TAKE THE AI TRANSITION DIAGNOSTIC

What the data says about AI and comms careers

Published by Sally Hems, Founder, Clear North Consulting

Key Takeaways

The economists are catching up

This week, more than 200 economists — including 16 Nobel laureates and chief economists at OpenAI and Anthropic — signed an open letter warning that AI could drive economic transformation "larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame," with large-scale job displacement as one of the named risks.

Their stance: build the incentives, guardrails and institutions to steer it now, not after the fact.

For PR and comms professionals, this isn't news. It's confirmation. The mainstream economic conversation simply articulates what the sector has already known for a while.


"AI is disrupting knowledge work" is true in the broadest sense, but it's also vague. It is not sweeping across the landscape, taking out professions evenly in one fell swoop. Some have been affected differently than others. For PR & comms, disruption has been more direct, and there's a specific reason why.

DISCOVER WHERE YOU ARE IN YOUR AI TRANSITION

Writing was the first skill AI mastered

By the time OpenAI launched, plausible writing had become a possibility. And testing GPT-3's release in 2020, human evaluators could tell AI from human-written news articles just 52% of the time, scarcely better than a coin toss (Brown et al., "Language Models are Few-Shot Learners," 2020).


Reasoning took longer. GPT-4, released in March 2023, scored only marginally above random guesses on GPQA, a benchmark of PhD-level science questions. It took roughly another 18 months for reasoning-focused models to exceed PhD-level expert performance on the same test.

This time gap is critical for PR & comms professionals, because their core work: drafting, narrative, copy, proofreading etc, use the LLM capabilities that matured first, putting the profession at the sharp edge of AI disruption. Despite this, adoption has been fast and now 92% of PR professionals use generative AI tools in their day to day jobs (Cision Inside PR 2026), making AI use the norm, not the outlier.


Judgement-heavy work: knowing which draft could risk reputation, which phrases or words could strain stakeholder relations, or which detail isn't visible in the brief, sits in the reasoning category. The area where AI is still catching up. This could explain why 44% of PR professionals predict that AI will reduce industry staffing over the next five years (USC Annenberg's 2025 Global Communication Report).


Exposure isn't the same as obsolescence

Realising that AI is here to stay, 50% of PR professionals now rank AI and automation as a top-3 challenge (Cision Inside PR 2026). And with resource pressure ranking higher in the same survey at 58%, this expectation to 'do more with less' is set to speed up adoption further.


Being one of the most exposed professions doesn't necessarily make it the most replaceable, however. In fact, arguably it's the opposite.

AI can produce commendable first drafts, but still can't grasp the complexity of strategic comms: aligning diverse stakeholders, developing positioning that overrides ambiguity, spotting beneficial alliances, or simply knowing when to keep quiet. These judgement calls are nuanced and built over years of practice. Which means those who understand the craft well enough to spot AI's pitfalls are best placed to define how it evolves.

Applying this understanding carries a premium. PwC's 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer — which analysed over a billion job listings across 27 countries — revealed a 62% wage premium for workers with AI skills - up from 57% the year before. That's economy-wide, not PR-specific. But it helps put disruption into perspective. Understanding where a tool's output falls short isn't just protective. It's increasingly where professional value lies.

Writing continues to be the profession's most valued skill

What's more, professional disruption seems to have come full circle. Despite LLMs seemingly steamrolling the art, writing is still rated the single most important skill PR employers look for in new hires: ahead of AI integration, ahead of analytics, ahead of everything else on the list (USC Annenberg 'Mind the Gap' 2025). Good writers require a strong understanding of their topic and its broader implications: critical skills for effective stakeholder and influencer relations. The industry that watched AI master writing first hasn't stopped hiring for it. It's hiring for people who can decide what gets written, how and when.

Where this leaves you

If you work in PR and comms, these findings probably confirm what you've already been thinking. What it can't tell is where you sit in the shift: still processing change, actively rebuilding capability, or ready to move onto new horizons. That's what the AI Transition Diagnostic is for.

Take the AI Transition Diagnostic

A few minutes to complete, this assessment shows which of the three transition zones (Endings, Neutral Zone, New Beginnings) best describes where you are right now, and what that means for what comes next.

AI TRANSITION DIAGNOSTIC

Sally Hems is the founder of Clear North Consulting. She has navigated three waves of professional disruption in a 25-year comms career: the shift to digital, the rise of social media, and now AI. Clear North provides structured group programmes for PR and comms professionals moving through transition