🚀 PR Futurist #120 🥇 GEO white paper wins industry praise 💡 Microsoft CCO's top AI tips for comms

Welcome

PR industry welcomes cutting the hype about AI answers

The PR and communications industry has reacted positively to the Purposeful Relations and 72Point white papers on influencing AI answers. Corporate comms leaders have found it particularly helpful as the papers cut through the hype to identify 12 imperatives and 12 actionable insights for 2026.

Microsoft CCO Frank X. Shaw has done a fireside chat with the Wall Street Journal where he reveals some top tips and ideas for how PR and communications can make the most of AI.

Again we've got two stories that highlight the importance of social licence for AI. A report in the Financial Times reveals insurers are reluctant to cover AI risks. While Walmart's Executive Vice President, Corporate Affairs, says that as AI reshapes business corporate communicators must act as the public’s voice in boardrooms. All of these flag how critical social licence for AI needs to be for corporate affairs leaders.

In another sign of how the media landscape is changing the Financial Times has started to publish its Alphaville blog on Substack.

Finally there is a raft of new improvements to Microsoft Copilot. I've summarised them in a short article and am starting to explore them as they start to become available. Today in a client training workshop I was even able to demonstrate a new feature that I hadn't even used before as I think it only went live this morning, as it wasn't there last night.

News

Is GEO essential for PR or is it all snake oil?

The launch of Hold the Front Page – Traditional Media’s Influence in the Age of AI white paper in partnership with 72Point was a great success. We had standing room only at the launch and lots of interest since.

There is huge interest in influencing AI answers (GEO, AEO or whatever you call it) amongst PR and comms professionals, especially corporate comms as so much of the hype is just about marketing and sales, it misses how important AI is in influencing corporate issues, reputation and relationships.

I've done my first write-up about it, with more to follow.

If you want to book a briefing for your team then get in touch.

Microsoft CCO Frank X. Shaw on using AI for corporate comms and crises

Microsoft CCO Frank X. Shaw did a fireside chat [full video] at the Wall Street Journal Leadership Institute CMO Council Summit where he explained in depth how corporate communications can use and benefit from AI. I've written an article summarising and commenting on his ideas which include:

AI as a transformer
AI as a critic and coach
AI for crisis communications
AI is cultural change, not just technology
AI as a good habit
AI as a team sport
AI gets better so keep iterating
AI accuracy and trust
AI based on your knowledge
AI adoption at scale

How do you keep up with the AI search shift?

There's still time to register for the PRWeek/Campaign/Management Today AI search and influencing AI answers webinar tomorrow. I'm speaking on an expert panel alongside Sarah Salter, Vice president, global partnerships and AI innovation at WPP and Jamie Brader, Commercial Director at Notified. The panel is moderated by Siobhan Halt, Deputy Editor of PRWeek.

There are already nearly 1,000 people registered.

AI

Use AI or get fired

The Wall Street Journal looks at how AI is being adopted across corporate America and finds both sticks and carrots.

"Anyone deemed untrainable or seen as dragging their feet risks being weeded out of hiring processes, marked down in performance reviews or laid off."

Corporate affairs

Insurers refusing to cover risk from AI

The Financial Times [paywall] reports that many major insurance companies are seeking to exclude AI risks from corporate policies. This makes it even more important that corporate affairs leader are advising on social licence for AI.

AI poses both operational and reputational risks and opportunities. Social licence for AI identifies issues where it is critical to ensure stakeholder trust by both acting responsibly and educating stakeholders about it in order to secure their trust.

Walmart's Dan Bartlett says AI will supercharge corporate affairs

Walmart's Executive Vice President, Corporate Affairs, Dan Bartlett makes the argument that as AI reshapes business corporate communicators must act as the public’s voice in boardrooms. He says that while AI can enhance strategy, it can’t replace the human touch needed to influence leaders. It's yet another example of why social licence for AI needs to be near the top of the agenda for every corporate affairs leader.

CommTech tools

Plethora of Microsoft 365 Copilot improvements

Microsoft has announced a plethora of new Copilot features. As usual with Microsoft announcements it's difficult to make sense of which version of Copilot they relate to and when they will arrive. These are the new features for Microsoft 365 Copilot for Business and Enterprise:

Work IQ: Work IQ is an "intelligence layer" that personalises Copilot for organisations, employees, and roles, enabling Copilot to act based on a deep contextual understanding. This understanding of your company is already something Copilot is much better at than other AI tools, but this improves it even more.

Agent Mode: in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint will allow users to interactively create, edit, and format content with Copilot iteratively within the Office apps. Users can choose between Anthropic and OpenAI models for reasoning. The PowerPoint and Excel ones have already appeared for us (but that's because we have Frontier mode enabled so get new features faster).

Group AI Chats: Teams Mode for Copilot enables turning 1:1 Copilot chats into group AI conversations inside Teams. New collaboration-focused agents act as teammates on projects or meetings. The personal version of Copilot recently gained Group Chats, but this appears to be a far more powerful way of collaborating with colleagues.

Real-time Voice Chat: The Microsoft 365 Copilot app now supports voice commands, such as checking daily priorities or getting meeting summaries. In Outlook, new voice-driven features let users summarise emails, reply, or schedule meetings. This isn't just the simplistic dictation mode as it is real time conversation where you can chat verbally to Copilot as you work and it can help you like an assistant.

Video Generation: The Sora 2 video generation model is now in Copilot Create for creating AI-powered video content.

App Builder: A new App Builder Agent simplifies building workflows and integrations with Copilot.

There are also a number of new governance and security features which you won't need to use on a day-to-day basis but makes Copilot easier, safer and more powerful in environments with large numbers of users.

Microsoft creates the world's first secure enterprise AI browser

You might have seen the buzz about AI browsers - Perplexity has Comet, ChatGPT has Atlas and Microsoft has Copilot in Edge. They are all great and really useful AI features.

However, you definitely can't use them for work as they personal browsers without adequate security or privacy. There have already been serious security scares.

But now Microsoft has announced Edge for Business, which is the world's first (and currently only) secure enterprise browser.

Digital and social

Financial Times launches Substack newsletter

The Financial Times is the latest publisher to launch on Substack. The FT has launched its Alphaville blog as a free weekly newsletter on markets and finance. It is further recognition from a big, traditional publisher of the importance of user generated content platforms in an increasingly fragmented media landscape.

Our GEO white paper on influencing AI answers found that community based content is one of several important factors in GEO/AEO. Targeting creators on platforms like Substack and Medium is becoming increasingly important.