In this op-ed Shane Russell, CEO of Havas Red Australia, explores how the rise of AI agents is reshaping public relations.
It’s 2028, and your morning routine now involves almost no routine at all. You don’t check your calendar anymore because your AI agent has already negotiated tomorrow’s schedule with other agents in your life. It’s coordinated your kids’ school commitments with your partner’s work diary, shifted a meeting because your CFO’s agent flagged a conflict, pre-ordered the groceries after spotting you’re low on breakfast essentials, and rescheduled your dentist appointment because it noticed that you were never going to make the 8:15.
All of this happened without a single human message, email, or calendar invite. Just agents talking to agents. Researching, deciding, negotiating and executing based on your preferences, your patterns, your past behaviour, and their own interpretation of what “good” looks like for you. Some mornings the first notification you see is simply “all sorted.”
That’s when you realise something profound: you’re no longer the primary audience for the information that shapes your day, your agent is. And the same is now true for the brands trying to communicate with you.
In this new era of PR, our audience isn’t disappearing, it’s multiplying. But half of it doesn’t have a pulse.
For over a century, public relations has excelled at understanding people’s emotions, ambitions, anxieties, and contradictions. But now we’re also communicating to systems that don’t feel anything, don’t forget anything, and don’t wait for campaign launch dates. They evaluate brands at machine speed, synthesise content across thousands of sources, and form opinions that they confidently pass on to the humans who trust them implicitly.
Your beautifully crafted message may never make it to a person unless the machine believes in it first.
These agents, whether embedded in search platforms, operating as personal assistants, integrated into enterprise workflows, or quietly mediating daily life, already prefer structured, verifiable, contradiction-free- information. They privilege clarity over cleverness, attribution over polish, and consistency over charisma. If your owned content is disorganised, vague, or outdated, an AI agent will simply choose someone else’s version of your story and deliver it to a human with absolute certainty.
This is the new battleground for brand visibility. Yes, we’ll still value the front page of the newspaper and prominence in social feeds, but increasingly, it’ll be the first sentence an AI chooses to generate.
AI elevates earned media to a new plane of importance. Third-party- credibility, the kind PR has always thrived on, becomes the backbone of what AI decides is trustworthy. Quality coverage, authoritative citations, well-defined- facts have moved from PR wins into machine learning- inputs.
Meanwhile, issues management becomes a game of authenticity at scale, with deepfakes graduating from fringe problem to daily nuisance. Statements, visuals, data, and everything else a brand publishes must carry its own proof of life. Content origins become crisis armour. Without verifiable signals, the machines won’t know what’s real. And worse, they won’t care. They’ll choose whatever looks most stable, most cited, most consistent.
And just beneath this, the regulatory tides are rising without much hope of keeping pace. Transparency obligations, watermarking standards, and disclosure rules will shape communications as much as creativity does. PR teams who understand AI policy will become indispensable, while the ones that don’t will discover the cost of non-compliance in glaring, public, and irreversible ways.
But here’s the optimistic part: brands that adapt early will win big. Imagine a future where your facts, values and positions are consistently favoured by AI systems because they’re structured cleanly, verified thoroughly, and reinforced through trusted sources. We already have dashboards that report your share of answer across every LLM, not just your share of voice across media or socials. Imagine an environment where your reputation is strengthened not by how loudly you speak, but by how confidently the machines can quote you.
To get there, PR leaders will evolve, not beyond recognition, but beyond today’s job descriptions. We’ll need the storytellers, strategists and crisis whisperers more than ever. But right beside them will sit AI reputation architects, provenance editors, and agent experience- specialists. All new roles designed not to replace the craft, but to amplify it across a dual world of human and machine audiences.
Because this is the truth of the Terminator Era. The work of influencing humans hasn’t gone away, it’s just acquired a new first step.
To persuade people, we must also persuade their agents.
Fortunately, credibility is still our native language, and that’s one thing even the machines can’t override.
(…yet.)
Written by Shane Russell, CEO of Havas Red Australia.
