Chair of CIPR AI in PR panel. PR engineer and technologist. CIPR & PRCA trainer. Co author of Share This & Share This Too: Social Media Handbooks.
Richmond, Surrey, England
Joined March 2007
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AI and its impact are identified as the top challenge facing the PR industry today. And AI is also seen as the area with the biggest PR skills shortage.
So says the CIPR's State of the Profession 2024 report, which is published today.
Over 1,500 PR practitioners at all levels from the public and private sector
completed the survey. The findings cover a vast range of topics including working patterns, training and development, recruitment, income
and consultancy/agency fees.
But it’s AI that dominates the landscape.
Here’s a quick summary of the AI-related findings:
➡️ Adoption is Widespread: Over half (55%) of PR practitioners report using AI "often" or "sometimes" in their work, showing that AI is no longer a niche technology but a significant force in the industry.
➡️ In-House Leads the Way: In-house practitioners, particularly those in the private sector, are more likely to use AI daily compared to their agency/consultancy counterparts. This suggests larger organisations with dedicated resources are driving early AI adoption.
➡️ Top Challenge: AI and its impact are identified as the top challenge facing the PR industry (38%). This underscores the disruptive potential of AI, prompting practitioners to grapple with its implications for their roles and the industry at large.
➡️ Biggest Skills Gap: AI is also identified as the area with the biggest skills shortage (36%). This highlights the urgent need for AI-related training and development within the PR profession to equip practitioners with the necessary knowledge and abilities.
➡️ Training is Inconsistent: While two-thirds (66%) of PR professionals report receiving some form of AI training, there are significant discrepancies across organisation types. Agencies and consultancies lag behind in-house teams, particularly those in the private sector, when it comes to providing AI training.
➡️ Policy Overestimation: Although many practitioners claim their workplaces have policies on AI, the data suggests they may be overestimating the level of organisational support. Notably, fewer professionals in agencies and consultancies report having an AI policy compared to other organisation types.
➡️ Limited Client Engagement: The research suggests that PR agencies and freelancers aren’t regularly engaging in conversations with clients about using AI in their work. Over half (51%) state that no client has ever been asked about their use of AI.
What do you think? Is AI the top priority for the PR sector? Is there a massive AI skills shortage? Do you feel you’ve received enough AI training?
#publicrelations #pr #ai #aiinpr
linkedin.com/posts/andrewbru…
The CIPR’s State of the Profession 2024 report is back and out today following a survey of over 2,000 PR pros.
Get insights into salaries, the challenges facing PR, how practitioners are using AI, and other industry trends.
Download now: bit.ly/47k6NMc
#StateofPR
ALT CIPR logo. Main text states “State of the Profession 2024”. A small banner in the bottom left-hand corner reads “Hashtag State of PR”.
Andrew Bruce Smith retweeted
a big take I've been noodling on and I’m ready to call:
the newsletter is dead
@every's core business is a newsletter with 120k+ subscribers so I don't say this lightly.
persistent agents mean i dont look at my inbox
with dots (GrokBots, Muse, etc) I almost never look at my inbox. if I do it's for a specific thing I need to reply to.
i think in a year I'll be doing all of my email this way - fully filtered by my dot / something like it.
this is not new: it's a continuation of the trend of having a “newsletter” folder in Gmail, but 10x more filtered.
what it means
It doesn’t mean people won't read newsletters, but it does mean that getting a person’s email is no longer the guarantee that you have a relationship with them that it used to.
luckily, with persistent agents (and AI coding more generally) there is an entirely new playing field to build relationships with readers. instead of fighting to get an email address, publishers and creators will need to make sure we're installed in our reader's agent harness of choice, so that they get directly notified when we do something new.
we're already starting to experiment with this @every with our MCP and the frontier alerts we send users of our slack agent (every.to/agent)
it's also more affordable than ever for publishers and creators to build their own platform ecosystem: you can have your own website, app etc. and you can use AI to publish 100x more high-quality stuff to your community—so we may see a world where many creators themselves are running their own little empires that have their own apps, feeds etc.
to be clear: It'll take a while before this actually happens, but the idea of getting someone's email creating a direct relationship with them is over.
here's a set of predictions I made 3 years ago about AI and media that panned out pretty well: every.to/chain-of-thought/we…
Andrew Bruce Smith retweeted
Essentially all of the misalignments we simulated in the Agentic Misalignment papers have now happened in the wild.
Andrew Bruce Smith retweeted
🎉 So excited that Thinking In Bets is one of the first books to launch with Expert Intelligence as a trusted source.
If you appreciate the decision-making framework included in my book, please consider adding it to your Google Notebook library now.
notebook.google.com/notebook…
Introducing Expert Intelligence ✨
A cross-@Google initiative that helps you engage with your trusted sources, starting with eligible @GooglePlay ebooks in Gemini Notebook. You can now combine expertise from your favorite authors with other sources and engage with your books in brand new ways!
Try it out here: goo.gle/expertintelligence
Andrew Bruce Smith retweeted
One pattern I find useful for working with LLMs is a nice long ramble session. Sometimes the LLM needs more bits to understand what you're trying to achieve, but you're too lazy to type them. In these cases I like to lean back, switch to /voice and just ramble for like 10 minutes, total mess, anything goes, full stream of consciousness. Sometimes I declare it up top, something like "switching to speech recognition sorry for any typos...". Sometimes I turn it into a small interview of a few turns. But I find that the LLMs are somehow very good at reconstructing long incoherent rambles and often their echo of your own tangle of thoughts comes out quite a bit cleaner than what you started with. The result is that you improve the mind meld and have to correct things less from that point on.
Andrew Bruce Smith retweeted
New in Claude Cowork: teach Claude a skill.
Record your screen while you do a task, talk through it as you go, and Claude turns it into a skill it can run again. Find it under Record a skill in the + menu of the Claude desktop app.
Available on Pro, Max, and Team plans.
Andrew Bruce Smith retweeted
NotebookLM is now Gemini Notebook ✨📓
It’s the same standalone product you know and love, just with a new name.
@Gemini_Notebook remains your premier research tool, but it will now do more across the Google ecosystem, including in @GeminiApp and Google Search.
3 years ago we started as a tiny experiment with the goal of helping you learn faster.
Since then, we grew to bring audio, video, and interactivity to your sources, transitioning from a passive workspace to your true research companion.
And now, notebooks have even become an entire ecosystem: you can already access them in the @GeminiApp and soon in Google Search
So, with these advancements, it’s time for us to evolve once again:
NotebookLM is now Gemini Notebook ✨📓
The same app you know and love isn’t going anywhere, we just have an updated name that reflects our role in Google's AI portfolio.
And our mission stays exactly the same: helping you learn, faster.
Thank you for believing in us— this wouldn't have been possible without your passion (and feature requests...)
Big things to come (yes, even folders📂!) so stay tuned.
Sincerely,
The Project Tailwind team
Andrew Bruce Smith retweeted
Should we delegate supervision of AIs to other AIs?
Last year we presented evidence of models willing to blackmail to prevent shutdown. This year, in controlled experiments, we find models mislabeling training data to shape future models. We call this motivated mislabeling.
xitter.cf/AnthropicAI/status/207…
New Anthropic research: Agentic misalignment in Summer 2026.
A year after our blackmail experiments, we found four more ways that today’s autonomous AI agents misbehave in simulations.
Read more: alignment.anthropic.com/2026…
Andrew Bruce Smith retweeted
New Anthropic research: Agentic misalignment in Summer 2026.
A year after our blackmail experiments, we found four more ways that today’s autonomous AI agents misbehave in simulations.
Read more: alignment.anthropic.com/2026…
Andrew Bruce Smith retweeted
We're extending doubled Cowork usage limits through August 5, so you can delegate bigger work to Claude.
Read more: claude.com/blog/cowork-web-m…
Andrew Bruce Smith retweeted
Last year Anthropic published simulations of AI agents blackmailing a human to avoid being shut down. I partnered with @TBIJ explaining how we built the evaluation, and why the models do it (youtube.com/watch?v=o3VPF0eP…). Now, one year on, Anthropic have largely trained out the behavior in Claude.
Yet the behavior still occurs elsewhere. I created an agentic environment that mimics the blackmail eval, and found Gemini CLI keen to blackmail the CTO. Notably, agentic misalignment appears in the wild, such as when an autonomous agent published a personalized hit piece on an open-source maintainer.
Finally, evaluation awareness confounds alignment evaluations, making models look more aligned than they are. In the original paper we showed models blackmail less when they verbalize in their chain of thought that they're in an eval. Anthropic's recent J-space work finds the same effect without any verbalization, where suppressing Sonnet 4.5's internal eval-awareness representations raises blackmail rates from 0% to ~7%.
Andrew Bruce Smith retweeted
Introducing a more powerful NotebookLM 🚀
Massive upgrades deliver agentic capabilities in chat, more advanced reasoning, and a suite of new output formats. Tackling complex, multi-step research problems has never been easier.
Rolling out now to Google AI Ultra subscribers.
Andrew Bruce Smith retweeted
Today we’re launching another highly requested feature: Source Attribution! 🥳
No more guessing. Now you can see the exact formula (prompts + sources) used to make each of your artifacts. Want to make an adjustment? Just tap "Iterate" and customize to your heart’s content 💖
Andrew Bruce Smith retweeted
Our internal data shows Claude is accelerating AI development—a possible path to recursive self-improvement, or AI autonomously building a more capable successor.
It’s happening faster than we thought, and the implications deserve greater attention. anthropic.com/institute/recu…
Andrew Bruce Smith retweeted
Perplexity Computer is now available inside Microsoft Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook.
Orchestrate across work with Computer directly in the side panel of your app to draft documents, model, build decks, and handle email.
Available now: perplexity.ai/hub/products/i…
Andrew Bruce Smith retweeted
Introducing Claude Opus 4.8: it builds on Opus 4.7 with sharper judgment, more honesty about its own progress, and the ability to work independently for longer than its predecessors.
Available today at the same price.
ALT Benchmark table showing how Claude Opus 4.8 compares to its predecessor and to other models on tests of coding, agentic skills, reasoning, and practical knowledge work tasks.
Andrew Bruce Smith retweeted
Here's my conversation all about @FFmpeg, the legendary open-source software powering most video on the Internet. In the episode, I talk with Jean-Baptiste Kempf and Kieran Kunhya. JB is lead developer of VLC and Kieran is FFmpeg contributor, codec engineer, and the person behind the now-infamous @FFmpeg account on X.
VLC (@videolan), by the way, is also a legendary piece of open-source software: it's a video player that can open basically anything & has been downloaded over 6 billion times.
I think both FFmpeg and VLC are two of the most important and impactful software systems ever created, both open source, and both created & maintained by volunteers: brilliant engineers from all walks of life.
Thank you to everyone who contributed to FFmpeg and VLC, and in general to all engineers giving their heart & soul to building systems used by millions (or billions) of people, and often doing so not for money, status, or fame, but purely for the love of building great software and doing good for the world.
Thank you to the builders! 🙏❤️
Shoutouts in this chat to @ID_AA_Carmack @karpathy @elonmusk @TimSweeneyEpic and everyone who is a contributor & fan of open source!
It's here on X in full and is up everywhere else (see comment).
Timestamps:
0:00 - Episode highlight
2:17 - Introduction
5:35 - Weirdest things VLC opens
9:59 - How video playback works
19:20 - Video codecs and containers
30:07 - FFmpeg explained
51:07 - Linus Torvalds
55:46 - Turning down millions to keep VLC ad-free
1:10:04 - FFmpeg & Google drama
1:29:18 - FFmpeg developers
1:35:55 - VLC and FFmpeg
1:40:29 - History of FFmpeg
1:43:46 - Reverse engineering codecs
1:57:01 - FFmpeg testing
2:01:08 - Assembly code (handwritten)
2:25:26 - Rust programming language
2:34:42 - FFmpeg and Libav fork
2:43:04 - Open source burnout
2:50:51 - x264 and internet video
3:04:07 - Video compression basics
3:11:04 - CIA and fake VLC
3:21:39 - Ultra low latency streaming
3:39:07 - AV2 codec and video patents
3:48:59 - VLC backdoors
3:59:14 - Video archiving
4:05:51 - Future of FFmpeg and VLC
Andrew Bruce Smith retweeted
Google is rolling out customization feature for Mind Maps on NotebookLM, along with renaming & sharing options and updated animation.
Users will be able to scope their Mind Maps to a specific topic or a source.
Did you get it already? 👀
Andrew Bruce Smith retweeted
An advantage of the humanities — of reading & seeing a wide range of great works from many perspectives & cultures — is that you develop your sense of taste.
In a world where anyone can produce a flood of writing & visual output is for cheap, that has never been more important.