Communications has a new audience: AI 

Artificial intelligence dominated conversations at Cannes Lions for the third consecutive year, but this time there was a noticeable difference in the discussion. Instead of asking how AI could create content, communications leaders were asking how organisations could build reputations for an audience that is no longer entirely human. 

Large language models are increasingly becoming one of the places stakeholders turn when researching companies, and this is forcing communications teams to rethink not only how they publish information, but how brands are understood by machines as well as people. 

AI as a new audience – with all its idiosyncrasies and preferences – was a leading theme this year, with exhibitors emphasising the need to tailor brand reputation to appeal to both traditional, human audiences, and LLM tools, which are a new source for information about a brand.  

Communications leaders identify the change as a “two-audience problem”: organisations must now communicate simultaneously with people and with the AI systems that are increasingly explaining brands to them. David Tiltman, chief content officer at WARC, says this requires a new discipline, whereby communicators must make brands “machine readable” without sacrificing what makes them “human lovable”. 

“It’s not just about improving inbound links and all that sort of stuff,” Tiltman says. “It is quite fundamentally different [compared to search engine optimisation], and it’s much more about the breadth of information on the internet and the context in which your brand or product is discussed.”  

If AI constitutes a new audience, communicators also need to understand what, and how, that audience consumes. Tim Hulbert, global head of brand strategy at Standard Chartered bank, says this requires more engagement with these tools. “You have to very intentionally have a conversation with the bots that are going to be talking about you. You have to treat them as a stakeholder and an audience.” 

This change matters because AI is increasingly mediating first impressions of a brand. Stakeholders, for example, are beginning to turn to AI assistants to explain a company over perusing corporate websites or speaking to executives. Already, organisations sensitive to this shift are altering the kind of content they produce.

Hulbert says some companies are beginning to develop longer, more detailed material designed to be interpreted by language models, even as human audiences continue to opt for concise summaries. “I think companies are already changing the content to be readable and accessible for longer. Which is really interesting because then you almost see separate content for the LLMs, because people still don’t want to read a 30-page document.” 

The consequence is a subtle but significant shift in communications strategy. Rather than asking how to optimise individual campaigns, organisations are increasingly thinking about the accumulated body of information that AI systems use to describe them. Press releases, campaigns and executive interviews remain important, but they now sit alongside search results, creator content, Reddit discussions and customer reviews as part of the dossier of information AI systems use. 

In this context, Tiltman describes reputation management as a “slow game”. 

“If you are fundamentally trying to change the way your brand shows up, then that would require you to do lots of things simultaneously and consistently over time,” he says. “That sort of brand reputation is built up over time. It is going to be very difficult to replicate quickly. I think while there’s lots of people out there offering like hacks and stuff, they’re only going to be able to do so much because it’s about consistency over time.” 

As an example, Tiltman refers to payments services company Mastercard. After more than two decades of consistently using the word ‘Priceless’ across its advertising and communications, he says the term now appears repeatedly when LLMs are asked to describe the company or the benefits of its cards.  

For Shane O’Donoghue, communications lead at TikTok UK and Ireland, the shift alters the essentials of the profession itself. He says communications is moving “from message distribution to reputation architecture”, requiring teams to design “the full evidence base around a brand” rather than simply distributing corporate messages. The problem, he says, is that most communications teams are not structured for this transition yet.  

Indeed, the challenge is as much an organisational one as it is technical. Communications functions often remain fragmented across marketing, corporate affairs, employee communications and digital teams, even as AI increasingly draws on all of those sources simultaneously. 

As a result, Tom Malcolm, UK group managing director at PR agency MSL, says the strategic conversations around LLMs themselves have become siloed. “The best organisations are making it a priority at a senior level. They recognise that it affects all aspects of how a brand lives and operates. If communications departments are operating in their individual silos, they’re not connecting. And ultimately, you never going to get that connection that really enables you.” 

This becomes more essential, Malcolm says, in the context of crisis management. “There’s much longer tail on crises in an LLM environment than there would be otherwise. With traditional media, there’s a shorter window in which you can manage a crisis, but then that news cycle moves on. The reality in an LLM environment is those stories, if they’re not managed properly, are going to be living on in the information that shapes LLM responses for a much longer period. 

“You’re only going to be solving that if there is a connection across different disciplines within the communications function, as well as a connection across different aspects of marketing and brand guardianship.”   

Exactly how quickly that shift occurs remains uncertain, but communications leaders argue that it is already influencing strategy. Tiltman cautions that organisations remain in a transitional period. “Assuming that transition continues, branded reputation and the way you manage brand reputation, and in particular through crises, will become more important.”  

If those systems increasingly become the primary source of first impressions between organisations and their stakeholders, communications teams may find themselves managing not one audience, but two.