Don't be replaced by AI. be amplified by it.

The comms pros who will thrive in this decade are not the ones who use AI the most. It'll be the ones who use their humanity the most, and use AI to amplify it. — Advita Patel

After 20+ years in PR and comms, that line completely grabbed my attention.

This was Advita's closing line at the 23 PR Pro conference last week. I came across it on LinkedIn and it has really resonated with me - not because it was surprising, but because it exactly summarises my own thinking.

AI and the way it will fundamentally change things has been a hot topic since the arrival of ChatGPT in late 2022. Endless words have been written about how this is a watershed moment for humanity. I took some time to be convinced of its usefulness; I am now an advocate, slowly expanding my understanding of how it can help my work while remaining mindful of the pitfalls and unforeseen consequences.

There are many people out there claiming to be AI gurus, but most, like me, are still in the learning and discovery phase. Change is coming, but I believe a lot will remain the same. That belief is grounded in experience. I graduated as the dot-com bubble burst, a moment when the internet was going to transform everything. In many ways it has but in comms and PR, a fundamentally good story has always been, and will always be, a good story. The channel changes. The craft doesn't.

Real stories and real people have long been at the core of my most successful work. The ground-breaking adventure explorer turned TV presenter. The group of volunteers who used historical building techniques to reconstruct a Roman villa. The housing officer who helped an isolated resident build a new social circle. The dozens of people I supported to share their experience of living with tinnitus. These stories work because they are genuine, human and irreplaceable. AI cannot create them, only amplify them.

This leads to a point I keep returning to: AI content, by its very nature, cannot be truly original. The models are built on predictions drawn from what has already been said and done. Progress has never come from repetition. True progress comes from new ideas and AI is, for now at least, incapable of original thought.

Saying this, I do not dismiss AI's value. Quite the opposite - I’m learning all the time and currently use it for proof-reading, idea generation and planning. I've also been working on a tool that applies a corporate style and tone of voice to written work. Having drafted and edited thousands of documents over the years, I know that colleagues often know exactly what they want to say but struggle to put it into words that land clearly and consistently. Tools like this, if adopted well, have the potential to free up comms teams to focus on genuinely strategic work and give organisations a more coherent, confident voice.

I also see real value in AI's ability to support reporting - recognising and interpreting patterns in data and insight that would otherwise take days to surface. Done well, this enables communicators to take a deeper, more informed and more strategic approach, because their decisions are rooted in evidence rather than instinct alone.

The skill, judgment and humanity that experienced communicators bring to their work is not under threat from AI. It is more valuable because of it. The professionals who will thrive are not those who use AI to replace their thinking, but those who use it to do more with what only they can provide.

That has been the philosophy behind my work for over two decades, and it is the lens I bring to every piece of work I do. If you are thinking about how to build a comms function that is genuinely strategic, human-centred and AI-ready, I would love to have that conversation.