I read The Sunday Times story about the graduate who lost his first job to AI with a heavy heart.
Not because I am anti-AI. Quite the opposite. I spend a lot of my time thinking about how artificial intelligence is changing communications, reputation and marketing. At Pagefield and across the PPHC Group, we are investing in AI, building AI-enabled products and helping clients understand what this technology means for their organisations.
But that is exactly why this story was so disappointing.
Because using AI well should not mean shutting the door on the next generation of talent. It should mean opening more doors, faster.
The story was painful because it captured something every leader should be thinking about now: what happens if we confuse efficiency with progress? What happens if we treat AI as a substitute for people, rather than a way of making brilliant people even better?
I can still remember my first job after university. I joined Honda Motor Europe and one of my responsibilities was creating new model photography and video for European markets. It was a dream first job: creative, fast-moving, high pressure and occasionally absurdly complicated.
We were trying to create beautiful images of brand-new cars before they were launched, often in locations where they couldn’t be spotted by eagle-eyed car enthusiasts. The logistics were expensive and difficult. Getting the car to the location, keeping it under wraps, organising the shoot, managing weather, light, access, timings, permissions. It was a lot.
So, naturally, we started looking at technology. At the time, that meant experimenting with computer-generated imagery (CGI), CAD files and Photoshop to reduce costs and solve some of those logistical headaches.
And sometimes it nearly worked.
But nearly was the problem.
The image could be technically impressive. The background could be real. The car could be modelled to extraordinary detail. But something was always off. The light didn’t quite fall properly. The shadows weren’t believable. The reflection had no soul. The car looked like a car, but it didn’t feel like that car.
Technology has come a very long way in the past twenty years. Today’s AI tools are astonishingly powerful. They can produce, process and analyse at a speed that would have seemed impossible when I started work.
But the principle still stands.
You can usually tell when there has been no meaningful human involvement. Something feels slightly flat. Slightly muted. Slightly synthetic. It might be efficient, but it does not quite connect.
That matters profoundly in communications.
Our industry is not built on outputs alone. It is built on judgement, context, instinct, emotional intelligence and trust. Clients do not come to us just because they need content, monitoring, data or a slide deck. They come to us because they need advice. They need someone to understand what is really going on. They need someone to spot the risk in the room, the opportunity in the noise, the phrase that will land, the message that will jar, the stakeholder who will not react the way the spreadsheet says they should.
AI can help us get there faster. It cannot replace the human intelligence that makes the work meaningful.
That is why, at Pagefield, we do not see AI as a replacement for talent. We see it as an enhancer of talent.
Yes, AI can take on some of the more basic, time-consuming tasks in communications. Media monitoring is an obvious example. AI can help scan coverage, identify patterns, compare narratives and surface signals at scale. That is useful. In fact, it is more than useful; it is becoming essential.
But even the best monitoring is not the same as insight.
A tool can tell you what has been said. A consultant needs to understand why it matters.
A platform can identify sentiment. A person needs to understand whether that sentiment is commercially relevant, politically dangerous, culturally sensitive or strategically useful.
A dashboard can show movement. A human being needs to know whether to act, wait, challenge, reassure or reframe.
This is exactly the thinking behind Pagefield GPS, our new patent-pending AI product. GPS helps organisations understand how AI platforms are interpreting their brand, reputation and market position. It looks at what systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Google’s AI experiences “know” or appear to believe about an organisation, where they are drawing information from, what they are missing, and how that could shape the views of customers, investors, journalists, policymakers, employees and candidates.
That gives clients an advantage. But not because the technology replaces consultants.
It gives clients an advantage because the technology reveals the terrain, and our consultants help them navigate it.
The data needs interpretation. The gaps need diagnosis. The risks need prioritising. The recommendations need to be rooted in a client’s real-world strategy, audiences and reputation. That is where human intelligence comes in. GPS is powerful because it combines technology with strategic consultancy, not because it tries to remove people from the process.
And that is the model I believe in for the future of our industry.
We should absolutely use AI to move faster, see more clearly and deliver better work for clients. We should be curious, ambitious and commercially realistic about what it can do. We should not pretend the world is not changing.
But we should also be very careful about what we lose if we decide junior talent is expendable.
The early years of a career are not just about doing the basic jobs. They are about learning how judgement is formed. They are about sitting in meetings and noticing what senior people notice. They are about getting the first draft wrong and understanding why. They are about developing taste, confidence, resilience and care.
If we remove those opportunities, we do not just fail graduates. We weaken the future leadership of our own businesses.
At Pagefield, our newest and brightest talent still has to understand client needs at a human level. They still need to learn how to think, write, advise and challenge. They still need to bring emotional intelligence, curiosity and care to the work. AI can support that. It can accelerate that. It can raise the floor.
But it cannot replace the human spark that makes someone a brilliant consultant.
The companies that win with AI will not be the ones that simply cut the most people the fastest. They will be the ones that work out how to combine technological capability with human judgement.
Because in communications, as in car photography all those years ago, realism is not enough.
The work has to feel true.
