The "Two Clocks" AI Framework for forward-thinking comms leaders

Yeah.

And most conversations about AI and communications focus at the moment on productivity, content creation and efficiency.

So what made you feel that there was a bigger, more fundamental question that the PR profession wasn't asking?

So all of that tactical conversation is necessary.

It's just not sufficient as a primary response because I think it misses what AI is strategically changing for communications.

And the first part is, first of all, persuasion no longer starts from a blank page.

It starts from a machine-made baseline.

And let me give you an example.

So imagine, for example, you're going to buy, I don't know, maybe like a car or a TV.

You go to chat GPT and you're like, okay, which vendors should I consider? Give me a list.

And the system would return your short list.

And in my view, that becomes two things.

First of all, it is now a commercial gate that depends and decides whether an organization has made the cut.

And we know there is increasing evidence, especially for B2B markets, that vendor discovery starts with AI and is a massive purchase intent driver.

So you have that commercial impact.

And secondly, that becomes a reputational shorthand that starts to influence stakeholder opinion Vee Mapunde, Before you as a company have opened your mouth so any conversation you're about to have there's a good chance I got that first.

Vee Mapunde, And when you think about communications influence model which is highly relational that doesn't work when you have a synthetic intermediary that's now.

Vee Mapunde, mediating all of your other stakeholders reputation management becomes architectural so that's kind of I think the first.

massive tectonic, if I might say, change on how reputation is built.

So I always joke saying reputation is now actually built a token at a time.

So that's kind of the building part.

When we look the other side of the coin that we don't want to look, which is how you lose reputation.

When you think about crisis, for example, someone probably has made a decision in a particular context and communication can work backwards from that.

AI changes that increasingly you have a reputation risk that is generated from within the system, meaning like a hijacked prompt, hallucination, where you cannot reconstruct that, at least not fast enough to intervene.

And when you think about that, the existing reputation management, risk management, muscle defunction have all the playbooks are not sufficient.