AI is coming for our PR jobs, and honestly, I’m fine with that.
I don’t say that flippantly. Some industries are undergoing real, painful change. Just last month, Amazon’s Andy Jassy told CNBC that as AI advances, fewer humans will be needed for certain roles. But he also said something important: in many jobs, AI will free people from rote work and make jobs more interesting. It will fuel innovation: augmentation, not automation.
If you’ve been in comms for a while, like me, you’ve seen this movie before. When the internet took off in the ‘90s, there was panic about jobs disappearing. But, as one Clinton-era tech official put it in Wired back then, yes, jobs would change—but more would be created. He was right—just like the AI skeptics will be wrong.
I don’t think AI replaces us. It redistributes our time. If your days are filled with coverage reports, pitch drafts, and research tasks, AI can help. Those aren’t the soul of the job—they’re scaffolding. Offloading them means we get to focus on what really matters: building relationships, shaping strategy, and telling stories that land.
What excites me about AI isn’t that it can do our work, but it can make our work more meaningful. It can take the first pass at tasks like article summaries or headline scans—necessary but time-intensive. When it handles those, we get back our most precious resource: time.
It’s time to think, to find the sharp angle, and to come up with something that actually makes someone care.
How we are embracing AI at Inkhouse
At Inkhouse—and across the Orchestra network, which we’re proudly part of—we’re embracing this head-on. We just wrapped up our first AI Innovation Challenge, a high-energy, American Idol-style competition that spotlights how people are using AI to work smarter. The ideas aren’t hypothetical, but strategic and applicable for everyday use, already improving the way we work.
(The contest also confirmed that I would be terrible at coding, but someday I will complete my build of the AI-powered daily email digest.)
And we’re not just using AI behind the scenes—we’re helping our clients get discovered through it. As search evolves from keywords to conversations, visibility depends on how clearly and consistently your story shows up across the web. That’s why we’re optimizing thought leadership, earned media, and owned content to influence how AI tools interpret and serve up information. From building structured, authoritative narratives to ensuring those narratives appear in credible, indexable formats, we’re helping clients shape the signals that AI models use to surface expertise. It’s not about gaming the algorithm—it’s about making sure the right story gets told.
AI doesn’t invent. It doesn’t intuit. It can’t read a room, earn a journalist’s trust, or coach a founder through a meltdown. It can’t connect a product launch to a cultural shift. That’s still on us.
But it can give us the space to do all of that better.
So let’s embrace it. Let’s automate the tedious stuff. Let’s stop spending time on tasks a robot can do in seconds. And let’s pour that energy into the work only humans can do—strategic, creative, thoughtful work that actually moves the needle.
I, for one, welcome our robot colleagues.
If you’re interested in working with us and learning more about what we do, reach out to us at [email protected].
