I grew up through the rise of digital communications. When publishing no longer required permission, when a blog post could outrank a newsroom, and when "breaking news" started coming from anyone with a smartphone, not a press badge.
I also spent close to a decade inside Rogers Media watching the erosion of traditional media’s monopoly on trust.
And for the past nearly five years, I’ve worked inside Canada’s largest public relations (PR) firm—advising leaders, brands, and institutions navigating a world that feels louder, faster, and more fragile than ever.
All of that has led me to a clear conclusion: Public relations doesn’t matter less in this environment. It matters more than it ever has. But not for the reasons many still assume.
AI has fundamentally changed reputation management
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is changing how content is created, distributed, and consumed—but it’s also changing how credibility is built. AI doesn’t invent trust. It aggregates it.
Large language models pull from signals across the digital ecosystem: credible coverage, consistent narratives, authoritative voices, and institutional behaviour over time. In other words, your reputation is now part of the infrastructure AI learns from.
If your organization lacks clarity, coherence, or credibility in the public domain, AI will faithfully reflect that back at scale.
PR in an AI era isn’t about “getting coverage.” It’s about shaping the source material of future understanding.
Geopolitics has entered the boardroom
Political risk used to feel abstract for many companies and leaders. Today, geopolitics shows up in supply chains, employee expectations, brand boycotts, regulatory scrutiny, and social media backlash, often all at once.
Organizations are no longer neutral actors. Silence is interpreted. Presence is scrutinized. Inconsistency is amplified.
PR now firmly sits at the intersection of policy, purpose, and perception — helping leaders understand not just what they want to say, but how the world is likely to hear it given the moment we’re in.
Trust is a scarce resource
We are living through a trust recession. Trust in institutions. Trust in media. Trust in business leaders. Trust in what’s real. You cannot performance-market your way out of a trust deficit.
Trust is built through behaviour, transparency, and repetition over time. PR is the discipline that connects those dots externally and internally.
Reputation inside the building matters too
Post-pandemic, teams are more distributed, more burned out, and more skeptical of corporate narratives than ever before.
Culture can’t rely on proximity anymore. Alignment can’t rely on osmosis. Internal communications, leadership visibility, and values lived (not laminated) are now existential issues not “nice to haves.” I was talking to a friend about this recently: collaboration isn't enough it has to be intentional collaboration to be successful.
PR has always been about relationships. Today, some of the most important ones are inside the organization.
PR is not the last step. It’s the lens.
The biggest shift I’ve seen over my career isn’t tactical—it’s philosophical. PR used to almost always be brought in at the end: “Here’s what we’ve decided. Now help us explain it.”
The organizations that are winning today bring PR in at the beginning: to pressure-test decisions, anticipate reaction, understand context, and ask the harder questions before the world does.
Because in an era of AI, geopolitical tension, fragmented media, and fragile trust, perception isn’t cosmetic, it’s consequential.
Public relations, at its best, isn’t about spin. It’s about sense-making.
And we’ve never needed that more than we do right now.
So if reputation is now embedded in AI, geopolitics, employee trust, and public scrutiny: why are many organizations still treating Public Relations as a downstream function instead of a strategic one?
In a world where perception is consequential, not cosmetic, PR needs a seat at the table from day one. If you’re ready to treat reputation as strategy, not spin, let’s talk.
This article was originally published on Misty Meeks’ LinkedIn page and is shared here with permission.
