AI Won’t Replace Communicators. It Will Clarify Our Value

It seems like layoffs are everywhere these days. Amazon just shed 16,000 jobs. UPS plans to cut 30,000 positions this year. In the PR industry, the recent Omnicom IPG merger immediately eliminated 4,000 roles. Agency executives, who relentlessly focus on cost efficiencies as any holding company veteran can tell you, are no doubt watching AI’s rapid advance and seeing an irresistible opportunity to cut deeper.

Then there is NYU Professor Scott Galloway, who recently told listeners of the Pivot podcast something that cuts against the prevailing anxiety. “People ask me what job is safe from AI. I personally think if I were to bet on one job that’s only going to increase in importance, it’s things around communication, strategic communications, investor relations, PR.”

Those are mixed signals. Is strategic communications an industry about to be hollowed out by algorithms, or one of the few professions that becomes more valuable because of them?

The answer depends entirely on what you think this industry actually does and where its value is centered.

There is an irony at the heart of the profession. We are an industry of storytellers, people who give language and narrative to organizations and the world around them, and yet we have long struggled to articulate what it is we actually do. PR is a shorthand that never quite captures it. Communications is somehow even vaguer. Beneath those labels sits a body of work far more expansive than most people appreciate, spanning crisis management, public affairs, brand storytelling, media relations, digital engagement, internal communications, and more. After more than twenty years in this business, it is rare to hear two people describe the work the same way.

This identity confusion has pushed parts of the industry to define their value around the wrong things. Deliverables. Impression counts. Engagement metrics. Media mentions. Vanity metrics that sometimes matter and often do not. The business models of many large agencies have been built around execution, around the sheer volume of output generated by layers of largely junior staff. The pyramid structure is not just an organizational chart. It is a revenue model. And it has trained clients and agencies alike to measure value in activity rather than impact.

That was always a misalignment, because the real value of communications was never in the deliverables. It was in the outcomes.

At its best, communications work builds reputations over years and protects them when things go sideways. It launches products that reshape markets, navigates crises that could sink companies, helps win policy fights that shape entire industries, and counsels C suite leaders in ways that define their legacies. It helps organizations make sense of an increasingly complex world. All of that requires judgment honed through experience.

Long before anyone heard of ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, there was a basic truth about high stakes professions. Academic training and book knowledge are the price of entry. A law degree does not make someone a trial lawyer. A political science degree does not prepare someone to run a national campaign. Medical school graduates spend years in residencies before they are trusted with life or death decisions. In every field where the consequences are real, mastery lives in doing, in accumulated judgment built over time.

That is what Galloway is getting at. Large language models are, at their core, the most comprehensive distillation of written knowledge ever assembled. They are trained on the page, not in the field. They can access every communications case study ever published, but they have never been in the war rooms, boardrooms, conference rooms, or trenches. That is simply the reality of what the technology is trained on and what it can do. If one day we find a way to upload human experience directly into models, the calculus may change.

None of this is an argument against AI. It is already useful for media monitoring, social listening, drafting content, research, and list building. It makes execution faster and cheaper, and it will continue to improve. Yes, that means some junior roles will shrink or disappear over time. That is a real consequence and one that deserves serious thought about how the next generation of talent is developed.

But execution was never where the real value lived. McKinsey does not sell PowerPoints. It sells judgment and a reputation for strategic counsel. The output is incidental to the value. The strongest communications firms have always worked the same way, even if the industry as a whole has not organized itself around that truth. Too many firms still sell deliverables when what clients actually need and value is thinking.

AI is forcing a reckoning with that misalignment. The short term temptation is obvious: cut costs, pocket the savings, and do more with less. The real opportunity, however, is to reorient the profession’s value proposition around what has always mattered most: counsel, judgment, experience, and relationships. The firms that thrive will not be leaner versions of what they were. They will be closer to what they should have been all along, organizations where senior counsel is the product and everything else supports it.

There is a final irony here. Communications professionals often guide organizations through moments of transformation. Now the industry faces its own. The technology will keep getting better. That much is certain. What will shape the future of this profession is how its leaders choose to respond. Those will be human decisions, made with human judgment, about where the real value of this work lives. That, in the end, is the point.