Think Forward

“If only we’d known.” But what if we did – or could have known before crisis strikes? When leaders are looking inwards, critical signals can go unseen or ignored. Situational intelligence matters before crisis strikes and Friday's Alert AI session explains why.

In the rush to apply AI in all things, we are losing sight of our future as humans and, in some spaces, losing sight of our humanity. Time to stop and consider the world we want to create and not lose ourselves in the race to hand over the design of the future to AI agents.

The arbitrary imposition of automated silence is of far greater consequence than regurgitated revelations from a robot or two. When AI is using AI to check if we are human - we have a problem.

A World PR Day reflection on the future profession we need to create - and the practice we need to leave behind.

Women are once again in the minority when it comes to AI. The systems being built, bought and embedded around us are laced with the bias, discrimination and downright misogyny that lives and breathes in the data they are trained on. My recent contribution to She Leads AI, part of the KLIP8 conference on June 9, looks at how women in AI, and women in AI and public relations, need to challenge the fast-forming new norms before they harden into practice.

AI has created new operational, reputational and governance risks for leaders who may not realise just how dependent their organisations have become. Just days after releasing Fable 5, the US government, 'citing national security authorities, issued an export control directive to Anthropic to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees', said the company. Last week, I'd sent my contribution to the KLIP8 conference which looked at this very issue - the Titans and Tigers of AI infrastructure, the geopolitical split shaping technology ecosystems and the switch-off threats that could disrupt critical communication workflows. This post shares the transcript and the practical steps leaders can take from dependency audits and two-tool redundancy to non-AI fallback processes, stronger governance and crisis protocols.

What does future practice, and the future practitioner, look like? Our roles are not disappearing, they are reforming. Future practice is not about producing more content with better tools, but deepening the work at the heart of public relations: helping organisations build and sustain the relationships they need to keep their licence to operate, working as stewards, guardians, sentinels and sensemakers across human, organisational and AI-intermediated environments.

The problem with AI-generated copy is the rhythm. It's a problem that sent me all the way back to an entertainer of the 50s and 60s called Sammy Davis Jr. and the song, The Rhythm of Life. When we're presented with AI-generated copy, what's missing is the rhythm that hits your heart. We don’t want a rhythm of predictability, as what we are after, as people, is the rhythm of life. The unique human way that words can switch us on, hit the offbeat, make us pause, help us to perceive something differently or just poke us in the ribs and get us to move.

Did you know you can grow tomatoes upside down in a plant pot? You can string them along a balcony or a very small space and, with a bit of care, you will have something useful to eat. It is a small, practical thing. A hopeful thing too, although not in the vague “everything will be fine” sense. More in the “there are still things we can do” sense. That is where The Chaos Compendium begins. At the start of this year, I published Divided on Purpose, a report looking at the risks and fractures likely to shape 2026. Four months in, the early warnings in that report have not faded into the background. Instead the Polycrisis Engine is running hotter than ever and the Chaos Compendium suggests ways we can keep the heat at bay.

A new class of AI can find and combine system vulnerabilities at a scale no human team can match. Known as Mythos, it shifts the balance towards attack, exposes the fragility of the systems we rely on and raises urgent questions about who holds the keys and what happens next.

What does our role look like in the next twelve to eighteen months? Some notes from this month's Hands on AI session on agents, orchestration and the capabilities that matter most now.

A paucity of leadership is the defining vulnerability of this polycrisis era and no amount of AI will fix it. Using the current geopolitical conflicts and New Zealand's own leadership gap as examples, this post makes the case for looking in the mirror before looking at the machine and draws on the Crises and AI session that ran on March 5.