AI's biggest month was a communications story. So why weren't we in the room?
Across June the big tech conferences argued about trust, reputation and who the public believes. Communications was barely on the stages.
I recently reflected on this Substack that the great themes of London Tech Week were sovereignty and capital. Who owns the compute and who tells your story when you are not in the room? Beneath the engineering and geopolitics, you face tough communication challenges.
Having now watched the events unfold at the other big tech conferences of the month, an uncomfortable question has been weighing on my mind… If June’s tech agenda was so focused on trust and AI, why was our discipline of strategic communications so hard to find on the stages?
How the tech conferences argued our subject
In London, the dominant human problem was trust. A friend working the events had been dropping the session summaries into a WhatsApp group, hundreds of them across London Tech Week and the London AI Summit, and trust appeared in 154 of the 352, more than any other theme. Around it clustered regulation, governance, the future of work, and the sovereignty question I wrote about last time.
And at SXSW London, a celebrity haunt as much as a tech festival, with Michelle Obama recording her podcast, the tech names on stage included Victor Riparbelli of Synthesia, whose business is synthetic video, and Rose Wang of Bluesky, whose proposition turns on trust and moderation. You can’t help but feel there is something subtly instructive about debating who the public can believe at a festival that is hosting synthetic-video pioneers and a former First Lady. Strip the lanyards off, and you are left with the management of public belief at scale - PR.
At VivaTech in Paris, artificial intelligence had stopped being a topic on the agenda and become the grammar of the whole event. The through-line the organisers kept returning to was sovereignty. A French agency even produced a tracker of the speaker list, which framed the event as a contest for European technological independence against the United States and China. Numerous ministers and regulators were in attendance, a sure sign that Europe is in the final, decisive stretch of writing the rules for how AI meets the public.
The questions on every stage - who is believed, who is trusted, who gets to tell the story - are communications questions. We have spent a century developing the vocabulary for them, but struggle to position ourselves.
We were not holding the microphones
With all those summaries to hand, I counted who was actually standing in the limelight.
Just 2 of 865 speakers at London’s two big AI events came from communications, public relations or corporate affairs. Not one of them was a chief communications officer.
Founders and chief executives took 287 of those 865 seats, technologists another 285. The vocabulary of communications appears nowhere across the 352 summaries. The word reputation itself surfaces twelve times.
Paris repeated the lesson in an even more pointed form. The independent tracker I mentioned earlier sorted VivaTech’s speakers and delegates by function, but did not trouble to give communications a category of its own. It folded the discipline into marketing, and even the combined pair came to just 4% of the room.
And going back to the two occasions in the London transcripts where communications did surface, it appeared first as a risk (”PR or legal issues”) and second as a line on a shopping list, a requirement to be procured alongside market access. We are filed, by the people building these systems, as a cost to be managed and a service to be bought, rather than as the discipline that owns the very problem they spent the month worrying about.
The room we were actually in
During the thick of tech conferences, the AI for PR Conference ran in London. It had a strong line-up: President of the CIPR, Farzana Baduel. Chief Executive of the PRCA, Sarah Waddington CBE. Carolyn Esser, Chief Corporate Affairs Officer at Darktrace, which is to say a communications leader at a listed cybersecurity firm, exactly the sort of person the London stages never thought to ask. Alongside them, much of the measurement community, the people now writing the rules for how a brand stays visible when an AI is the one doing the answering.
I was exploring Norfolk with the family, so unfortunately missed the occasion - a slight irony given what I’m writing about today - but the programme is exactly what our industry needs to care about. Reputation, crisis, governance, the integrity of the function in an automated world.
Yet we’re still talking in a bubble, and in the next 12 months we need to burst through to appear on those stages.
Three uncomfortable questions
It’s disappointing that, as someone who invested time and money in a CIPR-accredited PR degree, has since spent 15 years in the industry, and takes education as a professional responsibility, I feel the very industry I’ve bet on is in a perilous position when it comes to AI.
These are the questions every communications practitioner should be asking themselves:
How do we stop being the people who organise the stage and start being the ones the audience came to hear? There is a huge importance in coming together as an industry to share and learn from one another, but businesses are embedding AI into their operating models, and the integration and rollout of AI are largely communications challenges to navigate.
Have we made ourselves legible to the people setting the rules? Our industry is hugely diverse: representing all sectors and specialisms, with businesses ranging from freelancers to multinational giants. Perhaps our variety as a function creates buyer confusion around the concept of communications, meaning board-level appointments aren’t universally understood?
Are we spending our scarce attention on the right emergency? The tooling, the workflows, the very absorbing question of our own productivity are all real. But the categories that will govern how AI meets the public are being written this year and next, while they are still loose enough to shape, by people who do not think of trust as ours to hold. That, and not the content pipeline, is the thing with a closing window.
So what room are we building?
In the London Tech Week piece I ended on ownership: someone always owns the thing, and someone always tells the story of who owns it, and your only real choice is whether that someone is you. The same logic holds one level up, for the profession itself.
There are always two rooms. The one where we explain ourselves to each other, and the one where everyone else decides what we are for. We have become very good at filling the first. We cannot keep leaving the second half empty and wondering why nobody saved us a seat.
In the next 12 months, it would be good to see the role of strategic communications elevated industrywide, and to see more industry colleagues on those tech stages.