Newsroom

Full Steam Ahead: Escaping AI’s Early Stage Trap

For many in the public affairs industry, Artificial Intelligence has rapidly become both a promise and a puzzle. Just as investors at the turn of the millennium saw web technology as a universal disruptor, today’s public affairs professionals increasingly hear that AI will revolutionize their work. However in practice, for many the expected surge in productivity and innovation has been more elusive than anticipated.

To understand why – we must go back not 20 years, but 120 years.

In the late 19th century, despite clear benefits and the revolutionary potential of electric motors, American factories remained overwhelmingly reliant on steam power well into the early 1900s. Early adopters replaced massive steam engines with electric motors, only to find themselves disappointed. Costs didn’t decrease significantly, and productivity gains were marginal. The underlying reason, however, was not that electricity was overrated but that factory owners had not fully grasped how deeply they needed to reimagine their entire operation.

Steam-powered factories were rigid structures, arranged around the logistical necessity of a massive, central engine and sprawling, cumbersome shafts transmitting power across workspaces. Workers operated at the rhythm of machinery, not their own productivity. Electricity, by contrast, allowed flexibility, autonomy, and a completely new approach to manufacturing—one in which the layout, architecture, workforce management, and production processes themselves had to change entirely. It wasn’t until factory owners embraced the broader implications of electricity—rethinking their operational logic—that transformative productivity finally emerged, decades later.

Today, the public affairs and communications sector stands at a similar crossroads with AI. Many firms may be investing heavily in AI technologies and platforms (or talking about doing so at least…), but they limit their vision to automating or slightly enhancing current practices, often leading to modest improvements at best.

The real power of AI in public affairs is its ability to unlock entirely new possibilities—solutions that were previously inconceivable or prohibitively complex. AI can enable professionals to draw unprecedented insights from expansive, disparate datasets, to integrate decades of research and public information seamlessly into contemporary decision-making, and empowers even non-technical professionals to craft custom software solutions uniquely tailored to highly specialised challenges.

AI demands more than just technological integration; it requires cultural and operational transformation.

To unlock the transformative power of AI, public affairs professionals must be willing to be bold in assessing the foundations of how they do what they do. Organizations must champion cross-disciplinary collaboration and innovation, encouraging teams from diverse backgrounds to collaboratively imagine and implement entirely new solutions. We must become more ambitious and imaginative in defining and tackling challenges, leveraging AI’s capabilities to explore possibilities once considered too complex or impractical.

The AI revolution in public affairs will similarly unfold incrementally. The firms that reap its greatest rewards will be those willing to challenge conventional wisdom, reimagine their strategic processes, and truly adapt to a radically different operational landscape. Only then will we see productivity soar, unlocking the full promise of AI—a transformation that, while slower than initially expected, is certain to be profound and enduring.