In this opinion piece, Paige Hinson, head of brand and communications at Jiffi, argues that communications professionals are uniquely placed to close the AI trust gap but are mostly sitting it out. She discusses how human judgement layered on top of AI isn’t a disclaimer, but rather the product. And according to her, the comms industry needs to own it.
Last week, the government dropped a number at the AFR AI Summit that should have landed like a fire alarm in our industry: only 30 per cent of Australians trust AI.
It didn’t. At least not in the way it should have.
The conversation that followed were mostly about regulation, investment, and infrastructure.
Those things do matter, but nobody seemed to stop and ask the obvious question: who is responsible for closing a trust gap? Because the answer isn’t a regulator or a product team.
It’s the people trained to build credibility, shape narratives, and earn public belief.
That’s us, comms professionals. And right now, we are spectacularly missing the moment.
I work at the intersection of communications, technology, and AI product development. That dual vantage point makes something visible that’s hard to see from either alone.
The comms industry is having a lot of conversations about AI. Conferences. Panel discussions. LinkedIn posts. What it mostly isn’t doing is stepping into the strategic role the moment is asking for.
Part of that is a very specific, very understandable fear. Comms professionals are worried about being caught using AI. The logic: if a journalist finds out a pitch was AI-assisted, the relationship is toast. So the tool gets used quietly, apologetically, like something to hide.
But let’s actually examine that.
When a good comms professional uses AI to pressure-test a media angle, stress a narrative structure, or draft something they then reshape with their own judgment, what exactly has been lost? Nothing. The expertise didn’t vanish. It got applied at a higher level, with better
raw material to work with.
The Cision 2026 State of the Media Report is the data point people keep citing to justify the fear. It found that 53 per cent of journalists oppose AI-generated pitches. That’s real.
But read it more carefully: the same report found that 50 per cent of journalists say accuracy and combating misinformation is their single biggest challenge.
What journalists are objecting to isn’t AI in the workflow. It’s lazy, impersonal, unverified content that reads like nobody human cared enough to check it. That’s a professional standards problem, not a technology problem.
The distinction matters. Because it means the answer isn’t to use AI less. It’s to use it better, with more rigour, more craft, more professional accountability layered on top.
Human judgment applied to AI output isn’t a disclaimer, it’s the product. It’s the thing that makes AI-assisted comms worth trusting. And comms professionals, the people who understand how trust works, how audiences receive information, how credibility is built and
lost are exactly the right people to figure out what that looks like in practice.
Instead, the industry is largely ceding that ground. We’re treating the question of AI and trust as someone else’s problem to solve, the tech companies, the government, the platforms, when we are the discipline that actually has the tools to close a 30% trust figure.
That’s a miss of some consequence.
There’s a version of this industry that leans into the moment. That gets specific, not just vague statements about “responsible AI use,” but actual visible standards for what human-led, AI-assisted communication looks like.
That position comms professionals not as reluctant tool-users, but as the people who figured out how to make AI output worth believing.
The AI era doesn’t diminish what good comms professionals do. It makes it more valuable.
The judgment, the audience’s intuition, the craft of knowing what will land and why, none of that is replicable. But you have to be willing to use it, loudly, in combination with the tools now available to you.
The trust gap is a communications problem, it always was. The only question is whether our industry decides to own it
