Episode 506

FIR #506: Battle of the Bots!

For Immediate Release · Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz

March 23, 20261h 42m

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Show Notes

In this monthly long-form episode for March, Neville and Shel tackle a trio of interconnected themes reshaping the communications profession in the age of AI. The conversation opens with Anthropic’s top lawyer declaring that AI will destroy the billable hour. That thread leads naturally into JP Morgan’s controversial use of digital monitoring to verify junior bankers’ working hours, where Shel and Neville question whether surveillance technology can substitute for genuine managerial trust and engagement.

The episode also examines Gartner’s widely circulated prediction that PR budgets will double by 2027 as AI search engines favor earned media. Shel delivers a detailed report on the escalating misinformation crisis, citing a 900% surge in global deepfake incidents and new research from the C2PA on content provenance standards. The episode closes with a discussion of Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince’s prediction that bot traffic will exceed human traffic by 2027, and a sobering peer-reviewed study on how social bots hijack organizational messaging — research reported by Bob Pickard, who has experienced bot-driven attacks firsthand.

Dan York also contributes a tech report on the state of the Fediverse and Mastodon, as well as on AI developments for WordPress.

Links from this episode:

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report:

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, April 27.

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 [email protected].

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: Hi everyone, and welcome to the Forum Immediate Release podcast, long form episode for March, 2026. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel: And I’m Shel Holtz.

Neville: As ever, we have six great stories to discuss and share with you, and we hope you’ll gain insight and enjoyment from our discussion. Perhaps you’ll want to share a comment with us once you’ve had a listen. We’d like that.

Our topics this month range from AI in the end of the billable hour to Gartner’s predictions about PR budgets to monitoring work in the age of AI to newsrooms battling AI generated misinformation and more, including Dan York’s tech reports. Before we get into our discussion, let’s begin with a recap of the episodes we’ve published over the past month and some list of comments in the long form.

In episode 502 for February, published on the 23rd of that month, we explored how rapidly accelerating technology is reshaping the communication profession from autonomous agents with attitudes to the evolving ROI of podcasting. We led with a chilling milestone moment, an autonomous AI coding agent that publicly shamed a human developer after he rejected its code contribution.

A leader can build goodwill for days and lose it in seconds. In FIR 503 on the 2nd of March, we reported on the president of the IOC, that’s the International Olympic Committee, who had no answers to reporters’ questions and suggested on camera that someone on her communications team should be fired. We got comment on this, haven’t we, Shel?

Shel: Boy, do we have comments on this one. This attracted a good number of them, starting with Kevin Anselmo, who used to have a podcast on the FIR Podcast Network. It was on higher education communication. He says, having previously worked in communications for two different international sport federations, I found this story quite amusing. One of my first PR roles was working at the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games. I was working on the sport federation side, not the IOC.

Neville: Yep, you did.

Shel: But I know that working at such events is exhilarating and exhausting as you have to deal with a myriad of different issues. I can imagine that toward the end of the Olympics, the PR team fell short of delivering a robust brief. But nevertheless, in answer to your question, even if the PR people were abysmal, the fault is on Coventry for the way she handled the situation. A simple, we will have to look into this and get back to you response would have worked.

Instead, by handling it the way she did, she drew unnecessary attention to the questions she and the team weren’t prepared to answer, as you and Neville shared. I guess in the process of this mishap, I learned that Germany was in the running for the 2036 Olympics, which I wasn’t aware of. We also heard from Monique Zitnick, who said, really enjoyed your discussion on this. Certainly a puzzling situation that has surely ended in broken trust on both sides.

Shel: Mike Klein said, another ignominious IOC leader in the mold of Brundage and Samaranch. Neville, you replied. You said that’s an interesting comparison. Mike, Avery Brundage and Juan Antonio Samaranch both left very complicated legacies, particularly around politics and governance in the Olympic movement. What struck me about this episode wasn’t so much ideology or policy. It was leadership under pressure.

Coventry had actually received a fair amount of praise for how she handled some difficult moments during the games, which makes the press conference moment even more interesting from a communication perspective. It’s a reminder that reputation capital can be fragile. A single public moment can reshape the narrative very quickly. Mike replied, yes, leadership under pressure, but also the kind of people the IOC has chosen for leadership over the years.

Coventry has a complicated history over her involvement with her native Zimbabwe’s recent regimes as well. Sylvia Camby said, Neville, watching Coventry’s press conference took me back to the time I spent doing comms for an international association. It reminded me of how inward-looking organizations like the IOC can be. So totally focused on their internal member politics with leaders too lazy or too overconfident to bother to educate themselves about current affairs.

Also, they often have a distorted idea of what the press is interested in. They often think they can dictate their agenda. As you and Shel mentioned on the podcast, the questions were entirely predictable. You replied, Neville, that’s a really insightful observation, Sylvia. Organizations like the IOC can become quite inward facing, particularly when so much of their energy is spent navigating internal governance and member politics. That can create a kind of blind spot about how issues look from the outside.

Sylvia said, and I was thinking, I’m proud of Germany for being so sensitive about the significance of that date and for opposing the 2036 bid. They are much better at reading the spirit of the time than Coventry. As an aside, my father’s cousin competed in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin as a gymnast. She passed away last year at the age of 104.

She often spoke to me of the atmosphere surrounding the Olympics at the time, a heaviness and a sense of unspeakable doom. So yes, 2036 is a date that Berlin should definitely avoid. And you replied to that, Neville. People can go find that one in the comments.

Neville: That’s a good one. There are some great points of view, perspectives there. So thanks to everyone who commented. Are companies using AI as a convenient explanation for layoffs? That was a question we asked in FIR 504 on the 10th of March when we discussed AI washing, when organizations blame workforce cuts on AI, even when the reality is more complicated. It’s a difficult ethical space for communicators. And we have comment on this too, don’t we?

Shel: Three short ones. First from Monique, who commented that she was looking forward to listening to the episode because she’s been having a lot of conversations on this over the last month. Jacqueline Trzezinski said, I’m glad you’re delving into this. The same thought came to my mind when I saw the Block layoff announcement, especially as it was held up by some on LinkedIn as an example of how valuable transparency is during layoffs.

And Jesper Anderson said, I find it fascinating how quickly the world turns upside down. 18 to 24 months ago, companies were accused of letting people go because of AI and not admitting that this was the true reason.

Neville: Good perspective, Jesper, that one. Is social media still social? In FIR 505 on the 17th of March, we explored Hootsuite’s 2026 Social Media Trends Report, addressing social search, AI versus authenticity and more. Plus a darker question: what if AI starts to dominate the conversation? And we have comment, don’t we?

Shel: Yes, from Zara Ramoutoho Akbar, and I sure hope I pronounced that right, apologies if I didn’t. She said, yes, it feels like socials are shifting from a channel to a trust system. And in that world, I would say that the employee and peer voices matter more than brand output. Are you seeing organizations lean into that yet or still treating social as a broadcast channel? And since Zara asked the question, Neville, what do you think? Are you seeing this change?

Neville: No, I’m not, to be honest, but maybe it’s taking its time. There is something afoot without any doubt. And I think it’s something that we should expect. And that darker question is a valid one to put forward, let’s say. And we’ll keep our eyes and ears open, I think.

Shel: Yeah, I haven’t seen it much either, but I do think that there are organizations that are talking about it. So as you say, we may see this start to change in the months ahead. We have one more comment from Dolores Holtz. No relation. I for one certainly rely on people whom I trust more than any name or brand.

Neville: Yeah, I agree. Fair enough.

Shel: I think that covers our previous episodes up to this one.

Neville: Yeah, good, good comments all over from all those episodes. And thanks everyone for listening and adding your comments to that conversation. It’s really terrific.

Shel: Yeah, keep those coming and ask us questions because that was great from Zara. Also up on the FIR Podcast Network right now is the latest Circle of Fellows. It was a good conversation on the communication issues and challenges in this age of grievance and isolation into basically tribes these days.

Shel: This was Priya Bates, Alice Brink, Jane Mitchell, and Jennifer Wah were the panelists on this Circle of Fellows. As I say, it was really a terrific conversation. The next one is coming up on March 26th, Thursday at noon Eastern time. It’s on crisis communications and especially this idea of the polycrisis, which we heard about from our friend, Philippe Borremans.

The panelists for that Circle of Fellows will be Ned Lundquist, Robin McCaslin, George McGrath, and Carolyn Sapriel. Should be a good crisis-focused conversation. And of course, if you can’t make it at noon on Thursday, it will be available as a Circle of Fellows podcast and the video will be up on the FIR Podcast Network.

Neville: While we’re talking about IABC, let me briefly mention that Sylvia Camby and I hosted a webinar for IABC as part of IABC Ethics Month in February about ethics and AI. We’re actually going to…

Shel: I attended and it was terrific. I was there. It was a great webinar.

Neville: Well, thanks, Shel. That’s great. And we’ve actually had a nice review from someone, which was very pleasing. We’re going to repeat this, specifically for IABC members in the Asia-Pacific region. So if you’re in Australia, India, China, Japan, and maybe right out into the Pacific area, this one’s for you. It’s members only.

The event is AI Ethics and the Responsibility of Communicators. It explores the challenges and responsibilities communicators face when introducing AI, including transparency and trust, stakeholder accountability, and human oversight. It’s on Wednesday, the 15th of April at 6 PM Sydney time. That’s AEST, as I discovered, Australian Eastern Standard Time. You’re no longer on daylight savings in Australia, whereas we are by the time we do this. So 6 PM in Sydney, or 8 AM UTC. That’s Coordinated Universal Time or GMT if you’re used to that one. For me, I’m in the UK, so it translates into 9 AM UK time. But 6 PM in Sydney and that sort of time zone area is the important bit. So we look forward to seeing you there.

Shel: 1 AM Pacific time, so I won’t be participating in this one.

Neville: If you’re up, you could join. OK. So IABC will be letting members know about where to go and register, et cetera, I’m sure in the coming days. So just mark your diary in the meantime. Wednesday, 15th of April, 6 PM Sydney time. And let’s get on with things. But first, there’s this.

Shel: I won’t be.

Neville: Right, let’s start with a statement that will make a lot of people in professional services sit up a bit. Anthropic’s top lawyer Jeff Blick says AI is going to destroy the billable hour. That’s of interest to you if you’re a consultant in particular. Blick argues that AI is removing the need for what he calls tedious but lucrative work, the kind of work that firms have historically billed by the hour. And that matters because the billable hour isn’t just a pricing model.

It’s the foundation of how entire professions have operated for decades. But here’s the tension he highlights. Clients want problems solved quickly and efficiently, while the billable hour rewards the opposite: more time, more revenue. AI sharpens that contradiction because now tasks that once took days or weeks can be done in minutes. And that raises a very simple, very uncomfortable question for clients: if the work takes less time, why am I still paying for all those hours?

It’s something I’ve been thinking about quite a lot myself recently. I wrote about this in Strategic Magazine a few months ago, where I argued that AI isn’t killing consultants, but it’s killing the logic of the billable hour. Because the model has always had flaws: it rewards activity over impact. It prices effort rather than outcomes. And as soon as technology compresses effort, the model starts to look outdated. What’s changing now is not just efficiency, it’s expectations.

Clients aren’t necessarily looking to pay less. They’re looking for clarity, predictability, and above all, value that reflects results, not time spent. So we’re starting to see a shift from billing hours to pricing outcomes, from selling labor to selling judgment. And that sounds straightforward, but it opens up some deeper questions. If AI removes the entry-level repetitive work, how do people develop the judgment that clients are now paying for?

If you move away from time-based billing, how do you actually define and defend value? And perhaps most importantly, are firms really ready to let go of a model that has defined their economics for generations? I think what this really points to is a shift in what clients are buying: not time, but judgment; not effort, but outcomes. And the firms that recognize that early will have a very different advantage from those that don’t.

Shel: Well, if AI drives the end of the billable hour, all I will be able to say is it’s about time and thank God something did it. I have never been a fan of billable hours in communication consulting. I can see it in other lines of work. I mean, plumbers bill by the hour, electricians, people who work with their hands tend to bill by the hour, although interestingly, auto mechanics often do not. It’s the labor required to do this particular thing is worth this amount of money. And then there are the parts that you have to pay for.

But the question is, if the model of billable hours goes away in the public relations and communication industry, what do we replace it with? And I know we have talked about this in the past, but it has been a while.

But I remember when I worked — we have both operated in the billable hour environment. And when I was at Mercer, Mark Schuman was also at Mercer. I think he was in their Houston office and he came up and met with the comms consultants in Los Angeles. And he was talking about the value add. And I objected to this. I said, I have a billable hour based on my value and what it takes to cover overhead and make a profit. I think my billable hour when I left Alexander and Alexander was something like $385 an hour. And that should cover everything. Why are we adding something and just calling it value add?

And what Mark said was, if I have an idea in the shower and it took me 30 seconds for that idea to spark and yet it informs the entire engagement with the client and solves a problem and is based on my decades of experience and everything that I have learned — is that really worth only the 15 cents that that 30 seconds would be valued at under the billable rate? That’s ridiculous. The more I thought about it, the more I thought he’s right. That is ridiculous. So why aren’t we billing based on the value of the project?

Now, you can say here’s how many hours it’s going to take to complete that project and use that as a basis to come up with a price to give a client. Or you can look at other things. I think I mentioned on a show several years ago that Craig Jolly and I proposed a communications program for Coca-Cola for a department that was eliminated before we could come to a final agreement because they had actually agreed to this.

And what we were going to be paid for our effort was absolutely nothing. We were not going to bill them for hours. We were not going to bill them for the value of the project, but they were going to track the outcomes of the work that we did. And they were going to pay us 5% of the savings that accrued as a result of what we did and 5% of the profits that accrued based on what we did. And we had a formula for that. We would have made a fortune over, I think, the three years that we were going to get compensated after this project was complete.

There are other models out there that people can consider, but you’re right. I’m wondering when the clients are going to start saying, this is what I paid last time. Haven’t you started using AI? Why isn’t the drudge work that is part of this project taking less time and costing me less? I think we’re going to hear that from clients. So you better start thinking about the new models.

Neville: Yeah, it’s a sea change. It’s quite a significant change in structure to move from the billable hour. And one reason I believe nothing’s happened is there is definitely no groundswell of desire to change this from the people in organizations who would likely suffer most if it did change, or those who don’t.

And there are lots. I’m not picking out anyone in particular, but there are lots of people who just don’t like change. And we’ve been doing this for years. It works. Our whole business is based on this. And it probably is going to need, going to take a major client of a major consulting firm to say, hang on a second. We have a question for you about how you’re charging us. I’ve seen lots of chats about this, Shel, and I’m sure you have. And yet nothing’s happened.

So I wrote a lengthy analysis on my own blog not long ago, and that hardly got any attention at all. The story in Strategic I wrote was quite heavily researched, but I’ve not really seen much, any real traction on that other than some folks who said to me, hey, nice article you wrote in Strategic. I’d rather hear them say, I didn’t like it, here’s why, or I got a better idea, or whatever. Get a conversation going about it.

One thing I think should stimulate a discussion is, and this could be something we’ve got to force on people: look at it from the point of view of the client, not the consultant. And by the way, all these other examples you gave, like plumbers and all that, are absolutely right. So this discussion is specifically about professional services and consulting, not auto mechanics and plumbers and stuff like that.

So think about this: clients aren’t buying less, they’re buying differently. That’s the thing. I’ve had conversations with people — I have to admit, I struggled, truly seriously struggled to get the conversation actually with some energy to continue on why we should make this kind of change. So clients aren’t buying less, they’re buying differently. And one thing I wrote in the Strategic piece was talking about what their expectations are from the people that advise them, the consultants they work with. Today, they expect advisors who: one, use AI to scan signals and surface insights; bring sharper data-informed recommendations; and help avoid ethical, legal, and reputation missteps. Three major things they expect from people. AI has a role in all of them.

I think we need to move away and we can take the initiative on this to change the conversation with clients to this as opposed to, well, draft that report for the clients and AI can do all the research and so forth. When clients ask, why am I paying for all this time? You could pitch that to them in the sense that this is the value of the briefing we give to the AI. I think that is a demolishable argument over time. Clients are like you and me, they’re people, they’re not stupid. They’re looking at this themselves, many of them.

That said, there are many clients, particularly the more you get to the enterprise level and those kind of consulting firms at that level, who really don’t have much desire to rock the boat at all with all of this. It’s very entrenched, it’s ingrained. Everyone’s making money and it’s all wonderful and business gets done. And it’s going to need something to make a major shift here.

So I think we should take the initiative as communicators to do this. And it could be someone in a consulting firm — like you, I worked for Mercer and I remember back in the early ’90s, not discussions about changing the business model, but the value add. So maybe this is a Mercer thing at that time, perhaps. We need to have that conversation now. And we need someone at a senior level with an influential voice to raise this internally in their organization and run some internal webinars or seminars or get-togethers to talk about why we need to change the business model and why the billable hour has to end as the basis for business. But it’s a big task, I would say.

Shel: One of the truths about the public relations industry is that it takes pain for the industry to change. I mean, we’ve seen this. We’ve been doing this show for 21 years and we’ve seen it with a number of major technologies that have come along that the PR industry has been very, very, very slow to adopt. And what ultimately got them to adopt the web and social media was seeing work taken away from them by boutiques who were offering those services. And as soon as they saw money left on the table, they said, we’d better figure this out because this is something that we should be doing. They figured it out and now they’re using it regularly.

You’re absolutely right that we in the industry have experience and insights that allow us to do things like create the appropriate prompt to get the right result for a public relations issue or campaign or what have you. And it goes far beyond the prompt. It goes into creating documents that become foundational to a project within one of the LLMs. It even gets into agents now. What if we set up an agent on behalf of a client that is out there looking for competitive information on a regular basis? And it took, let’s say, 15 hours to create this agent so that it was producing the kind of daily or hourly reports that we’re looking for. And those become a big part of the project. It’s operating while we sleep. We can’t charge for that. Certainly it’s not going to be on an hourly basis.

So a formula has to emerge for these types of things that allows agencies to be compensated in a way that keeps the lights on, provides the salaries to the consultants who work there, and earns a reasonable profit without having to bill hours because it just makes less and less sense. And as I say, I didn’t think it made sense back in the ’80s when I was working for Mercer, my first consulting gig.

You remember maintaining your time sheet in 10-minute increments? Oh my God. Who’s going to pay me for that? Who do I bill for the time that I spend maintaining a time sheet in 10-minute increments? I mean, come on.

Neville: Don’t remind me, please. I tried to get away with entering time in the timesheet for the time I had to spend on doing the timesheet. They didn’t let me get away with that. No.

Shel: They didn’t buy that. My brother’s an attorney, and when he was working for a law firm — he’s corporate side now — but he remembered if he took a pencil out of the supply cabinet, he had to bill that to a client. So I mean, the time that he was spending billing things to clients was time that he wasn’t spending on client work. There are countless reasons why the billable hour needs to die. I don’t mind the consultant having a billable hour rate as a base for calculating something, but it shouldn’t be the be-all and end-all of what the client is billed. There needs to be a formula where you say this is what the project is going to cost. And if the project moves out of the scope that you agreed to, then you go back to the client and say, we’re outside the scope. We’re going to have to charge more for that. Here’s what we’re going to charge. You okay with that before we start moving on this stuff that you’ve requested that is out of scope?

Neville: Yeah, no, we need to get some movement going on this topic, I think. And maybe that’s something — thinking about IABC, you know, some kind of talk on this topic needs to happen.

Shel: Yeah. Or, you know how Ann Handley sold the T-shirt that said Justice for the Em Dash? I bought one. We need T-shirts that say Kill the Billable Hour with the FIR logo on it. Would anybody buy that? Let us know. We’ll pursue it. I’ll find out where Ann had her shirts made.

Neville: Yeah, I like that idea. I like it. Excellent.

Shel: If you work in public relations, you’ve probably seen the prediction that’s making the rounds right now. It sounds too good to be true. Gartner, the analyst firm whose pronouncements tend to get circulated in agency pitch decks for years, Gartner has declared that by next year, 2027, the mass adoption of artificial intelligence and large language models as a replacement for traditional search will drive a doubling of PR and earned media budgets.

Now, what would drive this surge in PR spending, you ask? Well, AI answer engines overwhelmingly favor non-paid sources. More than 95% of links referenced in AI-generated answers come from earned, shared, and organic owned content, with 27% originating directly from earned media. So if AI is where people increasingly go for information — and by the way, the data on that is striking; ChatGPT saw traffic surge 608% year over year between the first half of 2024 and the first half of 2025, while traditional search giants Google and Bing both slipped — well, then earned media becomes the engine of discoverability. And that, the argument goes, means organizations will pour money into PR to stay visible.

Now, I want to be honest about the source here, because Stuart Bruce, someone whose thinking you and I have always admired and respected, Neville — Stuart has pointed out that this prediction originated in a blog post published by Gartner as part of a lead generation campaign promoting a webinar for chief communication officers, and that while it carries the authority of the Gartner brand, it lacks the evidence normally associated with their research publications.

Frank Strong over at the Sword and the Script notes similarly that the prediction feels rushed. 2027 is barely more than eight months away and the path from “AI favors earned media” to “budgets actually double” is pretty far from certain. But I’m cautiously optimistic because the underlying logic is sound.

If AI systems favor credible third-party sources and PR is the function best equipped to generate that kind of coverage, well then yeah, our work becomes more strategically important. But a Gartner webinar promo is not a Gartner research report, and we should resist the temptation to tout this prediction as if it were settled fact.

Here’s what I actually want to talk about though. Let’s say the prediction is right. Let’s say the prediction is half right. Let’s just say budgets grow substantially. What happens to that money? Because there’s a pattern in this industry that I think we need to name directly. When good fortune arrives — a new platform, a new capability, a shift in the media landscape — agencies have historically been better at capturing the upside than at reinvesting in the profession. More revenue has meant more of the same: more accounts, more billable hours, more senior hires, not more rethinking.

And right now, in the age of AI, there are two investments that I think agencies have an obligation to make if this windfall arrives. The first is genuinely rethinking the agency model in light of AI — not just adding a chatbot to the workflow, but asking the hard questions about what services still require human judgment, where AI can amplify capacity, and how to build new offerings around answer engine optimization. And by the way, a new billing model.

Stuart Bruce notes that Gartner explicitly rejects the efforts of SEO and marketing companies to pivot into this space, recognizing that answer engine optimization requires communication-specific skills to balance stakeholder trust and platform requirements. That’s an opening for PR, but only if agencies actually build those capabilities rather than outsourcing them to MarTech vendors.

The second investment, and this one matters a lot to me, is in rebuilding entry-level pathways into the profession. AI has already been eroding the grunt work that used to serve as the training ground for new communicators. As one analysis put it, the traditional deal of entry-level work — trading rote labor for mentorship — that’s dying. The learning curve is being automated, leaving early-career professionals stranded between AI agents and senior incumbents.

If PR budgets double, agencies will have the resources to do something about this. They could create structured apprenticeship programs. They could invest in training that teaches new communicators not just to use AI tools, but to supervise and interrogate them. They could build the next generation of practitioners rather than simply eliminating the entry points.

What I fear, and what I think is entirely possible, is that agencies will look at this budget doubling as a margin opportunity rather than a reinvestment opportunity. More revenue, leaner teams, higher profits. And five years from now, we’ll be asking where the next generation of PR professionals are going to come from.

So yeah, the Gartner prediction may well be right. AI does appear to favor the kind of credible third-party earned coverage that PR generates. And that’s genuinely good news for the profession. But good news is only useful if you do something smart with it. Neville, you’ve been watching the agency landscape in the UK and Europe for a long time. When you see a prediction like this, do you believe it? And what’s your read on whether the industry will rise to the moment or just cash the check?

Neville: I must admit, I did say when I saw the article, I don’t believe it. British TV viewers might recognize that phrase from a comedy show 20 years ago. I did follow a lot of what people were saying, and all I saw was bubble, bubble, bubble, hype. I didn’t see anything. What I saw was missing, meaning this was a marketing claim, as you mentioned, and Stuart Bruce wrote about that, and others have too, just pointing out this was a blog post from Gartner. There’s no data to back up any of it. There’s nothing cited. There’s nothing you could trust to prove or to give you confidence in repeating it. Yet that’s what everyone has been doing, repeating this as fact.

The particular phrase that was repeated by Gartner and then mass repeated: by 2027, mass adoption of public LLMs as a replacement for traditional search will drive a 2x increase in PR and earned media budgets. But there’s no evidence behind that. Yet what we saw was mass repetition all over, LinkedIn in particular.

I did read a worth-reading article by Stephen Waddington published on the 16th of March on his blog about this topic. And he’s critical. And I think his starting line is “when industry optimism outruns the evidence,” and therein is where we’re at with this. I’ve seen sensible voices — you, Stuart, another one — who are saying that if this is true, then this is what it could mean, this is what could happen. But it’s like a lot of things we see: the maybe, perhaps, could, etc. is kind of brushed under the carpet, where suddenly before you know it, this is what’s going to be happening.

So I’ve not seen a huge amount of conversation about this, to be honest, except when this first appeared. That said, today I saw two posts on LinkedIn from people repeating this who obviously just came across the Gartner piece and they’ve reposted it.

Shel: The long tail lives.

Neville: Exactly. So Stephen goes into — he makes a point in his post about GEO, and I think that’s actually contextually good. He’s saying Gartner’s observation may ultimately prove correct. But the path from the insight to a doubling of budgets is far from certain. He says, GEO remains highly contested. I’ve seen others saying that too. The mechanics of how AI models select, weight, and attribute sources are still evolving. This is an era where budgets are being directed to support discovery work.

So what needs to happen instead, he says, is a call to action, I suppose, to communicators. When you see this claim being made, please challenge the argument. And if we aren’t set to see a boom in public relations work, some of that investment will need to be diverted to ensure the sustainability of earned media. And that, to me, is a very sensible point to make.

All of this is probably and in fact certainly is why I didn’t post about this on my blog. When I saw it, I was attracted to it thinking, this could be an interesting topic to stimulate some attention. Then I read it and started seeing others like Stuart saying, wait a minute. So I thought, no, I’m not going to join a hype bandwagon here without some further research. Therefore, it didn’t appear compelling enough to me to spend the time on it. Let’s see what emerges further from this, if anything. But like you said, Shel, if this turns out to be true, then happy days.

Shel: Yeah, I doubt it myself. I think what we’re going to see is an incremental increase in PR spending as a result of this. And that’s going to be because we’re not going to see some mass revelation at the same time among all industry that, my God, we need to invest more in earned media so that we’re visible in search results that are now happening on LLMs instead of search engines. This is going to be gradual.

One company is going to pick up on it, then another. But what I have seen ongoing, regularly, are new reports, new studies, new research coming out. It all validates that LLMs are in fact generating their search results based largely on earned media. And I think as people wake up to that and realize that if we want to be present in those results — it’s like showing up on the first page of Google search results — we want to be in the answer when somebody asks a question where our expertise, our thought leadership is relevant. Then you need to bolster your earned media.

One of the things that worries me though about this bolstering of earned media is how many more press release pitches am I going to get? How many more press releases that have nothing to do with me or what I do are going to show up in my inbox? You’re going to see reporters pitched way more than they’re being pitched now. And there may be some blowback from this as a result of that. It’s like, hey, PR industry, back off — too much. So there’s also that to consider.

Neville: Yeah, I agree. So don’t believe everything you read online is a simple thing here, and take time to pay close attention to what people are saying about this before you repeat anything. Just be clear in your mind.

Shel: Yeah, I was also going to say that I think owned media, the stuff that you produce on your own website — I think a renewed emphasis on that. So you’re producing really interesting stuff that people start looking at. That counts, too. That’s one of the categories of media that was included in this research. So you don’t have to rely on earned media all that much if you can do a great job of producing that content.

Neville: Good tip. OK, so earlier we talked about how work is priced. That was our piece about the billable hour. Now let’s consider how work is measured, because there’s another story that feels connected but from a different angle. The Financial Times reported that JP Morgan has started using technology to check whether the hours junior bankers say they work actually match their digital activity — things like keystrokes, meetings, and video calls. The bank says this is about well-being, about awareness, not enforcement, about making sure people aren’t overworked. And on the surface, that sounds reasonable.

But when you look a bit closer, it raises some uncomfortable questions. What’s really happening here is a shift from reported work to observed work. Not what you say you did, but what the system can verify. And that’s where the reaction gets interesting.

If you look at the comments on the FT’s post about this, there’s a very clear pattern. Some people see this as logical, almost inevitable. In a data-driven industry, of course you measure activity more precisely. But a lot of the reaction is skeptical, even uneasy. You see comments like, “this really screams we trust our employees.” “This is a classic case of measuring what’s easy instead of what matters.” “Big Brother is watching you.”

And then there’s a more nuanced point that comes up repeatedly. Does this actually improve anything, or does it just change behavior? Because if people know they’re being measured on activity, they optimize for activity. More keystrokes, more visible presence, more signals that look like work — but not necessarily better outcomes.

And that connects directly to the earlier discussion about billing. If AI is automating more of the actual work — the analysis, the modeling, the drafting — then what exactly are we measuring here? Time, activity, presence, or value?

There’s also a deeper cultural question. Investment banking has long had a reputation for extreme hours. JP Morgan has already tried to address that, capping weeks at 80 hours, for example. 80-hour weeks. The days of 40-hour weeks are a distant memory, obviously. But if people were underreporting hours to stay on deals, then the issue isn’t just measurement — it’s incentives, it’s culture. Technology can surface that, but it doesn’t resolve it.

So this opens up some bigger questions. Are we moving towards a world where all knowledge work is continuously monitored and verified? Does that improve trust or undermine it? And if both pricing and measurement are shifting at the same time, what does a fair day’s work even mean anymore?

Shel: Absolutely. One of the things we keep hearing about AI is organizations are going to have to rethink things like workflows. And we’re talking about organizations that are not going to look at all in five years the way they do today because of AI. Are people thinking that it’s going to take 40 hours for somebody to do today what it took them to do before if all of that grunt work is being taken over by AI?

On the other hand, I have seen that AI has increased the number of hours people are spending on their jobs. There’s some very recently released data on that, that they are more stressed now with AI in the picture. And if you’re putting in more hours, is this really an issue?

I’m also always struck by, as you mentioned in the report, the lack of trust, the signal of the lack of trust that this sends. I’ve always felt that the availability of these tools that allow this kind of monitoring raises the question of, you know, just because you can, should you? And yeah, I don’t think that you should. I think there are better ways to determine whether your people are working, and looking at their outputs is the best of those. Have they delivered what you expected them to deliver?

Because when you destroy the trust that you might have had, or perhaps you never had trust in your organization in the first place, if you have new hires who come in and find that they are being monitored in this way, they’re just inclined to find ways to cheat. I saved an article in my link blog not too long ago from the HR Digest about key jamming.

The point on this was that if you have employees who are doing this, you have a bigger issue. But if you haven’t heard of key jamming, this is easily available products that remote workers use by putting them on their keyboards and it continually presses the key. So it looks to the software that’s monitoring like that keyboard is active, that employee is working these hours. They could be off doing whatever they want.

I imagine that there are some keystroke monitoring software that have been updated to address this and want to make sure that they’re typing real words or real numbers and not just repetitively striking the same key. But then employees will figure out the next thing, or the companies that sell these products will figure out the next thing to make it appear that the employee is working.

Better to build trust so that the employees will want to produce great work for the organization that they love working for than to destroy trust and implement these kinds of monitoring tools.

Neville: So it’s interesting. JP Morgan is quite resolute in their defense of this, because as they say, they’re doing this to help junior employees not overwork. There was a case here where an intern at the Bank of America died in 2013, which the coroner said was linked to long working hours. And the anecdotal stuff has emerged constantly since then on people who are totally wrecked emotionally because of the hours they’ve got to work.

To be fair to JP Morgan, they’ve responded to that at scale in the organization. The trouble is that nearly every comment I see that has commented on this is extremely skeptical about their true motive. So they’ve got a credibility problem to explain this well. They talk about this is about awareness, not enforcement, th

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