Client A: LinkedIn is like an AI fire hose, there’s so much content – how can we differentiate?

Client B: I just want media relations. I can do content myself (with AI)

Client C: My CEO needs to have a personal brand – help me make her look authoritative with AI

These are some of the conversations we have had recently with clients. Everyone is a bit anxious. And no wonder, we are living through one of the biggest shifts in modern marketing and corporate communications and it feels breathtakingly different to what we knew worked before. 

Artificial intelligence can now draft press releases, visual and written social media posts, blogs and opinion pieces, analyse sentiment, generate marcomms plans, summarise research and simulate crisis responses in seconds. But is it wisdom, is it judgment and is it even close to being about relationships?

Corporate communications in the age of AI is not about replacing people. It is about understanding what technology can enhance and what it can never replicate. The conversation should not be about automation versus humans. It should be about responsibility, authenticity and trust.

Authenticity remains the foundation of effective communication. I have spent my 25+ year career in comms painstakingly protecting my personal reputation. My clients, bosses, and counterparts have a pretty good idea of what is authentic to me and the companies I represent when I work with them. AI can produce polished language and convincing structure, but it cannot produce lived experience. It can’t sit in a boardroom during a major decision or feel the weight of a reputational crisis unfolding in real time. Authentic communication comes from conviction and context. It comes from knowing why something matters, not just how it sounds. In a world where content can be generated endlessly, authenticity becomes the ultimate currency.

At the same time, we are already seeing how AI is reshaping journalism itself. Newsrooms are under pressure, resources are tighter, and the demand for speed is relentless. AI is now used to draft earnings reports, generate market summaries, rewrite press releases, create headlines optimised for search, and produce first draft articles from structured data. It can transcribe interviews instantly and summarise long documents in seconds. For time stretched journalists, these tools offer real efficiency. They reduce workload and help manage volume.

But when automation is the lazy initial take and replaces journalistic input, nuance can be lost, and where is the context? Where are the original sources, contacts? Original reporting is replaced by reworked material from the same sources, so journalism becomes increasingly homogenised, created from the same data and the same logic. When everyone is drawing from similar algorithmic outputs, differentiation becomes harder, leading to (frankly) shitty, banal copy.

For corporate communicators, this shift matters. It changes how stories work. It affects how narratives are formed and amplified. I’ve read a lot about ‘corporate storytellers’ recently. That’s great. I love a narrative, and a story continues to be the most effective way that an idea is transmitted (t.m. Aaron Sorkin). But in this world of a lack of trust, credibility is the only agency we now have. Adjacent to this idea is the fact that personal relationships matter, more than ever. In an environment where AI can generate hundreds of pitches or rewrites instantly, genuine engagement stands out. Journalists, like everyone else, can sense when something is generic. They can also recognise when someone understands their audience and respects their craft.

Trust is earned slowly and, despite what many think, lost quite slowly too. AI generates a perspective based on patterns and probability, synthesising what is already out there. It can mirror tone and simulate balance. But trust is built through accountability, consistency and relationships over time. It is built when journalists know you will answer difficult questions honestly rather than hiding behind prepared lines. It is built when stakeholders know you are not shaping narratives to obscure reality, or indeed outright lying. It is built when leadership teams understand that their communications counsel is grounded in experience and not simply output.

There’s growing assumption that AI levels the playing field, that access to tools equates to access to strategy. Tools can help, but they don’t replace years of navigating complex situations as I have had in the large financial institutions I worked at. Experience is knowing when a story is strong enough to work on its own and when it needs more. We recognise the early signals of a brewing crisis and convey the things that never appear in a briefing document that you tell an executive over the phone. We’ve seen enough cycles to know that what feels urgent today may look very different tomorrow.

My approach to AI is deliberate and personal. I don’t use its output as a given and challenge and interrogate it, encouraging our teams to do the same. AI gives you a single, aggregated perspective and doesn’t argue back, nor bring diverse, lived experience into the advice we provide to clients. A PR firm, when operating at its best, is not one person relying on a tool, but a team collaborating, debating, refining and strengthening ideas. It is the tension between different viewpoints that sharpens strategy. AI can provide a starting point but can’t replicate the depth that comes from people thinking together.

I use AI today in practical ways, it improves efficiency especially working with our junior team researching topics as a first pass, but when they present that back to us, the information they give is challenged and scrutinized. At Khora, we are open about how AI is used and where it adds value. We don’t present machine-generated thinking as human expertise, and we don’t outsource strategic decisions to algorithms. Client data remains private and protected. Confidential conversations stay confidential. Trust is not only something we build externally on behalf of clients, it is something we safeguard operationally in how we work.

AI will continue to evolve, but reputation, leadership and dealing with crises is frankly as non-artificial and as human as it gets. The future of corporate communications belongs to those who understand how to combine technology with relationships, trust, authenticity, and experience. Thank goodness I chose this as a career.