible AI and the way our global profession looks at responsible AI. So anytime we have an opportunity to talk about that, uh, it’s very helpful to me as we’re moving forward to Abuja and the World PR Forum, and we’ll be updating the responsible AI guidelines for our profession. Excellent. Looking forward to seeing the outcome of that initiative. And Mike? Hello there. I’m Mike Klein, and I am an IABC fellow. I am also editor-in-chief of Strategic Magazine, which publishes daily content for communication leaders worldwide. And also, I have my own consultancy focused on internal communication and organizational strategy. And my AI bent is less about responsible use of AI and more about strategic use of AI and our strategic positioning within the AI ecosystem, um, with an, with a particular focus on the second-order effects of AI use in organization worldwide Great. And some of you watching this may have seen the promotional materials that went out announcing that this was going to be happening and saw that Thea-Mari Karamalis was also going to be on the panel. Uh, we miss her. Uh, we were looking forward to seeing her here as well, but she let us know the day before yesterday that she has come down with laryngitis. So I, I suppose she could still be here, she just couldn’t say anything. Uh, so she’s opted to take it easy, and we hope that she recovers well and look forward to having her on a future, uh, installment of Circle of Fellows. So let’s jump into this. We have talked about artificial intelligence on Circle of Fellows a couple of times. It’s hard to avoid the topic. If you spend any time on LinkedIn at all, I swear half of the posts there have something to do with AI. I have started following somebody who is talking just about AI in the construction industry on, uh, on LinkedIn. Uh, she posts some really good stuff. She’s not selling anything other than her own consulting services, so, uh, she’s talking about what different companies are doing, and it’s, it’s, it’s really fascinating out there. Um, I personally subscribe to, I think, 12, uh, different AI newsletters, uh, that come by email. And I use AI to summarize all of those because I can’t possibly read 12 daily email newsletters. Uh, but we wanna sort of look at this from more of a, a 40,000 foot, uh, perspective as opposed to the nitty-gritty applications of AI in communication. What does this mean for communication leadership within organizations, uh, and within the communication profession? So, uh, the survey that was conducted by the Global Alliance, uh, I believe, if I remember correctly, I don’t have it in, up in front of me, but I

  3. Aug 25

    OTSP #6: One Size Fits Nobody -- A Better Way to Communicate Employee News

    Communicating news to employees used to be a straightforward proposition: Publish the company newspaper or magazine, and give everyone the same information at the same time. Today, communicators can target news by audience, location, channel, source, and relevance. But the greater challenge is deciding what qualifies as news and what you hope employees will think, feel, or do after receiving it. In this episode of “On The Same Page,” Shel Holtz and Mark Dollins discuss why employee news cannot be one-size-fits-all — or a one-and-done — and explore the importance of timing, sequencing, trusted voices, employee influence networks, and planning for what happens after the announcement. Raw transcript: Shel Holtz: So, Mark, I don’t know about you, but when I got into this business, communicating news to employees was what employee communication was all about. Was that true for you? Mark Dollins: Yes, exactly right. Often, it was one size fits all: Hit that button, and now everybody knows. It was really simple. Shel Holtz: My first job was with an energy company, ARCO, which doesn’t exist anymore. It was acquired by British Petroleum after I left. An interesting story: One of the people I knew who was still there—Dave Orman, who ran the department—said someone at BP who had been with another company it acquired asked whether he knew how to pronounce his company’s name. I think it was Amoco. Dave said, “No, how do you pronounce it?” He replied, “BP. The Amoco is silent.” Mark Dollins: Clever. I like it. Shel Holtz: Just to give you a heads-up about what it was going to be like. We had a newspaper. Sometimes it was eight pages; sometimes it was 16. Every Friday, it was delivered to all 55,000 employees in the company. Everybody got the news, and everybody got the same news. Today, there are organizations doing internal communication that don’t actually have a news vehicle. They don’t communicate the news. They’ve shifted entirely to a proactive, strategic approach to communication. Mark Dollins: We may have been separated at birth, because my first corporate job was also with an energy company. Our communication to employees was a monthly magazine—anywhere from 32 to 38 pages. To your point, everybody got exactly the same news and information at the same time. There really wasn’t a sense of urgency. Communicating news meant communicating what we decided was news employees needed to know, when we decided they needed to know it. Things have changed considerably with the advent of social media and immediate communication. Of course, there also used to be a wall between internal and external communication. You could get away with some things. That’s not possible anymore. That wall is invisible. Shel Holtz: I remember when I was at ARCO, Dave brought Roger D’Aprix in to speak to us. I believe he was with Xerox at the time. Roger was pushing this whole notion of proactive communication: You communicate to prepare employees for what’s coming, ensure they are aligned, and make sure they know what they need to know to understand and support whatever is about to happen. Everybody on the ARCO staff, with the exception of the graphic designers, had a daily newspaper background. We were all newspaper reporters. That was what they wanted—people who could report the news. There was pushback against what Roger said: “You mean we’re not going to report when the Trans-Alaska Pipeline terminus station blows up and kills three employees?” You do need to report that, but you also need to be proactive. Today, though, let’s talk about news. Mark Dollins: Indeed. How we communicate news today is critical. While one size doesn’t fit all in communicating news, I believe it is important to apply a strategic filter when deciding how to report it. Shel Holtz: Do you want to report absolutely everything that goes on? Even in public journalism, you don’t report everything that happens. There are editorial decisions. What is news? Mark Dollins: That’s the most basic question: What is news? What makes people interested? What is going to produce an “Aha!” rather than a “Ho-hum, I’m not interested”? Shel Holtz: Of course, news in an organizational or internal communication context is not necessarily defined the same way it would be at the Los Angeles Times or The Wall Street Journal. Mark Dollins: Remember all the filters you were supposed to apply in journalism school—proximity, timeliness, relevance, and so forth? Some are applicable here, and some less so. For global companies, proximity may not be geographic. The connection may be that my company’s name is involved. That gives it some relevance. Shel Holtz: But what’s relevant to an employee in Paris working in sales is not necessarily relevant to an employee in Peoria working in a manufacturing facility. When we started—with your monthly magazine and my weekly newspaper—the technology limited what we could do to tailor the news to different audiences. Today, that is drop-dead easy. Mark Dollins: Exactly. We can repackage and repurpose it for the channel we choose. Shel Holtz: You can deliver news to the people who will be interested in it or whose jobs will be affected by it, without bothering somebody who is going to look at it and say, “Why are they sending this to me? This has nothing to do with me.” Mark Dollins: When you’re faced with a “news item” for your organization, what filters do you run it through? How do you decide whether and how to treat it strategically? Shel Holtz: We have established employee profiles. I had wanted to create profiles forever, but we didn’t have the resources or time to do it right. Then I attended a conference where Andrea Greenhous was speaking. I think you were at the same conference—the PRSA Internal Communications Conference in Atlanta. Andrea talked about three profiles she uses: hard to convince, hard to reach, and everyone else. I expanded on that. I think we have five profiles based on those three. That’s one filter we use: Is this someone we really need to convince, or someone who merely needs to be aware? Another filter is what the news reinforces. We tell stories that reinforce our core values. We have six core values, which I think I could actually name if I were pressed. We have a strategic plan with four planks, and we have a purpose statement that expresses our higher calling. Through our storytelling and news reporting, we try to reinforce those things. We tell stories demonstrating that we are true to our values and that we are making decisions consistent with the planks of the strategic plan. Mark Dollins: And consistent with your earlier point, your purpose. That’s where many organizations miss the boat. Even when they have legitimate good news—“We’re launching a new product” or “We’re acquiring this company”—they explain the mechanics of how it will work but miss the opportunity to say, “This is how it supports our purpose, our whole reason for being.” If it connects to a specific strategy, explain that: “We’ve said we’re going to expand into these adjacencies as a strategic priority for the next three or four years. Look at how this action accomplishes that.” Sometimes, when you dig just below the news, you wonder why anybody would care, because no connection has been made to the organization’s purpose, mission, or strategy. As internal communicators, we have to think about the application and relevance to stakeholders. Shel Holtz: Obviously, there will be news stories without a clear connection to one of those things, but they’re so big that you must communicate them anyway. Before we started recording, we were talking about announcing a new CEO. That may happen because your succession plan has kicked in and the existing CEO is retiring. It could also happen because the CEO dropped dead of a heart attack or was removed by the board under questionable circumstances. Mark Dollins: This ties to what we discussed on our last podcast about change and change management. The way we treat news cannot be one and done. We have to consider the impacts: What’s the aftermath? A new CEO could signal an entirely new direction for the executive leadership team and other high-priority areas of the company. If you’re going to announce the news, you need to think about whether something else should follow immediately or fairly quickly. “How do we communicate the news?” is the easy question, in my opinion. You decide whether it is news and then determine how to get it to the appropriate internal stakeholders. But if we’re not asking, “And then what?” we’re going to miss a significant opportunity, especially with bigger news items such as a new CEO, a major acquisition, or something signaling a seismic change in the direction of the company or industry. It isn’t simply, “How do we communicate the news?” It’s, “How do we communicate the news, and what happens afterward?” Shel Holtz: Exactly. This is one of the challenges with hiring newspaper reporters to become internal communicators. In public journalism, you communicate something because it happened and is relevant to people who live in the area. That doesn’t fly in internal communication. You have to consider what you want from employees after they become aware of the news. Ed Robertson at FedEx developed a model with a horrible name: the Pyramid of Communication Quality. Mark Dollins: Rolls off the tongue. Shel Holtz: It sounds like something from a 1940s textbook, but it’s based loosely on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. He said most executives—and the communicators they hire—think they can start at the top of the pyramid: “What do you want me to do as a result of reading this?” But you have to move through several steps first. The communication must satisfy logistical requirements. A g

  4. Aug 24

    FIR #527: Delegating Hiring Decisions to AI

    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: An expert witness used ChatGPT to prepare a report. The prompts he used to generate the report were uncovered during discovery and entered into evidence. Nutrogena parted ways with its spokesperson, Hayden Panetierre, more than a decade ago. Its rationale for that decision has created a crisis for Nutrogena today in the wake of Panetierre’s untimely death. Brands suddenly care about Reddit thanks to its (perceived) role in AI-generated overviews and summaries. Redditors haven’t returned the feeling. Meta is facing a trillion-dollar-plus judgment in its current trial, but even more consequential could be a requirement to strip from its social media platforms the devices that addicted young people, many of which have become standards for social media. Will social media as we know it change in the wake of the verdict? Some companies are compensating employees who join the ranks of influencers and creators sharing content about the companies’ products and services. It sounds like a good idea, until you look at the labor, HR, and legal issues that arise. 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: ‘Show How 3M Is 0% at Fault:’ Expert Witness Used ChatGPT to Write Report Defending Company in Deadly Explosion Lawsuit Man Obliterated When Court Obtains His ChatGPT Transcripts I Just Ran My Thesis, Written in 2014, Through an AI Detector Hayden Panettiere’s Old Neutrogena Story Resurfaces After Her Death Neutrogena Faces New Backlash After Hayden Panettiere’s Death Hayden Panettiere Dead: Clip of Star Discussing Neutrogena Dropping Her Over PPD Resurfaces Neutrogena Under Fire Again for Dropping Hayden Panettiere After She Revealed Postpartum Depression Struggle Neutrogena Faces Backlash After Hayden Panettiere’s Death. How Should the Brand Respond? Hayden Panettiere Said Neutrogena Dropped Her Over Postpartum Depression. Now Fans Are Boycotting Neutrogena Faces Backlash Over Hayden Panettiere’s Postpartum Depression Claims Brands Suddenly Care About Reddit. Redditors Don’t Return the Feeling. Reddit Fades From ChatGPT Citations No More Doom Scrolling or Instagram Stories? A Meta Trial Loss Could End the Social Media We Know Meta Trial Could Spell the ‘End of Social Media as We Know It’ LinkedIn Adds an Option to Report ‘AI Slop’ I Just Had a Deeply Alarming 45-Minute Sync With Our Talent Acquisition Team Gap Inc. Opens Creator Program to Employees Gap Inc. Expands Cross-Brand Creator and Social Advocacy Program to Employees Employee Creators Are a New Brand Strategy Inside David’s Bridal’s New Commission-Based Ambassador Program for Creators and Employees David’s Bridal Ramps Up Its Creator Strategy Why Starbucks Is Betting on Employees as Creators Why Brands Are Inviting Their Employees to Be Creators Why Major Retailers Are Turning Employees Into Content Creators: Billo Should Brands Build Creator Programs From Their Own Employees? 32 Experts on the Risks and Payoffs Links from Dan York’s Tech Report: Publisher Traffic Falls 33% Globally as AI Overviews Reshape Search In 2026, Less Than One Third of Google Searches Still Send a Click Time Has Started Serving Ads to AI Agents Perplexity Blocks Time’s Ads Being Served to AI Agents LinkedIn Adds a Button to Report AI-Generated ‘Slop’ LinkedIn Says Its ‘AI Slop’ Button Is Working 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 fircomments@gmail.com. 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

  5. Aug 17

    FIR #526: Forget Anthropic's AI Watermark. Can You Defend Every Sentence?

    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: Clay AI Writing Policy: 4 Guiding Principles How Claude marks AI-generated content Anthropic’s watermark survives copy-paste, but not the real dev workflow Can Anthropic’s invisible watermarks curb ‘AI slop’? Researchers remain sceptical Anthropic’s text watermarks signal new front in AI detection Claude’s new Scarlet Letter watermark is invisible—for now How to Build a Responsible AI Writing Policy How Claude’s text watermarking works Claude is now watermarking every response — here’s what that means if you use AI for writing I’m Begging You: Never Write With A.I. 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 fircomments@gmail.com. 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 i

  6. Aug 17

    ALP 313: The audience has (and always will) matter most for PR and marketing leaders

    Times change, but somehow the job hasn’t. In this episode, Chip and Gini dig into what’s stayed constant across their combined decades in PR and marketing, and why chasing the latest platform update is a losing game if you’ve lost sight of the fundamentals underneath it. The episode was sparked by a LinkedIn series from Doug Simon, who asked longtime PR pros what has remained constant in their careers. Gini was asked the question of whether the PESO Model still holds up, and her answer is that the four media types haven’t gone anywhere, and earned media’s third-party credibility now matters more to how LLMs learn. Chip extends the logic to SEO and its successors, advising to chase the people, not the algorithm or the platform. Other changes may also have less of an impact than you might think. Influencer marketing is the latest version of celebrity TV endorsements, but with a YouTube channel. The agency-client relationship continues to run on the same dynamics it did 70 or 80 years ago. Gini brings up the story about a UK agency reportedly running AI agents to pitch journalists undetected for eight months. Chip’s take is that just like with interns and inexperienced team members, there are well-managed AI agents as well as poorly managed ones. It’s the human factor that matters most. [read the transcript] The post ALP 313: The audience has (and always will) matter most for PR and marketing leaders appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

  7. Aug 13

    FIR #525: The Consequences Businesses Will Face from Work Slop

    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: Why People Create AI “Workslop”—and How to Stop It Navigating AI in the Workplace: 2026 Harvard Business Review warns AI ‘workslop’ is rotting companies from the inside Botsitting, botshitting, and the hidden human labor of AI at work 27 Seconds to Breach: The AI “Workslop” Tax Hitting 2026 Bottom Lines How to Eradicate AI ‘Workslop’ From Your Office 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 fircomments@gmail.com. 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

  8. Aug 10

    ALP 312: Managing “Shadow AI” at your agency

    Most agency owners probably haven’t thought much about shadow AI (the name for when employees use their personal ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini accounts to do work). In fact, owners may be doing it as well. In this episode, Chip and Gini walk through what the risks are and how to respond without overreacting. The instinct to crack down is understandable but wrong. Employees are going to use their own tools regardless, often because personal accounts are better trained or more accessible than whatever the company has set up. The goal should be education, not elimination. Most employees don’t know that personal accounts default to feeding data into training sets, or that a single toggle can turn that off. That one fix alone is worth a conversation with your team. Vibe coding and a plain-language AI policy get discussed, in addition to educating your team. Gini’s team runs weekly micro-learning sessions to help people use AI as a thinking partner, not just a drafting tool. Both Chip and Gini advise that owners and employees who aren’t using AI meaningfully within the next year or two are putting their careers and businesses at risk. [read the transcript] The post ALP 312: Managing “Shadow AI” at your agency appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

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