Tuesday, August 25, 2026
Tuesday, August 25, 2026
Angharad Planells:
As content production becomes effortless, the real gap emerging in the comms profession is not output capability, but the depth and judgement behind it. The uncomfortable question for leaders now: are you hiring and developing the right kind of talent for what comes next? Because if not, a deeper risk is emerging. That of a future talent pipeline that looks capable on paper but lacks the judgement and expertise needed to lead.
“F**k off.”
Followed by silence as the phone was slammed down on the other end.
The ending of a story fondly and regularly repeated by one of my previous bosses as his experience with a national newspaper journalist during one of his first ever pitches as a junior PR.
Unpleasant, sure. But also, a weird badge of honour for many of us that honed our media relations skills dialling number after number in the hope of securing coverage for our clients. It was a story shared to inspire the apprentices and new graduates we took on, showing that no one is immune to the rite of passage that is trial and error when it comes to media relations.
In communications, failure is built into the job. We’re curious, we test, we take an educated punt and plan within an inch of our lives to achieve the outcomes we want. Best case? We surpass every metric and hope we had. Worst? It all goes wrong despite our best efforts and we learn from it.
That expletive phone call took place almost 20 years ago and so much has changed in that time. The communications industry has always adapted to technological change – too late in some cases, it could be argued – but AI represents a wholly different category of change. It’s not just speed or scale we’re adapting to now, but synthetic cognition.
So, what does this mean for entry level talent and current industry leaders?
Learning through friction
I’m in no way anti-AI, and actually the risk right now is not AI use itself, but rather false competence without comprehension.
Communications professionals cannot outsource struggle, judgement, or curiosity as these are exactly the skills needed to recognise when AI is wrong. If young professionals never have to struggle through ambiguity, failure, or imperfect drafts, how will they recognise when AI produces confident nonsense? Or know when and how to take creative risks?
This isn’t a case of pre-AI nostalgia – God forbid I turn into a ‘back in my day’ kind of person! These struggles are meaningful.
As someone who has worked in communications for nearly two decades and now teaches at Master’s level, what educators are seeing isn’t simply a passing issue of students cutting corners.
Of course, that’s happening just as it always has, but AI has revealed a more complicated structural shift in how communication work is produced, evaluated, and valued. The challenge now is ensuring communications degrees at all levels remain fit for purpose and develop graduates hungry to join an industry built on this cycle of risk and reward.
An overwhelming number of UK PR and comms practitioners are university-educated. According to the PRCA’s 2025 census, 88% of professionals hold an undergraduate degree or higher.
While there is ongoing debate around the importance of degree-level qualifications in the industry – indeed, some of the best people I’ve worked with started as apprentices at 17 – degrees have long been viewed as a way to filter talent when hiring, particularly for entry-level roles. But universities are currently one of the biggest battlegrounds when it comes to AI.
Earlier this year, I attended an AI in Education roundtable, hosted by CyNam at the University of Gloucestershire in the UK. The eye-opening discussion over those two hours swung wildly from exciting opportunity to concerning consequences. From an HE perspective, the main issue is not the teaching, but the assessing of students.
Since that roundtable, I have seen evidence of work across disciplines that has clearly been generated by AI and submitted as if by the person named on the document, often with little or no editing aside from a quick font change and a name added. Most concerning of all is that the brief for much of this work centred on a critical evaluation of a chosen scenario – something that requires academic research and in-depth understanding as a start point. But even that was outsourced and, in some cases, not refined or checked for hallucinations or irrelevant references.
It’s been a sad realisation that even in our classrooms, the exact place where it’s safe to get things wrong and where failure shouldn’t be feared but encouraged, that students are so eager to avoid it.
Of course, it could be argued that when the system rewards the product rather than the process, this use of AI to hit tight deadlines and juggle increased workloads is to be expected. If that’s true, then how can educators and comms leaders tackle this to ensure graduates and apprentices are of a consistently high calibre across the board?
Uniquely exposed
While this issue is not unique to PR and communications, we are an industry that is in many ways uniquely exposed to the challenges it presents. The biggest risk in communications right now isn’t job loss. It’s hollow capability.
For decades, entry-level roles have been built around tasks like drafting press releases, writing copy for multi-channel use, compiling relevant and targeted media lists, research for strategy decks etc.
These were never end goals skills, nor are they solely the premise of entry-level practitioners (I still like to take on these tasks to keep the skills fresh and up-to-date, as I’m sure many of you do, too), they are developmental scaffolding built through repetition. Through these tasks, new practitioners learn tone, judgement, storytelling frameworks, insights into the media landscape and crucially how to think.
With AI now able to perform many of these tasks instantly and fairly competently at a junior level, we’re seeing two distinct consequences playing out in real time:
Where clear writing, structured thinking, and fast drafting would easily distinguish a strong junior team member, employers will increasingly assume that everyone can produce a decent first draft, albeit with AI assistance. Which means…
As a result, the differentiator is shifting from ‘Can you write this?’ to more strategic skills. Can you frame the problem correctly? Can you identify what not to say? Can you align messaging with risk, target audience, and context in mind? Can you challenge a brief rather than just execute it?
What we’re experiencing across all levels is communications being less about production and more about things like editorial intelligence, ethical judgement, and strategic framing.
Before I get comms leaders yelling in my direction that this was always the case – I know. It’s just that now, we’re seeing these skills expected earlier than ever in the talent pipeline for our industry. As comms leaders, this new competence illusion means we have to think differently when hiring for entry-level roles, training junior team members, and redefining what ‘good’ looks like at all career levels.
Knowing this, means recognising that responsibility doesn’t stop at hiring. Training and developing communications talent sits with managers and leaders in our industry. As a result of my experiences in this area, both as a manager, a leader, and a lecturer, I’ve pulled together three recommendations for finding and nurturing the next generation of comms leaders without avoiding the AI in the room:
Tempting as it is, avoid giving AI the first 60% of the work. Instead, get the human draft first and then compare it against AI’s attempt. Learning happens during comparison and repetition of foundational tasks. Don’t trade that for empty efficiency long-term.
This skill isn’t just useful for AI! Encourage teams to question things like what sources informed the output and what assumptions are hidden within it. My rule of thumb? Treat AI outputs like an overconfident intern who’s been in place less than a week and it will change how you view them.
Just like that story I shared at the top of this piece, senior practitioners must get comfortable with thinking out loud. Your experiences, wins, and failures are all knowledge that can be shared – why that particular journalist matters to a client, how a piece of coverage can impact, when and why silence may be strategic. Whether it’s naturally in the office or more structured via mentoring, share what you know, and what you don’t.
Redesigning learning, not banning tools
Universities right now are on the front line of this issue across all industries, and much is being done to redesign how to assess students properly while acknowledging that they will start their careers with AI easily accessible.
This is a systemic shift in the way educators at all levels approach assessments, and it will take some time to transition to new ways of doing things. From a communications perspective, there are some practical changes already happening to ensure graduates leave with the skills they, and their future employers, need:
If we only assess the final essay or campaign plan for an assessment, then AI will always have an advantage. Instead, assessments could require multiple drafts, rationale documents, and annotations so students can explain where and how AI was used (if at all) during the assignment.
The most effective way to assess independent and critical thinking is during situations where the context is specific and evolving and there is no single correct answer to find. Live crisis simulations, stakeholder roleplay, in class exercises under time pressure means students have to use real-time judgement and be able to fully explain any trade-offs and changes they make over time.
Students need explicit instruction in how to use AI well, not to avoid it at all costs. Exercises like prompting for different perspectives, not just answers, critically editing AI outputs, identifying hallucinations or bias, and stress testing ideas and outputs in class can support critical thinking and healthy AI scepticism.
One of the risks of AI is homogenisation – have you seen LinkedIn lately? To counter this, and make AI outputs for assessments less attractive, move towards assignments that require personal positioning or opinion, ideally with oral defences where students explain their thinking. Reward originality and distinct ideas wherever possible.
A lot of communications work happens live – client meetings, crisis situations, newsjacking opportunities, stunts, events – so assessments must reflect this to enable strong thinking under pressure. Try rapid response writing exercises with no devices, cold call journalist questioning role play, or group problem solving with strict time constraints. AI rarely, if ever, teaches consequences. Exercises like these can.
This is a given for any degree programme, but there are more opportunities than ever to bring employers into the classroom. Some of the suggestions I’ve made above could be run by guest practitioners with real briefs and real feedback. Assessment panels should include outside industry professionals. Students will quickly realise that polished AI-generated work just doesn’t hold up without substance, and that the real world won’t be impressed with a generic press release or social media caption.
What we do next matters
The strongest future candidates won’t be those who avoid AI, but those who use it without being dependent on it. The best comms leaders of the future will, as they always have, combine tool fluency with intellectual independence. The tools of course will always change, but the intellect cannot.
While AI will absolutely produce faster communicators, the question of whether it produces better ones depends on what we choose to reward now.
If universities assess outputs instead of reasoning, if hiring managers mistake speed for understanding, and if leaders automate away apprenticeship learning, the industry may discover too late that it’s optimised itself out of judgement.
Which, for a profession built on trust, should concern us all greatly. Because judgement is the only thing that was never replaceable. Without it, we’re all exposed.
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Angharad Planells is “Co-author of ‘Ready or not? Leaders in the Age of AI’”, and is a seasoned comms specialist amplifying impact for purpose-led organisations at apt marketing & PR in the UK.
Written by: orlaclancy
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