Top predictions for the year ahead.
AI is going to play a major role in the communications role in 2026.1
Duh.
But what exactly that will look like is the question. How will GEO change the comms function? How will organizations build their own LLMs? How will audiences respond to increasingly homogenized content?
Communicators sounded off on these topics – and many more – in response to a LinkedIn post asking for AI predictions for the year ahead. More than 300 put on their fortune teller hats. These answers are some of the most interesting, edited lightly for brevity and style.
Humanity, taste and authenticity as the differentiator
Monica Earle is director of public relations & comms at Duolingo.
Hot take: We’ll start to prefer imperfection in comms and content because it will feel more human, rather than the over-polished “AI voice” writing LLMs tend to output.
Becca Chambers is CMO at Scale Venture Partners.
We’re all drowning in so much AI-generated content that we’re getting really good at sniffing it out. The more everything starts sounding the same, the more audiences will instinctively tune out anything that feels manufactured. We’re already seeing the fatigue of repetitive patterns and generic phrasing.
The result will be the rise of the human moat. Brands that use AI to amplify distinctly human authenticity will thrive, while brands that replace humans with AI slop will fade into irrelevance. When infinite AI-generated content becomes the standard, your humanity becomes your moat. The winners will be professionals and brands who understand that AI should help you do more, create faster and think bigger — while staying unapologetically yourself.
Michael Rowinski is director of marketing and communications – IBM Security & Infrastructure.
AI will make PR professionals more human.
AI will handle so much of the commodity work that PR professionals will be forced to focus on the one thing machines absolutely suck at: being interesting. The AI can draft the pitch. It can analyze sentiment. It can even write a passable quote from your CEO. What it can’t do is tell you that your revolutionary announcement sounds exactly like the seven others that hit inboxes this morning. AI will democratize the mediocre.
Sara Ajemian is go-to-market advisor at 2X.
We’ll see the scales tip toward taste over scale, especially in content. AI has commoditized production, so distinct POVs and intentionality will stand out.
Credibility will come from originality, not volume.
Sarah Mattina is CEO at Mattina Media Group.
In 2026, CEO-authored communications will move away from polished PR language, especially on social platforms. More leaders will publish in their own voice, complete with imperfections, because they want to avoid sounding too AI.
This shift is already happening.
Soft skills, judgment and critical thinking
Laura Hoy is founder of Hoy Media & Messaging.
2026 is the year we finally start measuring and valuing soft skills thanks to AI. When polished content is easy for everyone, the edge becomes judgement, nuance, critical thinking, resilience and the ability to read a room.
Grace Keith Rodriguez is CEO at Caliber Corporate Advisers.
The organizations that outperform their competitors will not be the ones that adopt AI the fastest, but the ones that build cultures where AI is systematically challenged.
However, it will be essential for organizations to train their employees to treat AI outputs as hypotheses rather than answers. This trust but verify approach will help avoid costly missteps, make smarter strategic decisions and ultimately develop a very important competitive differentiator: human judgment sharpened by AI, not replaced by it.
Yury Molodtsov is chief operating officer at MA Family.
The quality of communications will drop not because PR people are using LLMs to write, but because clients and executives are using LLMs to think.
Writing is thinking. If you outsource that to an LLM, you end up with the lowest common denominator of ideas.
Measurement, ROI and AI as an insights engine
Anthony Monks is director of public relations at ITPR.
In 2026, I think AI will quietly become one of our most effective tools for measuring internal comms impact.
Rather than relying on clunky surveys or surface-level analytics, AI will help knit together signals from email, intranet, chat and live feedback to show what truly lands with people, where connection is strengthening, where trust wavers and where comms really moves the needle.
When internal comms folk can speak to leaders with that clarity and humanity, we don’t just broadcast messages — we build culture that’s felt and seen.
Brian Olson is brand PR lead for corporate communications at Hormel Foods.
By the end of 2026, appearing in LLM responses will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with impressions, which continue to lose relevance as a primary KPI.
Jay Weisberger is communications leader, external communications, at DPR Construction.
I think we will see applications of AI that will greatly assist research phases of projects, often the step that gets skipped in PR campaigns. This will bring research that used to be costly much more within PR budgets and practitioner bandwidth.
Talent, careers and changing agency economics
Gabe Plesent is founder and principal at Press Play Media.
My opinion is that because AI is going to lead to so many PR agencies becoming more efficient with fewer humans on payroll, it will further push talented PR pros into freelance, consulting, contracting and project-based work directly with brands that want high-level but cost-efficient partners.
Agencies may save money in the short term without realizing they’re replacing themselves in the long run and streamlining a workflow of clients going directly to consultants. But we’ll see.
Lydia Beechler is director at PANBlast.
Next year, tech companies will stop hiring entry-level PR talent — and it’s all thanks to AI. As PR-specific AI tools become more powerful, they’ll handle the routine tasks that used to be training ground work, like drafting press releases, monitoring media mentions and building media lists.
This will force agencies to become the primary developers of junior talent, focusing on essential human skills like judgment, strategy and emotional intelligence that AI can’t replicate. As a result, agency experience will become more valuable for effective communication strategies.
Anya Nelson is SVP and public relations practice lead at Scratch Marketing + Media.
The hourly billable model will face its biggest challenge yet. As AI agents prove capable of executing routine communications tasks, brands will push back on paying top dollar for automatable deliverables and demand outcomes-based contracts instead.
The paradox for agencies: they must defend the irreplaceable value of human creativity while acknowledging AI’s efficiency gains.
Sukanya Sen is vice president, global communications & PR at the Urban Land Institute.
AI is going to hit communications teams hard. Expectations will rise — more content, faster turnaround — while staffing remains flat.
Comms teams will be asked to do more with fewer people and more tools.
Lindsey Bradshaw is a freelance PR consultant.
Those who ignore how to use AI for the good of PR — and focus only on fear — will be the ones losing jobs in 2026. They won’t be able to keep pace with professionals who embrace it, just like every risky tech shift before.
Remember how afraid we were to store files in the cloud?
AI governance, risk and reputational threat
Jake Doll is director of client relations at PANBlast.
Agentic AI will break things, bigly. Remember the guy who tricked AI into selling him a car for $1? That was just the beginning. Agentic AI systems that act on objectives, not just chat, will create crises faster than most comms teams can draft a holding statement. Expect lawsuits and rollbacks.
Alvaro Bendrell is director of internal communications and digital engagement at Enel North America.
AI is about to become every company’s biggest reputational wildfire. Hyper-realistic misinformation will spread fast, stakeholders will demand proof of ethical AI use and one careless prompt could expose confidential data.
Comms teams will be essential to keep AI from burning the place down.
Christina Garnett is chief customer and communications officer at neuemotion.
The next wave of AI tools will focus on detection, not creation. We’re already seeing how easily AI can be used for propaganda and misinformation, and consumer trust will continue to erode until safeguards are in place.
Audiences will demand clearer ways to know what’s real and what’s true.
AI tools, workflows and specialization
Aurora Sassone is a communications consultant.
Enter the AI content director.
Just like the early 2000s created the head of SEO and the director of social, 2026 will see the rise of the AI content director and AI agencies. Every comms team will need a leader who can orchestrate humans and machines, protect brand voice in a world of infinite content and turn AI from a productivity play into a competitive moat.
Joseph Gall is director of communications at PayPal.
AI will force PR pros to become technologists, building apps and agents that do the tedious, required work so humans can focus on strategy and creative thinking.
Kristine Hamlett works in executive communications at Workday.
The death of generalist LLMs.
Relying on generic, publicly trained AI for brand-critical communications will become professionally obsolete. To guarantee consistency and accuracy, comms teams will use secure, in-house models trained only on approved editorial history.
This transforms AI from a drafting tool into a brand guardian layer, ensuring every output aligns with tone, style and facts.
Cheryl Overton is a cultural strategist.
As generative models create faster than comms teams can review, brands will need new cultural QA tools that flag when outputs subtly deviate from cultural stance, values or lived-context storytelling.
Think spellcheck, but for cultural nuance.
Jennifer Stephens Acree is founder and CEO of JSA+Partners.
My PR AI hot take: 2026 will expose how much work there is to do before anyone can justifiably position themselves as a GEO pro. Early reports around how to capitalize on the rise of AI search conflict with one another and highlight biases, and the race to be a leader in the space is filled with uncertainty.
Beyond firms racing to be early adopters, I expect the industry will — and should — take a measured approach to GEO, especially in the first half of 2026. These models are black boxes, and the PR landscape needs to come to terms that this isn’t a code we can crack overnight. Rather than rushing to solve the GEO puzzle in a race to be a first mover, we’ll need to continue to experiment, iterate and learn from each other.
Media, visibility and earned trust
Sarah Schmidt is president at Interdependence.
With AI slop flooding social media, people are confused about what’s real and what’s not. Audiences will be seeking sources of truth and will turn back to legacy media or reputable creators for information that has been vetted.
Evgenia Zaslavskaya is a founder at ZECOMMS Agency.
Many companies still think including AI in a description will give them an advantage. That’s actually a red flag.
From conversations with journalists — especially U.S.-based reporters — pitches that start with AI startup often go straight to the bin. When those two words appear in an inbox preview, attention drops immediately.
Next year, more companies — and PR pros — will recognize this shift and stop using AI as a hook to grab attention.
James Holland is EVP, integrated strategy at Highwire:
Press releases still won’t die. Instead, they’ll multiply as brands attempt to sway AI perceptions. Expect turf wars — and budget squabbles — between PR and content marketing teams.
Victoria Banaszczyk is head of content at Centerlock Media.
In 2026, AI will be deeply integrated into all forms of digital communication — drafting, translating and summarizing. It will feel as normal as spellcheck.
However, messaging will sound identical, platforms will strain under compute demand and misinformation will spread faster than truth. Companies won’t have a choice: adopt AI or look outdated, but adoption also risks a bland, homogenized voice.
Nicole Yelland is principal at GRIT PR.
By the end of 2026, we’ll see more sophisticated automation for PR admin work — tracking, reporting and list building — and less AI-generated content.
We’re already at a breaking point with trite social posts and emoji-heavy AI writing. Algorithms may start pushing that content down, while more human, quick-hit pieces rise — potentially paired with AI-generated credibility scores showing story legitimacy.
Idil Miriam Cakim is founder & CEO of Iris Flex.
AI intimacy is coming. ChatGPT will reshape distrust in AI through hyper-personalized ads that are genuinely useful. These ads will take cues directly from consumer queries.
While late adopters may be unsettled by that level of intimacy, the relevance and timing will win people over. As ChatGPT gets paid for clicks, not impressions, brand websites and owned content will reinforce their place in the buyer journey.
The post Your predictions: How AI in comms will evolve in 2026 appeared first on PR Daily.
