Building Brand Gravity Podcast

Anne Green: [00:00:00] You know, every company we work with is upgrading its tech stack, Steve, AI tools, data platforms, automation, personalization engines, and understandably, there's a lot of focus on the technology. But we're here today to assert that many of those same organizations are still running. What we would call an outdated operating system.

When it comes to narrative. This is how they make decisions, how they align leaders and leadership and how they show up in moments that matter.

Steve Halsey: Yeah, Anne, you know, I really like that and, and here's a core idea that we've been pressure testing that we should talk about. You know, narrative isn't just what you say about the business, it's actually how the business runs.

And here's why I think that matters more than ever right now, when your narrative system is outdated, no amount of AI channels or current velocity actually creates momentum. So think of it this way. Narrative isn't just what you say about the [00:01:00] business, it's actually the operating system or the os, uh, so to speak, that determines your success and vulnerability and adding pressure to this.

AI scales, whichever system or direction you already have. So if your narrative OS is broken, guess what? AI is gonna help you break it faster.

Anne Green: That is so true, and that's what we wanna unpack today, why narrative itself has become the new operating system for brands and organizations, and what happens when companies fail to upgrade it.

Steve Halsey: Welcome everyone to the latest episode of Building Brand Gravity. I'm Steve Halsey.

Anne Green: And I'm Ann Green.

Steve Halsey: And in this era of AI acceleration, channel fragmentation and seemingly constant crisis. Brands don't fail because they lack tools. They fails because their narrative systems are outdated and to further ground our discussion.

When we say narrative as an operating system, [00:02:00] we don't mean a tagline or a campaign. We mean the shared logic that governs how leaders interpret complexity, make decisions, deploy technology, and show up under pressure. It's that invisible system running in the background of an organization.

Anne Green: I love that idea of an invisible system.

We're gonna use a lot of different metaphors today to try to unpack that. And on today's episode of Building Brand Gravity, we're sticking to just Steve and me. No outside guest today, Steve, because we wanted to devote time to exploring why narrative. Our assertion has become the new operating system for brands and organizations.

And Steve, I think the first thing we need to do is define our terms, make this concept tangible and not just theoretical. And I know you've been thinking about this a lot. In fact, this was one of your 2026 predictions, which are all on record, by the way, for our listeners on the first podcast of season four back in January.

So do you wanna kick us off here? What do you mean? When you say [00:03:00] narrative is an operating system.

Steve Halsey: Yeah. So when we talk about narrative as an operating system, the real question is what does that actually govern day to day inside an organization? So when I think of narrative as an operating system, we're not talking about messaging frameworks or brand campaigns as more traditional ways to think about narrative.

We're talking about the shared logic and meaning. That basically governs how leaders interpret complexity, make trade-offs, deploy technology, and really decide how to show up under pressure. And it's bigger than just messaging and it becomes an organization's de facto DNA. And this is really where, where we see it either succeed or fail, and often where, where we see that disconnect.

So let me give you an example. So if you have a healthcare company that sets a strategy around. Patient first. Innovation powered by ai. Everybody's gonna sign off on that direction and [00:04:00] gonna be really excited about it. Then in real world decision making, things start to happen. The product team wants to launch AI as fast.

To stay competitive as possible. So they are off and running. Mm-hmm. Legal wants to slow everything down and manage the regulatory risk. And comms is out there trying to emphasize transparency and caution to make sure that they're protecting trust around the brand. So what you have in this case is the same foundational strategy of using AI to basically accelerate that patient experience.

But three very different and distinct instincts in the moment. And so when narrative that kind of, uh, underlying glue that holds everything together isn't clearly defined, the strategy starts to fracture under pressure. Each leader is acting very rationally, but through a different meaning system, a different kind of context.

And so. A defined narrative [00:05:00] operating system would tell everyone, how do you weigh speed versus safety versus trust and concepts like that. Not just what the strategy is, but how do you make the trade-offs when that strategy collides with reality, and how do you make those trade-offs in a way that is genuine to the brand, to the business?

And you know, to the strategy that we were talking about. That's why we keep coming back to this idea that strategy sets the direction, where are you going? But narrative actually embeds the operating logic day to day for how decisions actually get made, particularly when things get messy.

Anne Green: I think it's a really powerful way to think about cohesion of thought and action in an organization.

And I've, I've been thinking a lot about this since you first. I brought this up to me, I think even at the end of last year. So the questions that come to mind for me, what are the guiding principles behind a given strategy? Can [00:06:00] we articulate the narrative around and behind them tied to organizational mission?

Vision values as well as current business objectives, right? Does this all hang together executive to executive, no matter what their functional area may be? Can this narrative scale up and down and across to reach into every part of the company? Those, to me, are some of the key questions that you're raising with this premise.

And another way, Steve, I'm thinking about this, um, and I'll see what you think about my, um, framework here. Is cons, um, contrasting the small n little n narrative, like messaging. And we do a lot of messaging in our field with capital N narrative as a true operating system, right? So basic ideas of narrative tend to be rooted in output.

Like I created a message document, um, like here's a page of messages about a murder merger or product launch. You know that stuff we do every day, right? That's narrative too, in a [00:07:00] sense, but it's more functional or transactional. That's to me, the small or little n of narrative as output. I think the bigger way you're suggesting that we explore is narrative as foundational, narrative as infrastructure.

And Steve knows, and many other listeners know, I love the word legible recently. So in this case. I feel like this foundational narrative helps make the organization legible to itself and to everybody in it. Does that resonate with you, Steve?

Steve Halsey: A hundred, a hundred percent. Ann, uh, think of it this way. If narrative lives downstream from decisions, then it's really kind of cosmetic.

But if narrative lives upstream of decision, it becomes much more strategic.

Anne Green: I love that soundbite. 'cause frankly, that that's the tension we know a lot of folks feel within their organization. Certainly a lot of our clients deal with when there's a tension there. So to me the concept's really powerful and, and I find it kind of inspiring frankly, because it gets to something underlying that I think you and I both feel is there, but it's not [00:08:00] articulated.

I do think communication. Deeper level underlies and everything, including the narratives we establish about the foundation of our businesses and our lives, our personal lives, and our communities. It has to be intentional. It has to be systemic. That's why the idea of an operating system resonated so fully with me the first time you shared it.

But you know, the fact that a concept may be resonant to me or you Steve, doesn't mean it's easy, easy to grasp or easy to implement. So I think where we start to see that complexity is that organizations are structurally fragmented by design. There's brand. Versus performance and I, and it's not always versus, but it's sometimes corporate versus product.

You know, strategy versus activation. Sometimes leadership vision versus employee interpretation. Sometimes stakeholder Y versus stakeholder Z because they're not always aligned. You get the idea. So sometimes I think we do view this as a problem to be solved by messaging. Messaging is important. I don't wanna diminish [00:09:00] that.

This kind of complexity is not just about communications as an output. Again, it's really more of a systems problem. And I would say it's a connecting the dots kind of problem. I mean, Steve, how do you see this?

Steve Halsey: Yeah, I think, I think you're, I think you're, you're really, um, tracking well with what I'm, what I'm thinking here, and basically it's in the complexity that this really shows up in, in practice.

Because as we all know, complexity doesn't get solved by just choosing one path. Rarely does it, does that, is that ever the case? It gets solved by really connecting what others separate, right? How do you pull those, those divergent parts together and when leaders cannot. Connect dots across, as you said, brand performance, product activation, stakeholders.

The organization tends to default into silos even when everyone has good intentions, and we see this all the time, you know, brand teams start optimizing for [00:10:00] long-term trust. Performance teams are optimizing for short term. Uh, conversion. So little tension starts there. Product teams optimize for speed and greater output.

People, teams are optimizing towards work life balance, and leadership is really trying to optimize for the street. So individually, while everyone is acting rationally, they're not necessarily acting in concert or in a very consistent vector together. So collectively, the organization can begin to feel a little bit.

Incoherent if everybody isn't, uh, to use a bad analogy, rowing in the same direction. And that's not a talent problem. I mean, that's what it looks like when an organization doesn't have a shared operating system to really help govern those trade-offs. The operating system should really determine whether leaders experience complexity as constant trade offs.

Or whether they see the connections that others miss and can [00:11:00] move the organization towards coherence and towards new level of success, particularly when you have things being thrown at you left and right every day.

Anne Green: Yeah, and I, I think narrative is what allows the clarity to actually turn into activation and activation into momentum.

So, but let's get more specific and try to make this real for our listeners. And I think as, as people hear, what I'm gonna share, like two examples, just reflecting on how is this more than strategy? How does this take things like values and actually build them into something that's operation that you can operationalize and, and many other connections like that.

But if we revisit the healthcare example, so let's take the example of a large health system. We do work in healthcare among many other sectors. So that's a very complex operating environment, and it's a very high pressure and complex industry, especially right now when it's clear across every person. Um, you know that the team, which prioritizes decisions, they have to prioritize decisions that are best for the [00:12:00] patient.

When everyone knows that that's the foundational narrative and operating system and all whi the North Star, then that narrative becomes a lot more. It becomes actual action and decision making. It can cascade across many different roles in the system. So like a frontline worker, they have a litmus test for decision making and urgent or challenging moments, right?

And, and they themselves, by the way, can then challenge back up the chain when they feel moments that the narrative operating system is going offline, where they're not aligning with what is that foundational narrative operating system they're trying to adhere to another case. That came to mind as I thought about this is a, is a hard one in the airline industry for United Airlines, which has really done a lot of good work around this.

But years ago you may remember, um, there was a really disturbing incident of a passenger that was dragged off of a plane mm-hmm. While they were sitting at the gate. And there was a lot to that story. And if people don't remember, you can google it and read about it. But there was a lot [00:13:00] involved there with individuals following the book at the time, sort of the letter of what supposedly was procedure.

But when you zoom out, and I give United a lot of credit for recognizing this, that action. Was so unfortunate, but was really deeply out of alignment with the narrative operating system and the core values. And by the way, I do not see those as one-to-one, but they're deeply aligned of the organization and it underscored work that they needed to do to reinforce that operating system.

The narrative, what we stand for, how the values are brought to life, minute by minute, day by day. And also to explore the systemic issues that broke it in that, you know, broke that narrative cohesion in the moment. And ultimately, you know, this led to a lot more empowerment for their frontline staff, both on and off the planes to make decisions that supported passenger safety and the experience.

I fly them all the time, as I know you often do too, and I think it's been really material. [00:14:00] The change is there. So that's some storytelling about how hard it is on its own. But now Steve, we've gotta add another layer here, which is we gotta bring AI into the mix,

Steve Halsey: of

Anne Green: course. So, right. Course you gotta bring AI in.

So I have

Steve Halsey: a podcast without ai.

Anne Green: No, really it wouldn't be building brand gravity these days without us talking about AI for at least a short time. Everyone knows. But you know, if we look at the challenges and opportunities of AI, and I think they're both, AI increases speed, it increases volume of everything, literally everything coming at you in the organization, and it increases something you said earlier, which is the surface area of risk.

There's just a lot more risk. So, you know, I'm gonna turn this over to you, Steve. How does AI further complicate this picture?

Steve Halsey: Well, I think you're ab absolutely right, Anne AI does increase speed, volume, and, and risk, you know, which is, which is why we keep coming back to this, uh, concept we've been talking about.

AI doesn't replace [00:15:00] narrative. But it exposes whether you have one and whether it's a right one. Honestly, when narrative isn't clearly defined, AI can very quickly become a liability because it ends up becoming the defacto substitute for leadership clarity, and you really don't want that, but you see it in a few predictable ways.

When the narrative operating system is weak, AI kind of accelerates the inconsistency. You see the scaling of confusing misalignment because every team basically is prompting from a different point of view for what the brand is trying to be, and the results taken in very different direction. But when the narrative operating system is really strong, AI does the opposite.

If you can really focus it. It can reinforce strategic coherence. It can become leverage instead of noise because everybody is operating from the same meaning system, the same approach. And we're seeing [00:16:00] leadership teams roll out AI co-pilots for content for sales. For comms, and then suddenly the brand sounds like it's coming from five different companies, depending upon who's prompted what in the tool.

Now, when I see issues like that, the issue isn't ai. The issue is that the organization has never really aligned around that narrative operating system or put the guardrails in to ensure that the AI is reflecting the DNA of that corporation. So that's why when we talk about AI as an accelerant, not a strategy.

We need to make sure that narrative is there to be a bit of a governor on the, uh, automation. You know, if it's the narrative, if the narrative operating system isn't set. You're just gonna go really fast, but in the wrong direction.

Anne Green: I think that's really wise, you know, and, and frankly now we know with AI discovery, and that's something we work on a great deal with our clients.

Um, that's [00:17:00] the first step of how people are understanding you. And you're right, there's a lot of content being generated out there. So both inside and outside the organization that legibility and clarity is critical. So there is another area we really have to touch on here and that's when an organization experiences a crisis.

Now Steve, luckily for us, the world is really sedate and stable and nothing is going on right now.

Steve Halsey: Mellow, chill,

Anne Green: really mellow. Okay. Haha, haha. That's not a best joke in these volatile times. You know, if, if we're not on the news cycle for five minutes, God knows what will happen while we're gone recording this podcast.

But you know, joking aside, how organizations. Prepare for and manage and come out of crises today is so important. I, I personally, feel like the stakes have never been higher on by many definitions. So when confronting a crisis, those of us in marketing communications often watch the following happen.

Unfortunately. Formal structures fail or begin to fall apart. And frankly, [00:18:00] that's if they were even cohesive to begin with. And that's not always a given. When it comes to crisis preparedness, crisis playbooks that are carefully created can get skipped or really scrambled in the moment, and then chains of command can get compressed or confused.

And ultimately what you see reveals in a crisis what is actually underneath, and it's pretty instructive. What remains. You know, when things are falling apart in a crisis is the o organization's operating logic. And, uh, that's not always a pretty site. I think you would agree, Steve.

Steve Halsey: Oh, I a hundred, a hundred percent.

And I, I think unfortunately in a crisis you don't get the luxury of process. A lot of times we think we'll have time for the process, but crisis doesn't just reveal your messaging for. Framework, as you said, it reveals your operating system. All those things you, you know, are you living your value? What's your core character?

What are all those things? But if that's not fundamentally in place in your DNA [00:19:00] before the crisis hits, you see the cracks immediately. Right. Values get talked about, but behaviors don't line up to that. You know, speed and coherence start to feel like they're almost going a little bit in opposite direction, and leaders can interpret the same situation through completely different lenses.

And increasingly AI generated response can then outpace that actual decision clarity. It sounds good enough, maybe we should go with it, right? But in real crisis situations, we often see two forces collide. Leaders are trying to move fast to protect, uh, the business, to rectify what is going on, to safeguard communities.

All of those things make them wanna move really fast. Yet the organization also wants to try and stay on brand. So when narrative isn't embedded all the way upstream in your DNA, speed and coherence, sometimes feel mutually exclusive. And that's when we start to see statements get walked [00:20:00] back. Leaders contradict each other, stress goes up, trust erodes, not because people don't care.

I found they, they always care deeply. But because the operating system isn't guiding decisions in real time in a way that is instinctive and natural.

Anne Green: Yeah, and I think you're right that leaders in really organ. People throughout the organization always care deeply. And you know, a lot of work goes into guiding a given organization across many dimensions of complexity, including crises.

But that underlying framework that goes beyond a statement of values or strategy that gives real language to what we stand for and what we intend to do. It needs to be strong and clear every day, but particularly in crisis situations, everything just gets more exposed in those moments. So I'm glad we had a chance to talk about the crisis.

Issue.

Steve Halsey: Yeah. Yeah. I think that, I think that's important, but I don't wanna spend the whole time talking about crisis or, or ai. But when we think about narrative as an operating system, you know, and we, we've [00:21:00] had the ability to pressure test this our ourselves, you know, across, uh, our two go to market agencies, uh, GNS, business Communications, and Morgan Myers.

We operate across a lot of different markets. We have a lot of different disciplines. Uh, you know, our clients have a lot of different go to market models, so you really can't rely on org charts to create coherence, especially as you grow. I mean, you really need to have a shared operating logic. So as we've grown and developed and matured, um, over time, we felt some of the same.

Tensions that our clients feel different teams operating for different outcomes, different markets pulling in different directions, different disciplines, interpreting what matters most in their own way. None of it was wrong. It's just a part of that process of of evolution. And so that forced us to really step back and reestablish our own narrative as an operating system and not just from refreshed [00:22:00] positioning or, or things like that, but to really rethink about how.

Our structure actually supports clarity, activation, and momentum because we realize that structure follows that core operating system narrative, not the other way around. Um, and our narrative operating system also determines how teams collaborate, how dec shit cision light rights work. How workflows go across discipline, where AI should be used as an accelerant versus where human judgment still has to lead.

And so we centered all this around, um, some concepts that we called Lead the change, which was directionally the strategy where we're going. A core part of that narrative development was around what we called freedom to Operate, which was basically saying, we accept that all things are not equal, and we accept that different parts of our organization, those leaders need to be empowered to be close to the client, to be deeply involved in those [00:23:00] industries, but have the freedom to say, you know what?

I know what's gonna work best for me. Give me the freedom to operate in that way. And what I think was fascinating and, and I appreciate you kind of your thought on this. We just got back from visiting all five of our office and you know what we learned? What I learned was that that narrative, um, os isn't just a positioning exercise, it shapes how everything works.

And to see the excitement. Of our, of our teams and the empowerment of it. I just think that just really was a great opportunity for us, uh, to kind of evolve our own narrative system in a way that really gets everybody aligned and understand that the narrative operating system is really leadership behavior.

It's not just aligning words on a website.

Anne Green: Yeah, I love visiting our offices. It was so great doing our roadshow. You know, we have people in many, many states, so more than just our five physical offices, but we got to see a lot of our staff in person. It was [00:24:00] amazing to see how much, 'cause we asked folks what resonated around these.

Changes we've made in this evolution we're undergoing, which is really about how we work and, and supporting our clients even better than we do today. And a lot of that that came across was the idea of the freedom to operate. You could really feel that underlying narrative structure resonating through and as you said, resonating in terms of how we actually operationalize and move forward.

So that, that was exciting. And, um. You made a point about leadership behavior and how that's so critical here, not just aligning words on the website. It's actually aligning leadership. I, I couldn't agree more on this, and really, to me, it's leadership behavior, but also leadership mindset are essential.

Steve and everyone else. And my orbit knows, I've been on the idea of mindset. I mean, this is a well established idea, but in terms of what I've been talking about a lot and what I think is really critical, I've been talking about that mindset question for the last two years pretty [00:25:00] intensely. Um, there's good reasons why, because in moments of tremendous change and transformation and all sectors are going through that right now, we need to think about that leadership lens and the mindset.

And to me it means a couple of different things. So, first. Recognizing that the narrative OS or operating system is an actual leadership discipline. It's not just a comms initiative, as in, here's your page of message point leader. You know, I don't wanna diminish. That's very important too. It's part of the work that we do every day, but it's a fundamental understanding that the underlying narrative, who we are.

Why we do what we do, how that understanding shapes and guides every conversation and interaction, no matter how large or small that we understand how this is all connected. And, you know, I was really reminded of this Friday. Um, we're recording this at a time where there's been a lot of exciting weather going on around, uh, the Midwest and the East Coast.

And I had the chance to spend about 13 hours commuting through, uh. [00:26:00] Three different airports last Friday and had a bunch of delays. And coming from Chicago to Newark on United, again, I was lucky enough to sit next to a pilot who was fairly young and a great guy, and you know, as we got sent back to the gate with a ground hold and he was explaining to me what he was seeing, you know, on, on the pilot, the good pilot stuff.

So I knew it was happening. People were asking him questions. We just started chatting about life and stuff that was going on, and him wanting to get home and having a 1-year-old. His wife having carpal tunnel surgery and just, just a lot of nice chatting and not putting pressure on him. 'cause he's a pilot, tell me everything, but just being really human.

And at the end, as we were getting up to leave, we finally got to New York and I said, Hey, it was so nice talking to you. I really enjoyed it. He's like, I really liked talking to you too. And hey, thanks for choosing United.

Steve Halsey: Wow.

Anne Green: And I was so taken. Wow. It so caught me up in that moment because that's their tagline, right?

That's what they would hope. In their prayers and leadership that [00:27:00] every employee would say, and he did it so spontaneously and so naturally that my reaction was pure delight and surprise and just like, yes, of course, like you. This is great. You're great. It's all great. Even though I had literally Steve been through mm-hmm.

Hours and hours of delays and so. I think I wanted to tell that story 'cause we're talking about a lot of things that might seem lofty, but I wanted to bring it to a really emotional level. You can see from that story how your narrative operating system becomes like the air you breathe as a leader, as how you show up every day, and as well as how you govern decisions and frame the direction you give to others.

So I hope that, I hope that helps bring this to life for folks even more.

Steve Halsey: It does and, and what, what I think is so powerful about that example, it also shows that if you have that core narrative and that leadership clarity, it carries on to everybody, like frontline employees, everybody. And you know, even though it's such a difficult [00:28:00] experience, your reflection on that is, yeah.

Wow. I really, I really trust that brand. I trust the professionals there. It's just really, really powerful. Well, you know, on, uh, building brand Gravity, we like, uh, must be getting near the end 'cause it's time for some practical, uh, takeaways for people to be thinking about. So wanna give you some things to think about, uh, your commute to the morning, whether it's, uh.

Taking a train, a plane, or just walking down the hall, depending upon, uh, where you may be. Uh, wanna give you kind of a three part gut check for you to think about with your leadership team as it comes to narrative as an operating system. Number one is what narrative actually governs how decisions get made.

Not what's on the strategy slide, we already covered that, but what shows up in the moment when trade-offs get real? Exactly like what you just experienced. Secondly, or number two, does our use of AI reinforce [00:29:00] coherence across the organization or does it fragment how we show up in the marketplace? That is really critical.

We don't just wanna amplify at scale. Things if there, if we really don't have that kind of core DNA pretty locked in. And third, ask yourself this, if we had a real crisis tomorrow, what story would our response tell about how we actually operate as leaders? You know what if the answers to those three questions are a bit uncomfortable, it's not a failure.

It's just a signal that your operating system needs some attention.

Anne Green: Yeah, if those answers are unclear, your operating system needs an upgrade, and I think those three questions are really powerful to step back and put what we've been talking about today in, in some really stark relief. We spend a lot of time and we across many organizations, not just we as an agency, upgrading tools and platforms and AI and channels, but you know, I think our [00:30:00] big message today is the companies that actually build momentum, especially now in a very fragmented.

Information environment that's made even more complicated by ai. As you well said, the ones that are gonna build momentum are the ones that are gonna upgrade how they think and decide and really make sure that that narrative is embedded throughout the whole organization.

Steve Halsey: Yeah, and to, and to take that a little bit further, I mean, I really feel like the brands that are gonna win the next decade.

They're not just gonna have better messaging, they're gonna fundamentally have better operating systems. You know, ones that turn complexity into coherence, AI into advantage and narrative into momentum. So think about it this way, you know, narrative isn't what you say about the business, it's how the business runs.

Anne Green: And that's how brands don't just manage change. They can lead it, which is very important to us and all the clients we work with. So thank you for joining us on another episode of Building Brand Gravity. I hope it was enjoyable to hear us reflect on something. We'd love to hear reactions from you to this one and [00:31:00] get your sense of agreed disagree, add on to it, and we have a lot more to come across season four, so make sure you stay tuned for further conversations.

Thanks for joining us today.

Natalie Nixon: [00:00:00] In the early stages of researching and writing, Move. Think. Rest.. I thought the title of this book would be Invisible Work because my premise is that it's often when we step away from the desk, when our work isn't trackable and traceable, that our most generative work is happening. And it turns out the neuroscience of the brain shows that we actually need.

To toggle between that neo frontal cortex and the default moat network. Zooming in, zooming out to do our best work.

Steve Halsey: Welcome to another episode of Building Brand Gravity. I'm Steve Halsey.

Anne Green: And I'm Anne Green. Nice to see you, Steve, in this cold weather we're having right now.

Steve Halsey: Great to see you as well.

Anne Green: Yeah. You know, Steve, um, when we are thinking about our intro today, I just can't get away from the inescapable amount of talk about and focus on AI these days, especially regarding workforce too.

And [00:01:00] you know, I think rightly so. As we've touched on in so many of our prior podcast discussions, I think one of the most critical factors in this transformation is not technology. It's us, the humans.

Steve Halsey: Yeah. I think, I think you're exactly right, Anne. I mean, what's, what's really striking to me is we've spent so much time over the last couple of years talking about what AI can do, right?

Faster content, smarter analysis, more automation. We really haven't spent nearly enough time talking about how humans show up differently in this environment. Because I think that's the real advantage is, is not just technical fluency, it's the judgment, the creativity is the context, right? So, and it's also the ability to ask better questions and connect those ideas in ways that the machine can't, and decide what actually matters.

And, and as you said, I think that's where the human layer becomes not just relevant. Essential.

Anne Green: Yeah. And I am happily seeing more discussion about how this AI transformation [00:02:00] moment and really societal transformation too, has to be as much about people as technology. I think you and I have agreed that was really missing from the dialogue almost entirely in 2024 and was still pretty thin in 2025.

So I think there's a lot of opportunity, yet there's also so much dissonance that people are feeling about the space, right? It's like. I'm constantly talking about that dynamic tension of encouraging folks to embrace and experiment with the thing that they also just secretly and not so secretly worry does this take my job?

And you know, on the AI and job subject, I was reading a newsletter you and I read all the time. Diane Brady's Fortune, CEO Daily, and it was actually today when we're recording. And she reports on a discussion she had at Davos with the CEO of Recruit Holdings. Now, for those who aren't familiar with that name, Recruit Holdings is the entity that owns both Indeed and Glassdoor.

So they got a lot of human-centric insight that CEO is saying to Diane. He feels from the research that only a small fraction of recent layoffs [00:03:00] in 2025, et cetera, can be directly attributed to ai. AI, yet he also said that workers are feeling real anxiety that this is exactly what's happening. So they went on to discuss also the fact that there absolutely will be changes in how leaders assess and source talent.

And I know you and I agree that that is true. There's no doubt about it. So I guess ultimately for me, as I reflect on this, it continues to point to that need to think differently about work and then also our specific contributions as humans in the loop.

Steve Halsey: Yeah. And I think, I think that's the tension right now, Anne, that, that so many of us are feeling, I mean, on the one hand, the data doesn't support, as you point, the idea that, uh, I, AI is gonna just wholesale replace all our jobs overnight.

But on the other hand, for so many of us, the very nature of the work we're doing is clearly changing. And that creates uncertainty and that creates very real anxiety. And so I think what we're seeing in his shift. Isn't whether humans are needed. It's [00:04:00] what humans are needed for, right? It's really moving from.

Kind of thinking about the use of AI and the AI-human connection is purely transactional or repetitive work replacement to one where it's really now how can they be married, so to speak, in synthesis creativity. And that's kind of what I don't know. You know me, I like to make up terms. My new one is meaning making.

So meaning making is how can we. Focus more on contribution over execution. So that's what I love about what you're talking about, about this idea of humans in the loop, not so much from a dystopian safety net. Let's, you know, make sure somebody can press the off button on this thing, but really what is that value multiplier?

Because the future of work. I really don't believe it's about competing with machines. It's about collaborating with them and learning how to integrate the things that only people can do in a very meaningful way.

Anne Green: So [00:05:00] all of this, we've been talking about the nature of work shifting, what we're discovering about what humans can do, the meaning making.

This all really resonates with the conversation I had earlier today with Natalie Nixon. Now that name may sound familiar to the frequent listeners. She appeared on Building Brand Gravity in early 2025, where we interrogated an excellent question, which is, are we all creative? And spoiler, her answer is yes.

She has a ton of insight and data to share on that topic. So, and I'm kind of obsessed with her framework of tapping into both wonder as well as rigor, and that's core to what she talks about. So I really encourage listeners to check that one out. But Natalie is back. She has a new book titled Move Think, rest, which digs deeply into understanding how it work and productivity.

Our whole idea of productivity has to shift with the changing times. She's worked across multiple fields, including as an academic. And she's now, you know, an author [00:06:00] and a very sought after public speaker, and also a creativity catalyst for all kinds of organizations. We had such a rich discussion, Steve.

I can't wait to get it out in the world. So with that, here is my conversation with friend of the pod, Natalie Nixon. I am so thrilled to welcome the wonderful Natalie Nixon back to building Brand Gravity for her second episode. And for those who remember her from last year friend of the pod, she is a very multi hyphenate career person, has been an academic, has been an author, now, a new book which we're gonna discuss, a prior book, um, and consultant and just all around creative person and a friend of mine, Natalie.

So good to see you. Good

Natalie Nixon: to see you, and thank you so much for having me back. Excited for our conversation.

Anne Green: That's right. So last year, for those who missed it, you can go to our YouTube page or on wherever you get your podcast and find our episode where we talked a lot about creativity. It was tied to Natalie's last book, the Creativity Leap, unleash Curiosity and [00:07:00] Improvisation and Intuition at Work.

And that was a lot about the question of are we all creative? And I highly recommend that episode, but I was super excited. To bring Natalie back now because she has a new book. It's called Move. Think. Rest. Got it. Right here. And you can tell I'm reading it Natalie 'cause the dust jacket is at home, right?

That's my tell, right? That I'm actually reading this book and carrying it around with me. But the subtitle is Redefining Productivity and Our Relationship with Time. So I have to start Natalie with the forward quote to your book, and I have it here to all of us who want to do less better. What does this statement mean to you, and why did you start the book that way?

Natalie Nixon: Well, I started the book this way actually because I was given an award by a speaker community, um, for, and my, the category in which I won was my, my award was entitled, Do Less Better. And I was in the middle of writing, Move. Think. Rest. When I received this award, and I think [00:08:00] the reason I won in that category was because they were observing that I worked in a very scrappy way, that I work in a very lean way.

And, and part part of that is out of need. And part of that is as, as one grows, as an entrepreneur of business, it's about hiring the right people to scaffold you. And I've increasingly done that. But as I was writing this book, that's a fresh take on productivity that's examining the ways we have thought about productivity and might wanna reexamine because of burnout.

New rules for, for work and ubiquitous technology. I thought this premise of. Of doing less better is really relevant. It's not about being less productive, but it is about being much more discerning, intentional about the ways that we are using our time, shifting away from only an outputs metric, and orientation about.

What is valuable in our work to how we can be [00:09:00] approaching work in a much more integrative way so that we are fulfilled so that it's not about busyness and an addiction to busyness. It's not about productivity theater, but it's about being very intentional about what we do with our time, which means we may be doing less, but because we are integrating, and I know we'll talk about this more.

Movement and thought and rest into the workday. Whether we are working solo or in a team in a large organization, we actually will, uh, contribute much higher quality output. So that's what that do less, better proclamation is really about.

Anne Green: I love it and I feel we're all, you know, I used to call it the cult of busyness where people wield it like a weapon.

Like I'm so busy. And it, it really is a very, just puts you right down the drain because everybody can wield their own busyness and it's, it's not that productive. But I do wanna, I do wanna peel back [00:10:00] the core tenet of your book. And I think there was a bit of a history lesson in the beginning, you know, which was really fascinating, which is the history of productivity and how we understand it today.

You know, it's this central organizing principle in our lives, right? Yet in many ways it feels like it's either in invisible or that we all just assume we know what it means. Like what are we talking about when we're talking about productivity? And I think this is becoming even more acute now given what's happening with ai.

So can you give us some grounding here in how we're understanding productivity today? And where you have some critiques of that. I know it's a big question, but whatever you feel is helpful to ground us in this conversation.

Natalie Nixon: Well, it's very interesting that you did use the word invisible because in the early stages of researching and writing, Move. Think. Rest..

I thought the title of this book would be Invisible Work because my premise is that. It's often when we step away from the desk when our work isn't trackable and traceable, that our most generative [00:11:00] work is happening. And it turns out the neuroscience of the brain shows that we actually need, uh, to toggle between that neo frontal cortex and the default mote network.

Zooming in, zooming out to do our best work. I didn't call it invisible work because I did not wanna detract from the work of feminists who, who have really. Done a lot of important work to talk about women's unaccounted for work, which is invisible work. I didn't wanna conflate the two, but when I was setting out to offer an alternative way for us to think about the workday, the ways we design policy around work in our organizations, the way we, we, we take care of ourselves so that we do our best work, I realized I had to first understand what I was reacting to.

And so the first industrial revolution is still. Something that lingers in the ways that we think about our best work. So the first industrial revolution took place starting around the 1860s and it really began a process of valuing work that was [00:12:00] what I call an either or model of work. And it was a model that really, uh, valued output speed.

Efficiencies. You measure only what you can see. And the challenge is that a lot of the ways that we do work today is not traceable. So for example, the gross domestic product, uh, does not measure email. It doesn't account for search engine work to the biggest things that help knowledge workers at least do the work.

And so then I started thinking about, well. What did the world of work look like? For the most part, before the first industrial revolution, and most economies were agricultural economies, and then I started playing around with this metaphor of cultivation. I know what we'll get. We probably get into that a little bit more later, but that's, that's a bit more of a both and model.

And when we c. It's not [00:13:00] either or. It's we're measuring the solo practitioner and the collective we, or we value both. We value speed, but we also understand the role of slow over time. And we also know that yes, we have to measure what we see and there's a lot that's happening when we need to sleep on it.

We need things to percolate and marinate. So the. The, the, the gentleman who is really tied to the first industrial revolution, revolution is, is Frederick Winslow Taylor, who, uh, was a big industrial engineer. He actually valued creativity, but he was known for during factory work, really trying to down to the minute, uh, use a stopwatch to understand speed and efficiency of humans because we were really trying to get humans to mimic.

Machine. And I think fast forward to the 21st century, the opportunity is not for humans to mimic ai, uh, our, [00:14:00] our newfound machine. But, but for to figure out how the ai, how the machine can amplify, what makes us uniquely human, can be much more of our co-pilot, our co-creator, uh, and not be the endpoint. The catalyst in a lot of times to help us do greater critical thinking to help us now make time for spaciousness, for more meaningful collaboration and those sorts of, of things that are so important for our best work to get done.

Anne Green: There's so much that you said I resonate with. I'm such a both and person. I mean, anybody who works with me here or clients would know. The binary thinking is so destructive in so many ways, and we're seeing that in our society as a whole, right? The zero sum game and truly multiple things are true at once.

And I like the idea of the both and of valuing, let's say, those outputs, but also the rumination that comes from it. And I also think that some of those. That history and that background, the framework, it kind of helps us understand like [00:15:00] what system are we in right now and why does it produce itself like this?

And, and it touches on so many things I'm thinking about deeply as a leader, which is what is the human and the machine interaction? How do we, we create a future, not sitting around being like, gee whiz Sam Altman, what will happen to us in the future? It's like all respect to open ai, but what is the future we want to see and envision.

What is that interplay of man and machine, because machines have upsides and downsides. I'm talking about the AI of it all, and also humans have upsides and downsides, and so to get back to, I think the other big connection for my next question to you is that there's been such a wrestling. Over the past, I don't know, few decades, but more acutely the last few years.

I think COVID put this in sharp relief about that integr of us as humans and workers and the mental health piece and the mindfulness and. When are we overwhelmed by tasks and pings and notifications? I mean, you and I just shut up [00:16:00] all our notifications before we got on this podcast, right? And that keeping the brain, I think of it on the track.

On the track, on the track versus what you're talking about. Move and think and rest. And what is that, as you call it, MTR framework.

Natalie Nixon: Well, so the move, think, rest framework is a very integrative framework. What it is not saying is first you move, then you think and then you rest. Maybe that would be lovely if it was in that nice, neat pat order, but that's not actually what we need.

That's not how we move through the world and through our day. And it's, as I was writing and researching and doing up to 60 interviews for this book. I realized that I couldn't even write it in that very siloed way. I mean, there's a chapter on move, there's a chapter on thought, there's a chapter on rests, but I really signaled for the readers.

Early on that this is very integrative, that there are times when you're moving where you're actually, your best thoughts emerge. [00:17:00] There are times when, uh, you that that your form of rest, um, sparks greater thought and it, it might even be the rest is actually a break. So when I talk about movement, I'm talking about movement hygiene.

I'm not talking about get a gym membership. I'm really advocating for our. Reckoning that. An acknowledgement that we are designed to move because the spinal cord is an extension of the brain. And if we sit for too long at the laptop and get cramped up, we will. We will restrict and right, we'll restrict and constrict blood flow to the brain, which means we will limit oxygen to the brain, which means we will not be doing our best thinking and that even.

Goes for people who have to drive an Amazon delivery truck all day or standing at a cash register. Um. In a retail environment, how are we practicing movement hygiene so that there's [00:18:00] diversity in movement and that we are allowing people to have some, some agency in, in, in how they're moving. Because when we move, our ideas move.

That's the link there when I talk about thought. I'm not only talking about rational, cognitive, clear decision making, which we want our our leaders to, to have, but how do you get that? You actually get that through what I call back casting and forecasting, and back casting is about reflection. Memory, pausing, metacognition.

Why do we think the way we think about this problem on our team forecasting is about imagination, curiosity. Um, it's about inspiration. Both that casting and forecaster require us to pause and, and that's essential because that actually will sharpen our cognitive, [00:19:00] rational thought. Thought processes and strategic decision making.

And then rest is, I'm not advocating for necessarily about every company should have a nap room in the building. That's not what I'm saying, although that's your work culture. Cool. I'm, I'm really talking about. Thinking about rest, which is different from sleep. Sleep is incorporated in rest. Thinking about micro breaks, scaling it out to what might a sabbatical look like?

So among the people I interviewed, I interviewed people in the tech industry where companies, uh, grant sabbatical, every five years I interview people at nonprofit organizations, not just higher education, where we're accustomed hearing, oh, faculty, they, they get to have. Sabbaticals. No. But nonprofit organizations where they incentivize and, and, and really encourage people to take a sabbatical and encourage is a really an operative word.

They wanna talk about sabbatical because it could be part of the policy. But if it's not [00:20:00] modeled by leaders, people don't take the sabbatical. They fear that they'll go to a slap on the wrist if they do take the sabbatical. So movement, thought and rest is about movement. Hygiene, back casting and forecasting.

Intermittent rest that can be done within one day as well as throughout a year. And I was really interested in what those, what that human-centered operating system looks like for the individual, the team, and the organization. So. And as you know, I really try to practice what I preach in terms of my Wonder Rigor methodology, and so there's a lot of provocation that I seed in the book, but I also offer very practical, tactical ways the rigor for people to begin to exercise these ideas.

So every chapter has reflection questions and exercises for the team, for the organization. For the individual to start to experiment with. But that's the [00:21:00] model. And it's interesting, we've had books that only talk about the role of movement in exercise in an organization in our workday, or only talk about the value of rest, or only talk about the ways we're, we're think we're thinking and our different thought processes.

But to really integrate the three was my goal here.

Anne Green: I noticed that I was thinking of it as the power of three in a way, and the interplay. Um, you know, I know movement's always been important to you, being a dancer back in the day and still today. Dancing, swimming, I know is something you're very committed to.

Open water swimming, which is intense. And I have gotten back into movement. Um, you know, I love yoga. I'm doing strength training, you know. Gyms like Orange Theory and finding that strength again, you know, being in my mid fifties and kind of meeting myself again at this time of life. Right. Which is a very common thing for women of this age.

And one thing I noticed I was reflecting on in the book, I mean, there's so many places I can go from this, but I'll, I'll keep it to one of the questions I'd sent to you [00:22:00] in reflecting on myself over recent years. And just being on my own journey of how can I be the best person and the best leader, because those to me are very connected, right?

Living my values. How do I wanna show up? I've really noticed in my brain activity, if you examine your thoughts and are mindful, my mind has coded various activities, either productive or non-productive. There's a whole host of emotions about myself and my worth or my value, and whether I have a good day or I have earned rest or fun that are deeply tied to whether I have been productive.

Now I'm lucky because certain things like exercise are coded as productive. Cooking. My brain is like, check, check. You're in the green checkbox, not the red side, but I'm trying to decouple this and really interrogate it. Because I don't think that kind of thinking, if you're running on autopilot and you're not interrogating those thought, I don't think they're helpful personally or professionally.

So does this resonate with you in the research you did [00:23:00] and what you reflected on these internal scripts that run tied to these ideas about productivity?

Natalie Nixon: Yeah. It's so interesting. Whenever I have conversations about mood think breast, we inevitably seem to hone in on the rest component. And I think, and I and I, when I think about.

The, the dimension of this operating system that I have to be more intentional about it. For me, it's definitely the rest piece. And what I would say is the shift that and the reframe that I want people to get is that rest is not optional. Rest is not reward, rest. Is integral to doing our best work. Rest is actually risk.

Mitigation rest is actually going to build operational resilience. And we know, uh, we have all sorts of, of case [00:24:00] studies and case stories when we go, go, go, go, go as individuals, as teens, as are just, we miss things, right? We, um, don't do our best thinking. We don't ask the best questions. Um, you know, the Navy Seals famously have ascribed to slow is smooth and smooth is fast, right?

It builds in consistency. So what I want people to understand is, first of all, I love that you called out that self-judgment. We all, I am definitely have to catch myself on and, and to build in a lot more compassion and that com, that that compassion mindset in my view is going to distinguish the best organizations in the future of work, the future of work.

We'll be distinguished by companies that have leadership to practice what I call inside out work [00:25:00] versus just like this outward pushing focus work. The leaders that understand that stories are data too, that yes, the quant. Spreadsheets. The metadata, the, the, all of all the big data is significant. It shows us patterns.

The qualitative dimension of work is going to be increasingly important in a world where basic tasks are increasingly going to be taken over by AI and such. So, so that qualitative dimension of self-compassion, um, will, will be, um. Will be best reflected in, in premier organizations by leaders who show compassion, who show curiosity, who show dimensions of, of frankly transparency and vulnerability, who show that self reflexivity about asking a question such as, you know, that competitor that, that we kind of said we would, we, you know, never wanna.

[00:26:00] We're, we're seeing them as the enemy or, or we, we don't want to do work with them. I started thinking differently about this because something that happened with my, with my kids' soccer team this weekend or something, I read in an article, I wonder. If we might revisit that. Does anyone else think that we might find a way to explore co-opetition instead of competition, but that self reflexivity is an example of that inside out work and it begin.

That's an example of thought, right? That's an example of the type of thinking that I'm talking about. Or we pause, we slow down. Just zoom out. In order to see the bigger picture. Um, so what I really, I really want, you know, people to take away is that the, these are, these are not principles that are additive that are one more thing to do, but they are really, if we play our cards right, and if you read the book and it's.

Tips and techniques, uh, are [00:27:00] totally feasible, um, to really attract and retain the best talent and to have an a plus organization.

Anne Green: Now, you know, there's so many connections I'm making. I always say to my people, our business is a tapestry. 'cause there's so many interwoven threads. And to see it more as a tapestry than all these siloed things that are happening.

Like this is happening here, new business is happening here. But a couple of things we've talked about as well is what is a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset? I'll obviously. Carol Dweck and many others have worked on that. But understanding that there's ways of thinking and seeing and being mindful of interrogating, like, how am I thinking?

Which also relates to things like implicit bias, which we try to understand in the context of say, diversity and equity and belonging. You know, there's so many of these things about stepping back and saying. What is the thought processes that are like, what's, what are the files that are running here and what are they saying to me?

But I, I like the idea too. It requires a bit of emotional intelligence. 'cause this goes right back to, you said it [00:28:00] best in the future, there will be many tasks that we measured as output that will not be necessary for humans to do, but there will be so much more in terms of context and meaning, creation and interpretation and connection and humanity that.

Are critical. And that actually relates to another quote in the book that I vigorously underlined, which is, you said We aren't, and I could not co-sign on this more, we aren't experiencing a tech revolution. We're experiencing a human revolution. So I'd love you to unpack that for me because I am way on that train too, and I'm wondering if some of our thoughts about it are similar.

Natalie Nixon: The reason why I say that we're not in the midst of a tech revolution. We're in the midst of a human revolution is just number one. I I, it's the. The root of that is just my total frustration with our tech crush. I call it our tech and saturated tech crush, where we forgive the, at the end of the day, the technology is a tool.

So, and what is the so what behind that tool? The, the, the, so [00:29:00] what behind the technology and the best of circumstances is that it, it gives us time for spaciousness because we can get the answers so much more quickly. It actually is now. Affording us an opportunity to have that self-awareness, that self-compassion, that self-care.

It affords us the time as leaders to think more critically and more intentionally about the ways that we are leading. It actually opens up opportunities for us to build our creative capacity as organizations, and that really is the so what behind this move? Think rest humans in an operating system. The reason why?

Working in this way is so important is because it begins to seed a capacity for creativity. That means we will be able to consistently innovate and deliver more purpose-driven business results. That's, that's the real reason. The the end, [00:30:00] the the move thing. Rest is a means to, to an end. And that end is building creative capacity, which, you know, I'm really passionate about.

And if we think about some of the most striking. FinTech and EdTech frauds that we have lived through a society recently. You know, whether it's Sam Bateman free or if it's Elizabeth Holmes or if it's, I'm, I'm, I'm lapsing on the name of, there was an EdTech scandal. Um, yeah, where the person, um, fraudulently said that their, that their mailing list, their data list was, was much larger than it was.

In all of those circumstances, if we zoom out, the challenge was number one, there was some FOMO going on. We've gotta, we've gotta reach the finish line first. And number two, no one was pausing to ask a different question to start to critically, uh, reflect on what was being presented to them. And this is just one, these are just [00:31:00] three examples of some really expensive.

Mistakes and moral and ethical dilemmas that begin to reveal themselves when we don't practice a different model of leadership. But, um, that, that, that, that, that human revolution is the opportunity, is an opportunity to behave differently. It's an opportunity to interact differently because of the technology.

So. So shifting, again, reframing and, and thinking about what does all this technology mean for me as a person, as a human. Now, I, I am not a hundred percent rosy colored glasses about the tech. I'm well aware about the ethical challenge of the technology, the sustainability challenges of the technology, the water usage of the technology.

Um. And in the meantime, what are the ways that we can make sure we recenter [00:32:00] humans in this conversation? That's what what I think is very important to do.

Anne Green: I, I couldn't agree more. And it's funny to add to your list of things. I, I find it funny that we're all walking around now having to ask ourselves, will the advent of artificial general intelligence be like an extinction event for our species?

That's why it's so much pressure on us. I think as workers and as people, such a seismic change where it's all on the table. There's like the day to day, well, I have a job, but there's also this like existential thing that you can't just discount. I, I really invite my team and everyone I encounter, you know, I was just at our shared alma mater, um, mentoring sophomores as happens every year, which is an amazing program, but I was really encouraging them to build their AI narrative and their thoughts about it and their hands on and hold both possibilities of ones.

But I said to 'em, look, you know, you have to think of the a hundred thousand foot as well as ground level too, about this. One of the transitions that I wanna make and, [00:33:00] and ask you about this 'cause it's very practical for me. So it's, you know, this is my, my way of getting your advice, Natalie, is that in my field, in the agency world, and there's many kinds of agencies and marketing communications, um, this question of inputs, outputs, impact in my field, as you well know as being a professional services person too.

We measure productivity have tended to, based on a very 20th century model, the billable hour, an hour of a human's time. Therefore, the calculation of our scope of work, our budgets, and ultimately somehow our successes by that cost of human per hour rubric and many forces like AI is one of them, is intensifying a discussion we've been having for a long time, myself and leaders across many firms and consulting as well about.

What is the impact? Can we shift to that? What is the impact? What is the purpose of this project and the value of it, value-based pricing, et cetera, versus just billable time. There's a lot of prognostication that, oh, it's all gonna go to that. It has [00:34:00] to change to that, et cetera. But it's been very hard to make that change because the way the corporate sector's set up and many of our clients are, and procurement and other structures.

Are very, very much set up or and delineated around that kind of conversation around the billable hour and those kind of input output. So what, what do you think about that tension between input, output, impact, and what are you trying to start to advance in the book on this conversation?

Natalie Nixon: Well, the tension that you've just outlined is really pointing out.

The opportunity for systems change, which is, is really painful too, right? Like my, my husband John is an attorney that the entire revenue model for law firms is based on billable hours. And we have this conversation all the time. The shift to value-based pricing means a shift in the sorts of questions that you ask.

So one really good question to start to ask of yourselves and of your clients [00:35:00] is what is at stake? If the work, the impact of our work does not happen. And when you begin to deline delineate what is at stake, um, unintended consequences, the additional costs, if this doesn't happen, you begin to really clearly see the value of the work, which.

Is exceptional, right? It's exceptional because of, of sunk costs, of missed opportunities of, of new sorts of, of awareness and, and new future scenarios that you can point to to start driving your business, which open up new revenue streams. So, so a lot of it is requiring us to ask very different sorts of questions, which is just a very different muscle to use.

So. The value conversation and it's linked to the move, think, rest operating system. The, the connection that I see there is around the value that we're putting on our time, the value that we're putting on the sorts of people that we have around the [00:36:00] table, that there are diverse experiences and perspectives that make sure that we are actually asking different sorts of questions that lead to a different.

Output that lead to a different impact, that lead to different value. Um, the other piece about value is that value allows us to be much more expansive in the way we think about the outcome. Value is allowing us to challenge our assumptions when we, when we say that this work. Equals X, we are assuming that we know exactly what the apple would be and, and that's very comforting, right?

We want to be able to say that in a quantifiable way. I can guarantee X, which in a lot of cases we still can do value though also is is an and a yes and we're also adds to the conversation the additional. [00:37:00] Impact the additional consequences, the additional attributes that can come from the work. And I think that the move, think rest, human-centered operating system is inherently much more values based because it's, it begins to expand the way we think of the human input into, into the work.

Anne Green: I like that suggestion of we have to stop and reframe the question of what is this work for? What are the implications? If it doesn't get done, what is the benefit of saying having an outside party? You know, it's the work we have to now interrogate going forward. What can AI do or platforms, what could do humans uniquely have to do?

So I, I think that's helpful to me in thinking about. How we keep reframing this because we're in the thick of this and we're gonna keep having this conversation, and I do think it's gonna be a both end. I don't think every entity that we work with will suddenly switch to this model. I think the billable hour is quite hard to say goodbye to on many [00:38:00] levels, but if we can start to evolve and sort of shine a light on the path to get there, I think that's gonna be very helpful for our industry.

Natalie Nixon: Billable hours is hard to say goodbye to. 'cause there's an entire system

Anne Green: Yes.

Natalie Nixon: Dependent on it, right? Yes. So we can't get rid of the entire system overnight and maybe we shouldn't. So what are prototypes that you can begin to launch? What is one particular. Client engagement or initiative where you could test out this very different pricing model.

So prototypes are a beautiful thing. They, they, they simultaneously excite. Teams and terrify them. Because prototypes mean that it, you're experimenting. It means that the answer could be, wow, that was a total fail. But what did you learn? You know, I'm from Philly, the home of the Philadelphia Eagles, and our, our quarterback, Jalen Hurt Hurts.

Like, loves to say, there's only winning and learning. There's, he doesn't like that. Paradigm win, fail, win, lose. It's winning and [00:39:00] learning, right? So that's what the prototype, what a prototyping culture begins to acclimate you towards. So think about what is one. Small, low stakes way that we can start to experiment with this.

A very different pricing model. What do we learn from it? What's the feedback? Uh, what's what then can we build on that? And that to me is the way to begin to, um. Address systems change, and we all know that in a system you change one element and there's a cascading effect. So it's not about being totally disruptive.

That's not practical. It doesn't really, that's not feasible. It does, it doesn't really make sense, but, but if you think about what's a prototype, what's the, and, and when I say prototype, sometimes when I work with clients, they go to what I call the Audi version. Before you get to the Audi version, there's a tricycle version, there's a motorcycle version, [00:40:00] let's say Scooter, then there's the Audi, right?

The sedan. Uh, but what's the duct tape? Scra scribble doodle tricycle version of this that you can begin to try. And what do you learn? And then what's the feedback loop that you build on your team with your organization to share out so that there is a lot of input? Because when people feel part of the problem solving process, there are more likely to be vested in the change.

Anne Green: Absolutely, because I have so much family in Philly. And for you, I will say, go birds, that since you evoke the Eagles. I love the prototype piece though. There's actually a client that's very creative that we're working with in a, you know, a, a new model that we talked to 'em about very much what you're saying, kind of saying mixture of human and, um, supported by ai, sped by it, and quality control and saying this may be a more productive way to go forward for both you and us.

Win-win. And there's. You know, actually discount involved in it, but [00:41:00] there's still a sense of the profitability that'll come on our side. So we're in that moment of experimentation. And I think I was talking another episode of this podcast that's gonna come out before yours, and mine does. I interviewed somebody who's a real expert in AI and he, we were talking about how terrible, everyone says upskilling, but no one in our society is committed to doing it.

And he said a lot of it is not to him upskilling, it's updo. Like, just like do the do, get committed, get hands on. And I think some of this requires that bravery to prototype experiment get out of your head space. You know, for me, I, I mentioned earlier, I haven't met a. For of times when I feel I have to keep, it's like my brain is a train and it has to stay on the rails, keep moving forward, and you have to produce, produce, produce.

But there's another metaphor. That's my one metaphor. And, and sometimes you need to be highly controlled. Uh, there's another metaphor. I've always thought about, which is when I allow myself some space, I imagine the brain is like the stone skipping [00:42:00] across the pond. And if you allow your thoughts to, it's like the stone.

Skip, skip, skip. And what I find is that my thoughts will follow a path and I don't even know where they're going. And I'll have to trace the stone, skip. Like how did I get to that thought? Because I'm letting the brain be a little bit free. And I find metaphorically thinking like that helps me to feel where is that expansiveness?

'cause as a CEO, like I have to. Do a lot of do, but I also need time to set back and say, where are we going? Why? What can I offer to our team to make it legible? What, what is the stories or the metaphor? What's our theme for this year? What's the strategy? And I do feel that that sense of sort of taking the shackles off your mind and your body to move and then also to rest.

I think that's why this has resonated so much with me. Does that, does any of those metaphors resonate with you, Natalie?

Natalie Nixon: I think, I love your metaphor of the, the, the skipping a stone through water. I'll give you another [00:43:00] water metaphor. I think it's actually probably much more germane than the train metaphor for the reality of how we work.

I, the reason why metaphors are so powerful is 'cause we are highly visual creatures and we have that. Visual in mind. It helps us to stay on track. It helps us to, uh, anchor ourselves into the why and what you just described. You are allowing yourself as a leader to pause and to self-reflect, to question, you know.

The question, everything from, you know, why do we choose to meet this way? I always go back to the, the OG of organizational artifacts, which is the meeting, the meet. The way we meet is a wonderful place to start. To think through this. Move, think, rest operat system. Think through, uh, how, why don't we, do we have to do a zoom?

Can we walk and talk in person? Can we, can we use the old school, uh, phone and, and do a more oral, oral way of, of, [00:44:00] of working and meeting. But I, the, the, the, the other metaphor that I'd like to seed and I would like to recommend a book that maybe your organization, I hope your organization is interested in.

Reading moves thing rest, but I'm gonna give another book that's been incredibly impactful to me. The other metaphor I think is much more germane to how we lead and how we work is to think about sailing. Now, I don't know how to sail. I'm infatuated with sailing. I love Christopher Cross's. Good old yacht rock song sail.

I, I I. But, but the, the, from what I understand about sailing, you must, there are times where you can just coast, but there are other times where you gotta lean into the wind. There are other times when you have to attack the sail in different ways so that it can catch the wind. It's so rich of metaphor, and I highly recommend.

That you and your leadership team, your entire organization read a great book called, first You Have to Row a Little Boat, [00:45:00] man, I've, I came across this book in like, remember Borders, bookstores. It was either a Borders or a Barnes and Noble in the late 1990s. I was in my late twenties. It was a little, it's a little book.

It's probably only like five by seven in dimension, maybe a little larger than that. Paperback probably was in hardback when I first got it and I devoured the book number one 'cause I always hoped to sail. Still not too late for that, but I, I'm more open water swimming right now. But I loved the rich metaphor for life and how you first have to row a boat before you graduate to as this, I'm sorry, I'm forgetting the author's name, but, um, to, to eventually sail.

But I high, I, I think it's a wonderful. Leadership book. I think it's, um, a wonderful book for right now, um, to understand how to. Here's the, the author is Richard Bode, BODE. Um, but I, I think [00:46:00] sailing and, and using this metaphor of knowing when you have to lean in, when you have to go against waiting, pausing, being cognizant of the environment, man, it's, it's so, such a helpful way to think about teaming, to think about leadership, to think about.

Goal setting to think about movement, thought and rest. Um, so I really, I really recommend that book and that metaphor,

Anne Green: you know, it means so much to me. You said that my father was a sailor. I grew up sailing and years ago, my husband's a musician, which, you know, and we did a cover of Christopher Cross Song Sailing as a present for my father before he died years ago.

And, um, it's just such a precious thing to me, but. The other thing with sailing or being on the water in general is that it reminds you there's things larger of yourself, which is the forces of nature. And we are all being buffeted by the wind right now. Geopolitical [00:47:00] social change. Um. As a leader, I'm spending a lot of time interrogating my own values because I don't like to create hysteria or upset, but I also don't love silence and stuff that I don't feel comfortable with.

And so that idea of monitoring the winds, knowing there's certain times where there's a storm and you gotta pull that sail down and you gotta get to a safe port and you just gotta care for your own people. I mean, there's a million things we could talk about that. So you really speak to my heart when, when you share that, Natalie, I love that.

Um. We talked about the fact that, you know, as we wind down, I, I could just talk to you forever about this stuff and I just love talking to you in general. Um, you end each chapter with a section you call seeds to cultivate. And you noted earlier, you asked tangible questions and exercises that speak to an individual.

It speaks to a team and it speak to the whole organization. And I think that's really material because. People can be good at one thing and not another. Like, you're great at an individual performer, but you're kind of poor leading a team, or you're [00:48:00] wonderful in the team environment, but you're not paying enough attention to the individuals or there's the organization.

And how does it scale? What do you feel about the interplay between those three dimensions and, and what, what do you hope that people do with those seeds to cultivate at the end of each chapter?

Natalie Nixon: I think the interplay is essential and to tole between me as an individual awareness of how I work as a team, how I'm part of the larger ecosystem is a dance.

And it takes practice to get better at that because we all, each of us have a natural inclination of where we feel more comfortable or where we, it's effortless, right At the same time. When we are part of an ecosystem, we're part of a larger organization, we have to build the muscle for each of those concentric circles of.

As an individual, a team, and the organization. And what I hope people will do with the reflection questions, with, with the exercises is, is to use them, is to start a book club, to use them, even if you use it [00:49:00] as a prompt for five minutes at the start of a meeting for a short conversation. I want people to experi.

With this very different way of working that where the pushback can be, man. Are you saying that my people should procrastinate? Are you saying that we should all be pausing? I'm not saying that. I'm actually saying that if you, that, you know, getting back to the, to the reframe question, what's at risk if you don't?

This is risk mitigation. This is a way to set boundaries actually. It's actually a way to make sure that instead of saying work or work, work, work, work, work, which is boundaryless, you are actually integrating boundaries to ensure that your people feel seen and heard, and that they actually do their best work so that they actually have the ability to be creative.

Because I'm a creativity strategist, I, I cannot leave our conversation about dropping a few statistical nuggets that are just a bit [00:50:00] alarming and, and also inspiring. But, you know, the World Economic Forum and their 2023 future job skills report designated creativity, they predicted the creativity would be the number two job skill by 2027 and a year from now.

The first job skill they said was critical thinking. Another report, I think by Market Splash. Said that 72%, maybe I think, or eight 70 to 80% of business leaders believe that creativity is essential for market competitiveness. So we had these two, this great research and these, and this really storied organization saying creativity was really essential for market competitiveness, for leadership.

At the same time. Other research shows that 70% of employees feel that they have no time at all during the year, maybe two times during the year, to exercise their creativity, to demonstrate their creativity, whether they work in a law [00:51:00] firm, a meat packing factory, or in education, right? So there's this gap analysis between saying, yes, creativity is essential at the same time as people not.

Experiencing that they're given the space and time to practice that creativity. The move, think, rest operating system is one on-ramp to help people to do that. It's one way to begin to shift to a leadership model and an organizational culture that. Hopefully, we'll, we'll, we'll position you to become the employer of choice, the workplace of choice, because not only are you generating great product in whatever sector you're in, but you also are a great place to work, and you also allow the con, you are, see, you're designing the conditions for people's best work.

Anne Green: I love that. And I think the idea of the on-ramp, how do we have an on-ramp to create more [00:52:00] space for ourselves for all of these things? And, um, we've kind of gotten in the last 20, 30 years just very much in a box of email, email notification, notification work work and creating that space I think is gonna be really helpful for us, especially, and very apropos and timely given the technology shifts that are happening.

But Natalie is always, it's a delight to see you, a delight to talk to you. For everyone listening, mo think Rest Her new book and Checkout Creativity Leap, I think you're gonna be doing a new edition of that soon. So, um, you know, I can't encourage folks to enough to reach out to you. Thank you for your time.

Natalie Nixon: Thank you for having me, Ann. Always a pleasure.

​[00:00:00]

Aaron Kwittken: If you're using fewer people and you're using AI, shouldn't I pay less? And my answer is, this is like Disney FastPass. So the experience has to be the same or better, but you're paying us because we just let you cut the line and that should have value. And we invested in that ability to allow you to cut the line and eventually everything's gonna be Disney FastPass.

So it's all gonna kind of like level out eventually. Right.

Anne Green: Hello and welcome to another episode of Building Brand Gravity. I'm Anne Green.

Steve Halsey: I'm Steve Halsey and Anne, can you believe we're here at the start of our fourth season of the podcast, some amazing guests over the last four years, and it's exciting to see the conversation we already have lined up for our listeners this year.

Anne Green: Yeah, I couldn't [00:01:00] agree more, Steve, and we have a really great one today. I would actually call it a must listen. For any leader in marketing communications, whether you're agency side or on the corporate side. But before we transition into today's guest, I wanna hear a little bit about what's been on your mind, what's pulling you into its gravity.

Steve, any news or insights that are top of mind for you this week?

Steve Halsey: You know what's been pulling me in into, uh, the gravity this week is really some, some news and some research that was unveiled at Davos by our friends at Page and the Harris Poll, and they're calling it the 2026 Confidence in Business Index, and it's really focused on what does it take for companies to regain credibility in the gen AI area.

And one of the things, and one of the findings that really jumped out to me was the fact that economic impact for everyone, and this was global survey, so economic impact for everyone is now the number one expectation of businesses [00:02:00] globally, but only about a third of people actually believe that companies will deliver on that.

So this is really creating a big gap between expectation and belief, and this is where we're starting to see trust starting to break down in the corporate standpoint. The research also showed something that we've talked a lot about on this podcast, particularly in the last season, that the confidence curve right now is broken.

I have down here, more than 70% of the public says they don't really see or understand what companies are doing on the issues that matter most to them 70%, which means that good work alone isn't enough anymore. That action has to be visible in a way that can be contextualized and is communicated in the way people are finding it.

And that's really where the AI piece came in in the research. One of the most striking shifts is how search and generative AI tools are rapidly [00:03:00] becoming the most trusted source for learning about companies, especially among younger audiences. So the implications of this is huge for the way that brands show up, how they build authority, how they create credibility.

And we're gonna go into that much deeper, uh. And our, one of our upcoming podcasts, we got our friend Rob Jekielek, the Harris Poll. He's gonna come back to unpack those with us and we can talk about what it means for chief communications officers, CMOs, and corporate leaders just trying to navigate trust and technology this year.

Anne Green: I love that Rob is coming back again. Uh, the research, the page. And the Harris Bowl do together is always so insightful. So I'm looking forward to digging into that more soon. I myself have a copy of it. I'm gonna be checking it out in depth. So from my end, it actually, in terms of what, um, has me in its gravity, I'll speak to another piece of research unveiled at Davos.

It's very timely right now as we record in January, the Edelman Trust Barometer, and [00:04:00] I always give them major kudos for creating and sustaining this property for, I think 25 years. I think it's the 25th anniversary. Um, it's super smart and indeed a barometer that shows a lot of change over the years. So this year, um, interestingly aligned with what you just shared, and I have my notes here, they round, um, they sat, found that 70% of those surveyed are unwilling or hesitant to trust.

Someone who has different values, facts, problem solving approaches or cultural background. So that is seven in 10 with what they call an insular mindset. That's the term they used. So that's one. Um, another top line they shared. And you know, this is all available online. Go check it out. I think it's important for anybody in marketing communications to read this survey.

The majority of those surveyed also believe it is a problem that people in their country distrust those with differences. And this is global as well, so much that they actively try to make things worse for one another. That's, [00:05:00] everybody sees this as a problem. And so there's global recognition of the issue here.

Yet interestingly, not a lot of energy for bridging those divides on a personal level. If you go back to the first stat and then the final top finding they touted was that globally all institutions have a mandate. It kind of goes to your question about are people seeing companies doing good? Do they expect it?

What are they expecting? What do they see? But they have a mandate to bridge divides and facilitate trust building. And employers are best positioned to broker trust as they have the best performance scores. Now, you, like me, Steve may remember way back in the wake of the.com days when the top trusted source in the barometer was a person like me.

Remember those days, right? Yep, yep. And this was during the rise of social media and the democratization of connecting with others online. So I find it crazy to see how far we've come and how much both person to person and overall institutional trust has [00:06:00] fallen. And that employers who are the perennial them and the us versus them, workplace binary, are best positioned to build trust.

Steve Halsey: Well, I mean, it's, it's interesting that it, that it keeps coming down to that. But I, but I guess it, I guess it makes sense when you can't trust the other institutions. You really hope that, uh, that the businesses in your community that you work for are the ones that make a difference. So a lot of interesting parallels between those two studies, which means a lot of opportunities, yet a lot of challenges for the communicators out there.

But I think what you're seeing across both of those studies, and, you know, it's, it's in Edelman's title, trust, is that same signal. Trust isn't just eroding, it's just really fragmenting right now. And businesses are increasingly expected to step in where these institutions are falling short. You know, to me, what feels differently now is a sense of urgency between the economic pressure, the AI [00:07:00] disruption, just sheer information overload.

Companies are being judged right now, not just on what they say. On whether people can find, understand, and believe what they're doing. That's fundamentally different communications challenge than it was even a few years ago, which I know you're gonna get into with Aaron.

Anne Green: Yeah. And, and the AI of it all is core to what we're gonna be talking about, but it has a lot to do with society, business trust, et cetera.

So this is definitely a good segue to move on to today's guest. He is a longtime agency leader. We've known him for years, an AI SaaS pioneer in the comms and marketing space, which it very interesting to hear his observations on that. And now he's back on the consultant slash agency side as a senior innovation and AI leader.

Very interesting role that he stepped into. So I'm speaking to the one and only Aaron Kwittken about this critical time in AI enablement for both agencies and corporate side marketing. There's lots and lots to unpack here folks. Lots of good actionable advice [00:08:00] and some hot takes, which I very much enjoyed.

So without further delay. Here is my conversation with Aaron.

Aaron Kwittken: So I'm delighted today to be joined by an old friend in the industry,

Anne Green: Aaron Kwittken. He has been around. Welcome Aaron. We're glad to have you here today.

Aaron Kwittken: Thanks. I think I take issue with old. That's fine. I am. We are.

Anne Green: We're seasoned. We're seasoned.

Aaron

Aaron Kwittken: seasoned.

Anne Green: So for those that don't know, Aaron has had a huge career in the agency side and then also in the platform SaaS side, and now back in the consultant and agency side from launching his own autonomous firm, Kwittken, back in the day after, you know, a number of agency roles, which became I think KWT Global sold that.

Aaron Kwittken: Yeah. Did.

Anne Green: Then launched PRophet, which I think may have the distinction of being the first AI powered SaaS platform in our industry. Is that right Aaron?

Aaron Kwittken: Yep. You got my Venmo. Thank you for saying that. I appreciate it.

Anne Green: Thank you.

Aaron Kwittken: You can flex for me, yes.

Anne Green: Thank you for the prom payment. I appreciate

Aaron Kwittken: that.

Anne Green: Yeah,

Aaron Kwittken: it's painful.

It being first is actually [00:09:00] not good. I learned. And we can talk about why, but, uh, it's extraordinarily painful if you're too soon or too early in something, especially with tech.

Anne Green: Yeah, I mean, being the pioneer, it sounds great, but it, it comes with some knocks and trying to, you know, open that territory that's never been open before in the mindset too.

And now having a very big AI and innovation role at FGS Global, and that's just a few months in. So, you know, welcome again. And I think that what might be interesting to get started, because we're gonna cover a lot of these things, is I've given the stats, right, that you can see on LinkedIn, but tell me about the arc of your journey.

Why moving, first of all, that entrepreneurial spirit to launch your own firm, but then that even deeper entrepreneurial spirit to break new ground, like you said, te, tell us a little bit about how you interpret that arc.

Aaron Kwittken: Yeah, I mean, I've been in the business for more than 30 years. I guess I'm going in my 33rd year.

Started off in Public Affairs in Crisis in DC back in the early nineties. [00:10:00] And it's interesting when you start in crisis, especially if you're an adrenaline junkie, it's not quite like the pit, but it's a little bit like the pit for pr. You, you just kinda get hooked on it, right? And if you start from the perspective of how do I stop a reporter, um, or try to neutralize our journalist from writing something or balance something, it puts everything in perspective.

It's actually easier to then be proactive when you're pitching. So like many of us, I came from that, that earned media world. Um, and uh, you know, I always wanted to start my own agency. So, you know, I really learned quite a bit from others. Every large agency you can think of from starting at what's now, MS&L was Manning Selvage & Lee all the way through, um, to GCI group. And I've had some incredible mentors along the way, which I just wanted to mention because. Without real humans, and I hope that number goes away. None of us can grow, none of us can be enriched. And then sadly, going back to the age thing, um, you know, as we get older, sometimes we, we lose some of our mentors as well, and [00:11:00] it, it actually helps you reflect and appreciate what you have.

So yeah, I started my own agency actually, almost exactly 20 years ago, a little more than 20 years ago. And, um, anybody who wants to start an agency, never name it after yourself because you soon realize every email that goes out has your name on it. Um, and not everybody necessarily is good, right? You're gonna have good mediocre and you're gonna make some mistakes.

So anyhow, we did change it to KWT Global. Um, I ended up just having my own thing for like five years. I sold it to a company called MDC Partners. Uh, and the reason why I sold it, this is important so quickly, is because back in 2010. Uh, social, uh, and digital. We weren't calling 'em influencers yet, was kind of on the rise.

And if you recall, there was like this fight between kind of the ad and creative shops and then the PR shops who's gonna own social. And because PR agencies, firms are so resilient and we are so agile, I, I'd like to say that we won, we pretty much won. Um, and I think it was easier for us because we saw, uh, a front of the house [00:12:00] opportunity to monetize social and to grow our practices and really be like the, the, the, the pointy end of that spear for integration, right?

Integrated campaigns. And, uh, we're actually at that moment again now, but this time it's called AI and it's both front and back of the house. Um, and I'll talk a little bit about why it's more complicated. So, you know, I stayed at the agency, which most people don't for a number of years after selling it all the way up through, um, in my agency role until 2021.

Uh, and we grew it, we scaled it. It was amazing. Um, we embedded ourselves originally inside of a creative shop on purpose, um, because we wanted to be a little non-linear in how we're thinking. My background is B2B and corporate, and that was called Kirshenbaum & Bond. And, um, back in 2019, I was kind of ready to leave MDC, admittedly, and also publicly was having a lot of problems, liquidity.

And long story short is they ended up merging with Stagwell, which was founded by a guy named Mark Penn. Um, I was ready to leave Mark's like, "Hmm, hang out, you know, we need. Um, some [00:13:00] bright minds." Uh, I don't know who he was talking about at the time. And, uh, to stick around and, you know, ultimately what Stagwell's mantra was, how do we transform, how do they transform marketing through technology?

So I was kind of intrigued by that. And at the time I'd been working with a company called Dataminr. Dataminr, um, is now, I guess 15, 16 years old. I think they were really the OG around. Mm-hmm. Triangulating social media feeds to validate what was happening in the digital world, in the physical world through digital feeds, uh, but the un being kind of their main, uh, client and then public sector, financial services and media organizations.

Uh, and they originally were actually, uh, 10% owned by Twitter now X. Um, and, uh, I learned and met all these people who are like these brilliant data scientists that are doing this thing called ai. This is back in 2016, 2017. And I'd always thought in the back of my mind, because there's so much repeatability, uh, to what we do.

When you, when you think about ai and its, and its core promise of, you know, learning, um, and [00:14:00] especially repeatable things, looking back, look ahead and, and kind of recommendation engines, stakeholders, journalists in particular kind of follow patterns. Why can't we look back at past coverage, predict future interests?

So, um, in, I was, uh, you know, I decided to stay and, uh, I was lucky enough to have Stagwell invest in a company that we called PRophet. Um, and it was back in 2019. So pre COVID, uh, you know, um, and, uh, pre-Chat GPT, which came about in 2022. And we built prototypes. And it was, not only was it hard building it as somebody who had nothing to, didn't know any about anything about coding and UX and UI and user stories and data science and whatnot, but it was very hard to sell into a market that, uh, was by, by, by design.

We as PR people were skeptical or cynical or trained to find fault. All the good things, especially you're a crisis person. Um, I'm inherently a pathological optimist. Um, and I had a couple of, and, and actually your firm was [00:15:00] one later on, uh, some really great early users. Uh, P&G was one of them and helped us kind of grow it.

And it wasn't that headwind that we had didn't turn into a tailwind until chat GPT came into the market. Even though we weren't doing generative, we're doing predictive AI. You know, how do I know which stakeholder's gonna, um, be interested in my narrative? We then made generative part of it. How do I make that narrative more interesting?

So the stakeholder engaged in my content, and, um, the reason why I did it is because in 2019, 2020, I had this holy shit, real deep existential moment where I literally thought, I absolutely believed that we were facing the beginning of extinction, or at least major transformation as agency people, because I thought AI had the power to fully commodify.

What we do, or at least up to 80% of it. And that people who are always nipping at our heels are competitors that aren't real our, our day-to-day competitors, but consultancies and ad agencies, in particular media [00:16:00] shops, they would use this to further commoditize what we do and then kind of creep into our scope.

So I thought it was gonna be very DIY, I thought SaaS was gonna take over, and it did for a small while. And then I realized, um, having competed against, you know, Meltwater and Muck Rack incision, these people are just salespeople. Um, at the end of the day, um, the technologies that I was using. Would eventually be accessible and ubiquitous and available to all of us.

And the major moment over the last year that I think shifted the power from SaaS to service to us the consultants, is ag agentic and the ag agentic revolution. And the fact that the unit cost of actually building infrastructure, whether you're gonna, you know, roll the dice and use deeps seek from China or a different LLM, it's all gonna come down.

And you don't have to be a technologist necessarily, or a developer or coder anymore to be able to build AI into your workflow. And actually, instead of having a username and password for decisions and MuckRack [00:17:00] and Meltwater and I don't know, um, you know, peak metrics and blackbirds of the world. Um, we're, we're, you're either gonna be buying their agent and it's gonna live in your work environment, or you're gonna be buying data from them.

It's either API or agent. It's no longer gonna be username and password. That's all gonna go away. Um, and you're gonna see this precipitous kind of reckoning, um, when it comes to pr, SaaS platforms. They're either gonna get bought, they're gonna get shut down, um, or they're gonna change their business models.

Um, so I joined FGS Global five months ago 'cause I saw a great opportunity to work with, I think some of the brightest minds when it comes to high stake stakeholder comms, right? Uh, lobbying public policy, government relations, crisis m and a. Um, you know, um, you, you name it. It's kind of that the farm. No consumer, it's all, you know, uh, corporate B2B globally.

Um, and, and they had already started building, uh, their own model back in 2023. They call it Fergus now. We call it Fergus, but nobody knew about it because it's not, it's not kind of in our genetics [00:18:00] to like peacock, like a large agency would. Um, so the opportunity was to continue to build that out, make it agentic, and also build point solutions with our developers, uh, which I think is another shift you're gonna see inside of firms, the right firms who can, who can afford it, who can think about it.

Um, you know, our, our business is gonna change, where we're also gonna be developing point solutions and hiring, uh, people who do have data and technology backgrounds for our clients in addition to communications programs and counseling and, and whatnot. So, I'll, I'll stop there because there's probably a lot there to unpack, but that's kind of the journey.

So I basically. Thought that it was going one way and I realized quickly, oh shit, I need to make a big U-turn. And who better to u-turn with than FGS, which is also backed by one of the world's largest PE firms. KKR.

Anne Green: Yeah, it's, there's so much there. And, and it's really interesting to hear, you know, that vision shifting over time and what your assumptions are, but also willing to make a bet behind it.

One thing I wanted to [00:19:00] backtrack too, 'cause there is a lot to unpack there. I love, I love hearing the story 'cause I was watching you from a distance for some of this and then got to know you a little bit better later. 'cause I'm a, I'm over 30 years in this game too, on the agency side. So watching with great interest is when you go back to media, your skin looks a

Aaron Kwittken: lot better than mine though.

You're, you're, you glow. I do not.

Anne Green: It's the light. You know, we've, we've got, it's the light. We've got, we've got, uh, stuff that helps us here. Yeah. You gotta, you gotta have your podcast situation going as you know.

Aaron Kwittken: Yeah.

Anne Green: But I, I think what's interesting about you reflecting on the social media moment, 'cause I've been spending a lot of time thinking about that moment of disruptive change, and it was even prior to social media.

It's really about writing to the web, that moment of WordPress and Typepad where you didn't need to know HTML code. I mean, that was really the first thing versus today, but. Talking about what's the competitive step, who's gonna own something quote unquote. And I think one thing that's been very interesting about our field versus some of the other companion groups within marketing, and obviously a lot of our firms are very integrated now, is we've [00:20:00] always been in a multi-stakeholder mindset.

And that was really critical for organic social and paid social to see all the stakeholders, the full corporate narrative, the ways in which that shifts, depending on the audience, versus a more of a campaign mindset where it's like, well, we're gonna do this thing at this time to this one audience. And I, I've been thinking about that today too, because the AI of it all.

And, and all the pieces that will peel back in this conversation. You know, like you said, where is the data sets that are most relevant that help you create things? You know, what, where are those audiences? What are those channels? How discovery is changing. I think it's a huge moment for us. And like you, I've been spending time asking myself, how existential is this?

I think it's pretty existential, but it's also then like you, that's why I wanted to talk today. What is that advantage we can have and how do we think about things like Htic and others in ways that are gonna be productive moving forward? So it is interesting to, to hear that trajectory to start, you know?

Aaron Kwittken: Yeah. No, [00:21:00] no, I, I agree.

Anne Green: A little while ago when you and I were talking, maybe like two years ago or something, you talked a lot about the bets PRophet was making on predictive ai and then the rise of generative. With chat GPT and at the time, um, and this is a while ago now, you were very much like there's a real difference here.

Predictive is more of the thing and we need to spend more time. And that generative obviously blotted out the sun because it's like a magic trick. But to me it was indicative of the fact, and you've heard me talk about this, that there's such a flattening of AI and such a lack of precision and speaking about it and what are we talking about?

So when you think about different types of artificial intelligence and machine learning, how are you thinking about that today?

Aaron Kwittken: Uh, I feel better about the generative in part, again, going back to agentic. And the reason why is because the reason why generative was so, was so sloppy and, and created so much slop and blotted out the sun.

I love that. I'm like, I'm gonna have to steal that.

Steve Halsey: Yeah.

Aaron Kwittken: Um, at first this was like a weird kind of magic trick type thing where everybody was [00:22:00] like, wow. There was like novel. Uh, and then we're very curious. But then not many people really converted. They're still kind of playing around with it. I think this is the year of enterprise ai.

I think this is the year of, uh, ROI, if anything. Finally. And, um, I even have a chart that I've started in 2022 that I have not changed that would show that this is the year and this is the year just saying. Um, but uh, I think because agentic was just pulling from LLMs and also if you remember, backdated web material.

Anne Green: Yes, very much so. I mean, that was very outta date. It's quite different now, you know?

Aaron Kwittken: Yeah. It's so different. And the reason why I was hallucinating is because there were so many voids, right? But because you can now deploy agents to go out and get multiple sources across the entire web, not just from one LLM, but to potentially seven or eight LLMs and different sources.

And you can even wait, Hey, put more weight on BBC, or Factiva, or S&P or [00:23:00] AlphaSense, right? You can wait them now because you can do that. You have less hallucination, you have the greater fidelity of your data and greater facts. Right? Greater validation of what you're doing. Um, and because you have memory and reasoning, now it's learning Anne Green, after you use it enough, it is literally learning how Anne Green thinks.

It's going to eventually be like, I know what Anne's gonna ask next. It's kinda like that spouse who's you've been married to for 30 years. She's not next to me right now, but she was earlier. You know, they know like you can actually have the conversation back and forth. It's gonna be like that. Right? And you know, for us at FGS, we built this platform where eventually, I was just on a firm wide call yesterday and I said, this is your second screen.

If we all work in two screens, Fergus is your second screen. And the fact that you can actually talk to this agent and give it six or seven different things as opposed to one thing by one thing, and it's gonna actually go back and forth and then it does its thing while you do other things. That [00:24:00] is.

That's not incremental. That's, that is I think, the single greatest, um, development and probably the most consequential that we've seen since the invention or the, the, uh, at least the, um, the mainstreaming of chat. GPTI

Anne Green: could not agree more. And I think what's interesting is. It's a mental switch too, for people.

Right. So I've always said that to me, and I'm interested in your point of view on this too. I think one of the biggest challenges of adoption and upskilling, first of all, as a society, we talk about upskilling all the time. We do a terrible job at it. We don't really invest in it at all. I mean, it's Asra Kline talks about this.

Many people talk about it, right? So we can say upskilling, but what does that mean? But I think one of the biggest challenges I'm seeing right now to adoption on a broader level, and I'm talking about like within an agency environment or a client environment, et cetera, is, um, just people being able to interrupt their own workflow and sort of thinking about things in a new way and asking themselves, is there a new way to [00:25:00] do this?

And this idea of using it as, I like the idea of a second screen. I wrote that down. I'll steal that from you in terms of a constant thought partner and a constant generator. And asking multiple things and letting it churn on it and go back to it again and again. So to me it's that issue of the human saying, I've done this, especially for those that have been in the business for a while.

I've done it this way for a while. How do you even think to interrupt yourself and what are the, the repetitions or the frequencies or the examples or those moment of exposure or I've been using the old mobile term, what's the killer app that gets you excited? Right? What do you see right now? Like, what does that bring up for you in terms of where the drag is and you know, what is it that turns that light on for people to recognize and also like, get hands on with it the way you're talking about it as that second screen.

Aaron Kwittken: This sounds very dated, I'm sure, but I like to operate on the fear greed continuum. People operate mostly out of fear or greed or g fear,

Anne Green: greed. Uh,

Aaron Kwittken: [00:26:00] yeah. It's, it, it's, it's real though. It's, it's very human. It's very humanistic. What I've experienced more recently is I've been tapping into greed. Um, so, you know, how can you grow your revenue faster than your headcount?

Um, how can you, um, better utilize your associates' time, um, to actually, uh, train them like you, to be critical thinkers and strategists and problem solvers versus just doing mundane research and tasks and things like that, right? So I think that if you can at least create the ROI for people, especially senior people, but even more junior people, I mean, if you're talking to a more junior person, um, these are skills that they need to have, that have to be native and, and, and, and innate, right?

Um, you know, and then the fear thing really, um, I think we're past that, but I'm not entirely [00:27:00] sure we're past that. Um, I think we were there for a while. I don't call it upskilling anymore, just so you know, because I a hundred percent agree with you. Uh, I call it updo. Updo means just fucking do it. Just start playing around and it stop whining.

And by the way, you know, if you really wanna force it, you don't get it. It's part of your performance review, right? It's part, uh, it's part of your compensation review. Um, it is, uh, very much part of our apprenticeship program. Like if AI and workflow optimization needs to be as much a, uh, carrier for culture as every, all of your other values that you have or don't have, or say you have inside of your firm or your department inside of a brand.

Um, so for us, you know, we look at adoption, we look at usage, um, and we look at first weekly average users. And that's very generous. By the way, once a week. [00:28:00] How many times, and then we're moving to daily. Right. But I think if you really want to, you know, you have to, you have to have carrot and stick. Um, uh, sometimes it's kind of like parenting in some ways.

Like, you know, uh, you don't know what you're missing. You don't know what's good for you. If you're trying to get them, you know, try new food, whatever. You can wait for them to learn on their own, but you might have to accelerate it. And sure, the world is terrible at upskilling and professional development.

I think agencies in general are horrible at it. I'm no better having run, having built my own, run my own. I'm always like, yes, we're gonna focus on professional development. Then it's like, oh, we've got this client thing. Oh, we have this new business pitch. Oh, I, you know, they're taking a vacation. All, all three really good important things.

Professional development o always falls the to the flow. So instead of just, you know, develop people, you know, as you go, um, don't, and, and of course, you know, we have office hours, so. Um, we allow people every week we have multiple times a week where we have technologists and then people from [00:29:00] our AI and innovation team just dial into a team just like this.

And, uh, you know, I wish it was just dead air and I could reclaim that hour or two back. Actually, I'm glad I don't. People just dial in, they ask us anything, their AMAs basically. And, um, and it really, and some people wanna just do one-on-one, but we also just kind of invite people because the more and more kind of schools or structure we do, we'll do roadshows with offices and things like that.

But really it's just about, um, forcing it on the review and compensation side and just getting people and, and, and it making sure also that senior people, when they're asking for new hires, you have to push on them and say, okay, but explain to me how you are actually, uh, servicing and staffing your business on the, on the, and this goes, this is true also internally.

And how are you using technology to better optimize what you're doing?

Anne Green: Yeah, and you'd said it earlier, back of house and front of house. I mean, it's, it's, it's going to touch all areas of our business for sure.

Aaron Kwittken: Yeah. And, and the reason why I say [00:30:00] back in front is because historically comms people are really good at front of the house opportunities.

It's just who we are. We're really bad at the details about the back of the house. Very few of us are good operators or like care about the back of the house, the pipes and the plumbing, and we're like, eh, and we like kinda leave it, right? It's a little messy. Now we have to care about both and that's uncomfortable for a lot of us in this business.

Anne Green: Well, yeah, especially data integrity, data storage structure. You know where it's coming from, how you're pulling from it, or else it's not. I mean, last year we spent a lot of time working on that just so we could maximize what we can actually do in this new world. But, but you're right. It's not sexy, but it's really, really critical to getting rubber on the road here I think.

Aaron Kwittken: Totally, totally.

Anne Green: So you said something that I enjoyed, which is naming things that you have a little chart that you've named. So, um, I think it's important sometimes for our teams, especially with a change as big as this and I have a lot of compassion for whelming. This can feel, especially with the big workforce discussion out in the world, it [00:31:00] just feels very overwhelming.

And, and the AGI of it all, like having to have a portion of your brain wondering if Sam Altman's gonna find like artificial general intelligence that's gonna turn to this topic. Like that's not the easiest thing for people, but we try to make it legible year to year, you know, so we call 2024 the year of AI exploration.

2025 year of AI enablement and this year we're calling it AI Standardization and acceleration. So part of our job is to create what we're calling standard operating procedures or SOPs for different types of accounts. So if you're standing up this type of account, whether it's marketing or earns media, et cetera, you should be running these types of agents, these kinds of workflow standard.

This is how the younger people are orchestrators of it. And we're deep in that process now, and I think it's gonna be really helpful. But you know, as you look at 2026, you said just a minute ago that is this the moment of enterprise AI is the moment of of ROI. So yet, tell me what you think is [00:32:00] this year for both agencies and corporates and what's the make or break right now for you, Aaron, in the next 12 months

Aaron Kwittken: on the agency side?

Uh, we'll start there. Um, I think that agencies have to decide. I, I don't know what. What you guys are doing. I can tell you that we went the path of, you know, building our own platform and then having it sit on multiple models. So that requires having, you know, uh, we have a labs division and there are 50 to 60 developers, front end background, ui, ux, you know, qa, uh, data scientists, all, and, and we had to build kind of infrastructure.

That same team also builds point solutions for clients. They pay for themselves, honestly. Um, but still, uh, they, their large, their large, uh, role in this world is contribution margin. It's optimizing our workforce and making us do things faster, better, um, better, faster. And, um, the make or break for me [00:33:00] actually is making sure that, 'cause we're very.

Um, disclosed very transparent with our clients when we use our systems, 'cause we use our systems for everything. And the make or break for me is the moment that a client comes to us, and this goes for everybody. It's cold comfort and says, well, if you're using fewer people and you're using ai, shouldn't I pay less?

And my answer is, um, this is like Disney FastPass. So the experience has to be the same or better, but you're paying us because we just let you cut the line and that should have value. And we invested in that ability to make, to allow you to cut the line. Um, and eventually everything's gonna be Disney FastPass.

So it's all gonna kind of like level out eventually, right? But why in the world were clients paying us or anybody by the hour to do things to take a long way? So the make or break is moving from hourly to fixed fee from outputs to outcomes. That's the make or break, whether we like it or not. That is where it's going.[00:34:00]

And instead of waiting for it to come, we need to get out ahead of it. And that's definitely what we're doing. I think a lot of firms are doing the same thing. It still requires people enter their time, by the way, it doesn't mean time entry 'cause you still have to know where they're spending their time.

You need to know your cost basis. But what's really fascinating for me is then figuring out, um, you're able to now actually put of value on the agents that are working alongside of your colleagues to help them be better and faster at what they do. So that's the make or break. I think it's interesting that some larger firms like Weber for example, they're, they're probably like, they had a holy shit moment, I'm sure you know, and they're part of this big, mega, mega thing, right?

Mm-hmm. Now the IPG on the come thing right now just on Theum and they're like, holy shit Nick, what do we do? And they're like, we're just going to, I think it's an easy way out. I don't think it's the best way out. We're just gonna partner with Google and we're just gonna have Google do everything. That's great, except that you know, Google's not native to your business and it still requires a lot of work on their part because they're not purpose built for pr.

Um, [00:35:00] and, uh, it's only one model. It's Gemini, which is by the way, a great fucking model, but it's just one model. The best agencies, well, sorry, the agencies that are gonna optimize AI the best, I should say in the best way, we're going to sit on top of multiple models, be ag agentic, move to fixed fee, um, that is very make or break and hold the line when it comes to pricing, because I could feel procurement breathing down our necks right now.

I could, I, I know it's gonna happen. I know it because that's their job and it's misinformed and misguided. So it's becoming upon us to empower our clients. And then the other, the second make or break is what, how will companies use this and what will they decide to keep in-house versus, uh, send out of house to us?

So we like to whine about media monitoring, right? It's annoying, but we still make money on it. Um, whether or not we're it's AI enabled or human enabled, or it has to be a little bit of both. But, you know, if you're, you know, head of comms for a [00:36:00] big corporate Caterpillar just making, using the example, they're not a client, right?

Can I say them? I'm just making them up. Um, uh, you know, does it make sense to just, you know, do that in-house and hire, you know, have a, a young person just manage it for you instead of five people doing it at an agency, whatever, it would be less. So there are certain things that. There might be take back moments that come out of our scope, which might be perfectly fine.

There are also other moments where, um, you know, if I'm a brand, I'm like, yeah, I don't really wanna build this myself anyway. There's certain things, uh, that my company's gonna be doing that I'm gonna probably be plugging into 'cause I have to deal with it now. Um, and that takes a long time and it doesn't really know our business so that they're gonna be slowed down by it, which is our opportunity to say, actually let us do this for you.

We'll optimize it. Um, and we'll be able to work faster for you. So that's gonna be a make or break. I don't know where, where we're headed. It's gonna be a little bit of a mixed bag. And on the client side, I don't, I, they're not quite there yet. They're not ahead of us yet. But [00:37:00] if we don't continue to move fast and at least have these open discussions with them, they're gonna, the conversation isn't gonna be, you know, we're looking at a different agency or sometimes we just need a change.

Um, or, you know, we're gonna go into review. Actually, the competition could be. We're gonna, we're gonna take this in-house right now. They've said that before, but now they might have more impetus to say that that might be the mandate inside. I just don't know. That is kind of a scary moment.

Anne Green: Yeah, and I think that that is something we all need to be thinking about really seriously, because I do see a lot of corporate teams, you know, really digging in and making progress.

You and I, and, and our peers are circulating in similar venues and talking to CMOs and CCOs and I, I do think that this question of the internal activation where there's legal, regulatory, it, there's a lot of layers there. But I really liked what you said, Erin, about. How can you be, how can you build a structure, however you approach it, that's a bit agnostic about which models you're gonna use?

You know, one of the things you and I have [00:38:00] both seen, and you know this from the SaaS side too, is whenever there's new developments and technology and platforms, the pricing is challenging. You know, for agencies over time, they're expensive. There's a proliferation of competitors. You know, there tends to be an arm race around dollars.

And for some reason that doesn't usually lower the price point in our sector. I don't, I don't understand how supply and demand work in our sector, but it's, it's challenging. And so then you have this proliferation of models, which do you access? How are you paying for them? And I think it's been very interesting for both client side.

Agency side. And then you have the ones like the Microsoft environment that's more protected, but is it advanced? As advanced as some of the others. And it's been exciting to see, you know, you talked about coding earlier, you see Claude code and you see what the seismic impact that's making where you hear the incredible results around Gemini three, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So I think this question of how do we [00:39:00] as business owners and leaders, um, and you know, you've and I've sat in similar seats, how do you figure out, position yourself to take advantage of the best data out there in the best way? And that does come back to this HN tech question. So you've been doing some great writing, you've got a newsletter on LinkedIn.

You know, I've been checking out some of your pieces and one of the things you talked about is your new agentic colleagues are here. That was one of your 2026 predictions. We've all been talking about agents and agentic AI for a while now, but it sounds like you're feeling really bullish that this is the year that we're gonna see.

Leaps forward there. And how are you thinking about that? You know, maybe dig into that a little bit more.

Aaron Kwittken: Well, uh, I think about it in a couple ways. I, I'm, I'm, I've been thinking a little bit about what makes us different when we're sitting with a client. Um, I was sitting with a very large global healthcare company not long ago, and, um, the clients are now, now have people at the table who aren't just, you know, public affairs or [00:40:00] crisis, but there, there, there are software engineers sitting now in the room and, uh, if nobody's experienced that yet, then I'd like to know how and why and what world you're living in.

But that's never happened. I'm only starting to see that happen the last year, year and a half now that I'm back in the, the game on the consulting side. Um, to me, that gives me a lot of comfort. I have no problem with them in the room. I prefer them in the room. Um, because the, 'cause the, the conversation always goes back to data.

Um, and where are you ingesting your data and how can it backstop your instinct? Um, so the what I, the, the, the asks I'm seeing and we're getting are, you know, we're big corporate, we can't move so quickly overnight because of all the restraints that you just talked about, right? Uh, we've worked inside a Microsoft environment.

We have these IT people, we, the InfoSec people, whatever. But, um, can you help us with, with the right permissioning, take all this data that we're, that's coming in and make sense of it, not in some stupid [00:41:00] PowerPoint where you have a designer, but literally build an ID graph, ingest all this data, and then give us the ability to slice and dice it, look at it different ways to help inform our comm strategy.

Um, to me that's super exciting. I think that's where consultants can be very powerful, but it does require an investment in technologists or tech partner. So if you're a smaller firm. And you don't wanna hire people who do that. You need to partner with another firm that's a technology firm and like do some sort of revenue split.

And I think that's fine. That's what I would've done if I was a smaller agency. Um, and, and the moat for us, all of us, uh, just agencies is what I call adoption velocity. It is not the technology itself because it's becoming pretty ubiquitous and pretty accessible. It's how quickly are you adopting it and deploying it?

How are you staying on it? Um, you know, there are, there's, [00:42:00] there are agents that you can put into your environment, agents that will help you with, you know, GEO or a IO, whatever you wanna call it. I call it GEO. There are agents that you can build for around threat detection that are different than media monitoring.

Um, and, uh, it's okay if you have a dependency on an outside company for that agent. That's okay. The real value is how you deploy it and integrate it into your workflow. And your spend might actually be the same as what it was before, but it's different. It's just not username and password. It's controlled in your environment and you're directing it.

So, um, I think what we're looking at is making sure it's seamless and frictionless and it truly is inside of your environment as opposed to having to have to, to log into six or seven different apps or websites to get what you need. Um, so that's what I mean by that. The second screen, everything should be there for you.

Um, and then, um, how do you deploy that [00:43:00] for a client or how do you build that for a client? Um, and I think that we need to start thinking like a little bit more like an Accenture. Uh, the agencies of the future are ones that are both service, but also we can actually build things like Accenture can build things.

You actually need to start having, uh, real engineers, software engineers on staff or through a partnership.

Anne Green: Yeah, I think you make some good points there. I mean, you talked in your predictions article that you put out recently about. What does it mean to move from an emerging technology to a fundamental infrastructure?

And I do think that, if I'm interpreting it right, is very key to what you're saying. That it becomes that. We've been talking about Steve Halsey, one of my partners has talked about he is the metaphor of corporate narrative as an operating system. You know, where, and, and I think this idea, idea of an operating system, understanding where the data's coming from, what you can do with it, what channels you're using, what the, what the audience mixes, what you're trying to do with it.

I think the other piece is also where the council and the true expertise of humans comes in on [00:44:00] top of that to interpret and share. But when you talk about fundamental infrastructure, am I interpreting that right? When I, when I hear you discussing this, this change that's happening?

Aaron Kwittken: You, you, you are hearing me.

Absolutely right. And, um, four or five years ago, I, I didn't even know what age agentic was. I didn't know that this was coming. I didn't think it was possible. Um. And we know we can threat, we can thank, uh, Anthropic or Claude or Anthropic really for it because they created the MCP protocol. They created literally the pipes that allow all these apps and everybody to kind of exchange information with each other.

It's pretty incredible. I just didn't see it coming. Um, what I, what I don't know, and it doesn't keep me up at night because it also kind of excites me, is what's that next aha moment? So we saw GEO, uh, we saw agents, we saw GEO because that has to do with discoverability. We care about how our clients show up, right?

That's part of our job and showing up right in the right places. [00:45:00] Um, we, you and I talked about this offline a little bit because I don't have an answer for it. I hate to address things. I don't have an answer for at least thoughts on

that.

Anne Green: I, I think it's fun to do that right now at this moment. So go for

Aaron Kwittken: it.

Well, let's do it. So, um, data visualization. AI data visualization that is out of our control and what that means for brands and reputation. So again, they keep coming back to Gemini. Gemini is the first, but not the only, uh, the rest are gonna follow. Where now, search queries, they're gonna start building charts and graphics and doing like these little infographics around your search query, which basically could replace a website.

Um, so will people, people aren't gonna go to websites anymore. There certainly aren't, but it doesn't mean you don't need it. 'cause this needs to be your single source of truth. And then how does that rank ahead of, or at least alongside of a Reddit or Wikipedia, which also indexes very high across LLMs.

So it's going to help, it's gonna force us all to rethink what's the value of a website? Where does design that we own, sit [00:46:00] inside the world of reputation and brand and narratives and and whatnot. And, um, how do we take control or at least participate. That conversation with these LLMs to make sure they're representing us in a way that maintains our integrity.

Right. I, I don't have an answer yet. I, I, I, I'm not sure I know yet. Um, but that is like scary. Uh, no one's talking about it. No one's really talking about it in the way that we're talking about it right now.

Anne Green: Yeah. I, I feel like it's an emerging discussion, but I'm hearing it more and tell me if you feel this is true, you hear it more on the side of sort of, um, zero click search and traffic Armageddon for publishers and what this will mean, and then how can Cloud Flare help and et cetera, et cetera, and how do we get them to pay?

And now we're seeing the announcement that chat GPT will start to include advertising or some, somewhere, I forget where the, or is it Gemini? One of them. I mean this is coming obviously [00:47:00] OpenAI 'cause they're looking for monies, looking for the business model. So, but I, I do think is sort of, um. A lot of times I feel in these conversations it feels like an existential loop or the snake is eating its tail because they need content to ingest, to continue to evolve and to just to operate in the way they do today.

The LLMs and everything that is come is cascading off of them. That content needs to be out on the web largely. There's, they've, they've pulled in all the other corpus of data that they probably can at this point. Maybe then if you have a situation where the websites are star of the journalists that write for them, et cetera, et cetera, not every journalist can support them.

So I'm, I'm going down the journalist route as one example. So, right. Not every journalist can support themselves on a substack. So does this start to degrade that web environment? Are you left with only corporate sites? I mean that the implications of this spin off in a lot of different ways and it's really interesting to contemplate, even if we [00:48:00] don't really have the crystal ball right now to know which way it's gonna go.

Aaron Kwittken: Well and, uh, you know, if, if, if. News consumption, even online is on the decline. And social and news influencers are on the rise, and most people get their information from TikTok X, Reddit, uh, YouTube is all post literate Postscript world. Um, and that's where the audience is, that's where the LMS are gonna pull from.

Not necessarily high authority news outlets, even though LLM seemed to favor journalistic content, but we don't really know if that's true. Um, it is a little bit of the wilds right now. Uh, and it reminds me back to the days of the internet when the internet was just starting and then internet was a bubble.

It burst, but it didn't go away. This is gonna burst too. This will crack, but it's not gonna go away. This is here forever. Forever.

Anne Green: And I think too, that when we, people think back to those days of the.com bubble, those who weren't sort of there plenty, plenty of us were. Forget that it's not the internet that bursts it's [00:49:00] pets.com, you know, it's, it's entities that did not have.

The business to match the speculative valuation. And there's plenty of that example here right now, but this idea of, um, what is it training on and what does that mean for, and, and, you know, I try to say to everybody too, we're getting a little philosophical here, but I invite everyone always to think about this on multiple levels.

There's the ground level, you know, your daily use, et cetera. There's that middle level, which is workflow transformation, and how are we changing business models. But the a hundred thousand foot level is what does it mean to be human? What is happening to our society? How does this net positive or net negative?

And that, that's a much bigger picture. I think actually this is a good time to bring humans back into the discussion here. I, I really appreciated in one of your pieces, there's a header, humans Powered by Machines. It's definitely my vibe. That's what I seek to see. Um, and I really do believe that we have to have a vision for the future and decide how we're gonna drive to it.

Um, not just because, oh, that'd be good [00:50:00] for us, but because we have a real. Vision and a bet we wanna make. But you talked about betting on a different future, I've gotta hear one word. Technology, ables and amplifies human expertise rather attempting to replace it. And you would talk about, you know, what is that human corpus of like knowledge and expertise and, and, and like you said, training the pipeline of younger people on how to be those orchestrators and experts and grow supported by that technology backbone and that operating system.

But, you know, what do you see as, as the path we need to take to keep the human in balance with the machine and, and have it be supported by that intelligence not taken over by it entirely?

Aaron Kwittken: I think, um, there, there's this weird, isn't it called the Javins principle? I can't remember, but this law where actually, uh, anytime you introduce a new technology, it actually helps elevate humans.

And, um, if anything in this world, I think that our time as consultants is gonna be [00:51:00] valued at a higher rate. Than ever before. Um, I think where I worry and what you touch on again, second time I don't have an answer for this, is the way we were kind of raised in this business is through mirroring good, good and bad behavior.

Like we saw everything, but, um, we, we definitely learned by doing. And sometimes we were just kind of literally per verbally thrown into the water, thrown off the deep end. And, um, I worry about the shortcuts that AI will enable for young people. And, um, some people will call that upskilling. It's not actually, uh, it's enablement and it is, um, it's, it's kind of like, you know, driving your kid to school every day when they could walk and then they don't really know what the school is when they have to, when you're not there.

Um, because, you know, they've been so, they're so co you know, so dependent. I mean, I mean, most kids don't know how to read a map because they have ways or Google maps, whereas we had. Physical maps. I used to remember going on AAA and having to like, [00:52:00] um, actually I had to call them to send me, what are those called?

Trip things, whatever. And then somebody,

 

Anne Green: yeah, they would do a little, they would create one for you. It was physical. You talked to them to get it done.

Aaron Kwittken: They would come in the mail and they did used this thing, a highlighter, and they literally highlighted how you would drive from Jacksonville, Florida to Buffalo, New York.

Right. And you would either pull over, you would look at it, or your person next to you would tell, tell you where to go. So, um, I I, I, I do wonder what learning is like, if is, is it, it's definitely not the same. Is it as powerful and does it give you the same level of critical thinking that scar tissue is important?

AI does not create scar tissue, um, that you need in order to be a good counselor. 'cause you don't have that expertise. Or you might have fleeting expertise, but you don't have the experience. So how do we create those experiences for people that we learned in an analog world that now has an increase and become a digital world?

I just don't know. I'm not sure.

Um, I haven't figured that out and that, that worries me. That scares me.

Anne Green: I think it's the [00:53:00] essential question, and it's coming up all the time. I just did some mentoring at my alma mater this weekend for sophomores. It's an annual program I've done for like nine years and so many questions about AI and what that entry level is gonna be and what, what does it look like to be a younger person?

And I do talk about the fact of like multiple tools. And it's not just the LLMs, it's our whole tech stack. You know, how we look at AI embedded in all the kinds of tools we use. Creative tools are a great example. Adobe Firefly, that's, that's an obvious one, right? That's supercharging creative teams. But how do you become the orchestrator of many things?

But I think one thing, and I love your idea of upskilling versus enablement. I just wrote that down 'cause it's a really good question. I think to take it one step farther. In in the, what you're wrestling with? 'cause I am too is this question of, yes, I have this vision of helping all of our generations of people be orchestrators of technology and allow those to go out, create tasks and like take workflows, et [00:54:00] cetera, et cetera.

Everything we're talking about. However, there comes a point where a human needs to look at it and say, is this good or is this garbage? Or is this somewhere in between? And does this, like for example, our agency does a lot of work in very complex industries. Agriculture is one of them. Like our creative team and our, you know, what we call market communicators, you know the, the Comm sci folks, they can look at row crops like corn and they understand whether that row is correct, how it's sewn, its stage of growing, if there's a certain kind of blight or pester disease, et cetera, et cetera.

Now, over time, AI will get better at that, but. If you, and that's just one very specific example, but there's also, you talked about crisis comms, those, those years you spent in the trenches as a younger person going through it with the more senior people in the firm and the clients and you hone your instinct and your knowledge by watching it go down.[00:55:00]

And so, you know, when we're bringing people in, I think we have to be really attentive to mentoring and a lot of storytelling and a lot of explaining so that they can then take their own discernment and look at a product that's come through an hn, took workflow and be able to judge and say, wow, this is great in these five dimensions, but these other four, they need to be adjusted more.

I mean, do you resonate with what I'm saying here, Aaron?

Aaron Kwittken: The area that's probably hallowed ground that ai, at least in the next three, four years, cannot. Place or replace is in crisis comms because there's so, there's so much variability when, when you, I just think back, you know, when you get that call from a reporter that says, you know, start with, you know, a source tells me, or I hear whatever.

AI can't tell you whether or not you're falling into a trap. And that actually if you comment, you're giving them the story. Whereas if you don't comment on the record, they might not have a story. So here's [00:56:00] kind of like the cat and mouse game. You need to play with that reporter. AI can't tell you that my experience of 30 years of having been there, done that, getting burned, having some success, that's what's gonna tell me how to do it.

And that that, that to me, uh, is a great example of experience that can't be replicated. Um, on the other hand, there are, especially let's say even in the m and a world, um, most m and a transactions are repeatable. Um, they're more similar than they're different with the exception of some content that's different that actually.

Can be, um, you know, uh, put into a little bit of an operating system, a communications operating system, uh, where, uh, a lot of it can be done for you. Um, you're still orchestrating, like you said, but there's not as much kind of back and forth unless of course you have an activist shareholder that's different, that it becomes more of a crisis m and a situation, right?

So I still think there are co we have to define as an industry, what are those places that [00:57:00] still require lobbying, networking, access, um, influence. Um, all those things I think are still very much human endeavors. Even media training and coaching. Yes, I can create a synthetic audience now. I still need to look.

Uh, I could, I still need to. Oversee and guide what that q and A is. I still need to coach that person. You know, we, early days, I partnered with a, um, and they've gotten a little bit of, uh, a little bit of, uh. Actually, I can name them, it's fine. Usually, they've gotten, um, a little bit of attention and traction in the market.

I think they partner with Weber and others. And then of course all these big agencies rebrand stuff, but they say it's theirs, you know? Um, sonar is, is not, um, really built by Burson. I know who's behind Sonar. It's all, you know, might label stuff and I have no problem saying that. Um, Uley is really cool, but it doesn't replace the need for a counselor and a senior [00:58:00] advisor to media train someone and doesn't catch everything.

Um, and it doesn't catch if you repeat it a negative necessarily. It, it's, it's, it's not, still not good at nuance and things like that. So it's an interesting starter starting point. Um, it's great for sales, but like we, you still need us, I guess is my point. I guess I'm blathering on, but you know what I mean, we're still very important.

Anne Green: Yeah, no, I agree. So this has been an amazing conversation just to put a capper on it. I love to hear. A little speed round. What's your advice for both sides of the house? First agency leaders and second, the corporate side?

Aaron Kwittken: Well, uh, I'm gonna start the second, um, on the corporate side. Um, I think you need to find a way to work outside of it, but be friends of it, because that's gonna be your biggest gating factors is to success around AI optimization.

And outside of that, lean on a really smart, uh, technology forward, technology powered [00:59:00] agency partner or firm partner who can help you with, you know, what your, you know, your discoverability issues on the web. Um, figuring out how you can, um, harden your threat intelligence capabilities and, uh, reach hard to reach audiences, not just gen pop audiences, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Um, and that, that's my advice there over time. Um, you will need to probably hire your own tech person to deal with it so you can get what you actually want. Otherwise, you're going to be subject to the generic kind of AI optimization operating system that everybody else in the company uses. That's, and, and we are, we are special.

We need to be fit for purpose. We, we can't fit into just the general ai ai optimization system inside of our corporate environment. We're different. Um, on the agency side. It depends on your size and, and your, I guess your, your, um, your constitution, your, your level for, uh, your appetite for, for [01:00:00] investment.

Um, I think it's important if you can't hire people who have technology backgrounds. Um, and not, I don't mean just hiring people who are like in data and analytics and insights. Those are important people to have. And hopefully if you don't have them, you should. I mean, people who have developer type backgrounds, people who can build things, you only need really one person and then they can contract out to other firms around the world.

There's so many talented people. It's especially nice to be able to support people who are in, uh, countries that have conflict like Ukraine. They're incredible programmers there who need work. Um, they're happy to. So you need to have at least that one person. And then, um, either a partner with a tech, tech firm or ha partner contractors.

Every firm should have its own, uh, communications operating system, whatever your, your partner calls it. Um, for us, we call it Fergus. Um, and then you have to decide what is it that's most important in an operating system. Is it content generation? Is it your thought partner? [01:01:00] Uh, is it to, is it, do you want it to be more predictive?

Do you want it to be generative? It depends on your business. And where those pain points are. You can start with pain points and then work from work from there.

Anne Green: This is great, great advice. Really practical. I mean, definitely a lot of food for thought. I think we're both on the same page. That 2026 is a critical year for our industry.

It's for the whole industry, both sides of the house. But um, I am excited you talked to us today, Aaron. I love having gotten to know you over the years and I love picking your brain on this kind of stuff. So thank you for being a guest today on Building Brand Gravity. I really appreciate it.

Aaron Kwittken: Well, I appreciate you having me on, and I, I value our friendship just as, just as much.

And, uh, I can't wait to be on a panel with you again. I think we need to have our own event, our own special event.

Anne Green: I Please, hey, world, you've heard it. Ask us back. Yeah, we, we have a good, uh,

Aaron Kwittken: with good lighting F with good lighting,

Anne Green: exactly. All right. Thank you, Aaron.

Aaron Kwittken: Thanks, [01:02:00] Anne.

Anne Green: [00:00:00] I will say lean hard into the human aspects of this transformation, and in doing so, be open. Encourage your teams to speak about and hold the paradox of AI upsides and downsides that exist simultaneously. And I think that speaking to the nuances and the realities here is more likely to help catalyze change than.

Sweeping all that complexity and the stuff that's inconvenient under the rug.

Hello and welcome back to Building Brand Gravity. I'm Anne Green.

Steve Halsey: I'm Steve Halsey.

Anne Green: Steve, happy 2026. It's January

Steve Halsey: already, already. The new year is upon us with excitement and I guess for some maybe a little trepidation,

Anne Green: I am still reeling at how fast 2025 went. That was somehow the longest and shortest year that I've experienced in a long time, but it is January.

And predictions are [00:01:00] everywhere, and we wouldn't be good podcasters if we didn't have our own. So I think we have to get into it today.

Steve Halsey: Yeah, I think you know what we should do today is let's start with each of our predictions, but rather than going through them one by one, by one by one. Maybe we can, uh, can spend a little time talking about the broader trends and the things that are impacting that drove us each to come up with those predictions and really talk about how they're shaping the way that brands operate, communicate, and even the way leaders need to lead here in 2026.

Anne Green: Yeah, and as you and I were comparing notes before this recording and sharing our personal predictions, we each came up with six of them interestingly. So that's a nice parallel. Um, some really clear through lines emerged and the five of them were AI surprise, um, trust pressure. People and also something close to our heart, Steve narrative.

So it's exciting. We can unpack these piece by piece. So I'll start and let me [00:02:00] give you my six without a lot of detail. I'll just give you the top line and then I know you can do the same, Steve. So my first one's going to be AI standardization. And also acceleration. We talked about 2024 is the year of AI exploration.

We dubbed it this year, or 2025. It actually been the year of ai, um, acceleration, and now we're getting into AI standardization. So that'll be okay. I have to, we're gonna have to cut that. Let me do that part again. We dubbed 2024 as the year of AI exploration. 2025 was the year of AI enablement, and now we're getting into AI standardization and acceleration.

My second one is going to be intensifying stressors on the healthcare sector. No surprise, not the only sector under stress, but a big one. My next one is an interesting one that I've started to see pop up, which is rehiring. Which we'll talk about that more a little bit later. Another is [00:03:00] GLP-1s shaping and reshaping literally everything.

A very interesting and exciting topic. My fifth is a pair, cyber and slop. And by the way, slop is the Merriam Webster word of the year for 2025. And then the final one for me is the rise of the counselor.

Steve Halsey: Well, that's a, that's a really interesting, uh, list that you have there. And, uh, you know, I think for me it really captures kind of both the human and system pressures that we're seeing that so many organizations are feeling right now.

But I also think there's some really interesting things in there, like the rehiring, the. You know, there are some really good signs of a positive movement as we come into 2026 that, that I think are, are good to make sure we capture and talk about. So here's my list. My first one is this idea that corporate narrative becomes an operating system.

So I'm excited to get into that one GEO and narrative intelligence move from nice [00:04:00] to have to absolute, must have to any well-managed corporation. Here's a new one I'm coining this year: The trust crisis of synthetic reality. What is reality? What isn't? It just gets harder and harder every year. The compressed news cycle is really forcing us to be always on.

Volatility as we're seeing every day in the news remains a baseline, and recovery is uneven across industry. But I also think 2026 is the year where we see a significant shift in even more external influencers becoming core to the go-to market strategy for B2B companies. So those are my six.

Anne Green: I love those.

There's so much good stuff in there. You know, so much of that, Steve, comes back to the idea of trust and also coherence. In an AI mediated world, I, you heard me in 2025, Steve and our other colleagues have heard me talk about making things legible. Are they readable? Can you tell what they are? So there's tons of, um, to unpack here.

So [00:05:00] as we said, instead of going one by one, we're gonna kind of use these 12 predictions as anchors for these key themes. And the first theme we wanna talk about, we're calling it the pressure stack. Which is volatility. Yeah. Pressure. A couple good songs on that front. Some uh, Bowie, some Billy Joel. But the volatility and the sector stress and also the pace of change.

And the intensity of that pace. I mean, the, the way I would think of one of my anchors here, and I mentioned it 'cause it's one of my trends, is the stressors on the overall healthcare system. I think healthcare is a real leading indicator for many parts of our. Society and systems and other industry sectors, it affects everyone.

It has a massive workforce. It has huge interdependencies. It's very linked between the private and public sector, and it's massively impacted by economic pressures, demographic change, just income inequity, everything that we see. And it's also incredibly impacted by technology and advancements. So. [00:06:00] There is not all negative stuff here, but I will say that that sector, I work in that sector a great deal.

We have clients in that sector across many different aspects of the sector, so that's something that's top of mind for me when you talk about the pressure right now.

Steve Halsey: Well, and and, and, and particularly when you think of that, that's also one industry that you have such the overlay of personal emotion.

About yourself, about your loved one, about your, about your friends, um, and, and that, that stress we're seeing play out huge, huge in healthcare, but we're also seeing it, I think, across a lot of other industries. I think as we look ahead at 2026. Recovery is gonna be uneven. I mean, you have industries like healthcare where again, a lot of these different groups are actively competing and trying to restructure what everything looks like.

But in other sectors, we're seeing a lot of uneven recovery. And even where we're seeing rebounds, there's still regulatory uncertainty, geopolitical shocks are happening on a daily basis, [00:07:00] and really AI disruption in terms of what can be and what's going forward. Is really making this environment tough to really know what clarity exists, how to be consistent, like you said, all that stuff, like you said, is just multiple pressure points stacking up at once.

Anne Green: Yeah, it, it is not one big disruption. It's that multiplicity. And I think one thing we've talked about an earlier podcast, one of my quotes was. The fact that humans have a hard time holding paradox and multiple things in our head at one time, and we have to create certainty where we can. But it's not easy.

And that, that's, that's a leadership pressure for sure. But it goes all the way down the chain. So that, that's a good one. I like that first theme, Steve.

Steve Halsey: Nice, simple and easy. The the, the next one I wanna, I wanna talk about, and I, I kind of teed it up there, is the trust crisis of, uh, synthetic reality really hit me the other day when I was just scrolling through my thieves and all of a sudden this thing popped up that says, Hey, [00:08:00] record 22nd of your voice.

Pick any song and you'll sing it. Pitch perfect, "Bohemian Rhapsody", whichever, whichever one you wanna do, do. And it just struck me that at that moment, it used to be deep fakes. Took a lot of effort, took a lot of, lot of, lot of time, took a lot of, uh, of knowhow. But now with the AI tools, being able to create videos, music, videos, all this stuff, once it becomes mainstream, at what point.

Do you know what's real and what doesn't and what isn't? What isn't real? So, so to me, I think that is going to be a huge, huge challenge for us as we think about all this synthetic audio video identity that's just out there in the mainstream. How do companies manage that?

Anne Green: I, I like that idea of synthetic reality.

'cause in some ways this is going to be our reality living in that. What comes to mind for me under this? This anchor of [00:09:00] trust in the synthetic sloppy world is the two sides of the coin, which is cyber. The incredible threats. That are happening on the cybersecurity front with ai, you know, fueling it at scale.

But on the other side, just the proliferation of what people are calling AI slop, which is an ever changing entity in one person's slop, is another person's, you know, Sistine Chapel. I guess maybe not that extreme, but it, it's very much in the eye of the beholder. And I would say like most things humans create, it can be great and it can be awful.

And that's why I do think we have to hold these two things in our hands at one time and in our minds at one time. I think what's most salient to our. Business, our sector, and all of our clients is how that synthetic reality is reshaping and polluting the signals that they try to use to understand their audiences.

So for example, if you look at some of the big news stories on the social side, from 2025, let's say the Cracker Barrel [00:10:00] logo. There was so much media coverage of this outrage on social media, ascribing reality that, oh, these are the customers of Cracker Barrel, or a portion of them who are so angry. What turned out being the case once there was forensic sort of cyber analysis.

It's not that hard to do now. Is that a huge portion of that social traffic was not real. It was bot networks, it was fake, it was AI driven, and there's a lot of social engineering at the societal level happening. There's a lot of outside parties that would like to get. America is just one example. This is happening all over the world.

Get us very riled up. And think that we are the strident voices. We are angry at each other. We are tearing each other down, and that's not always the case. And so whether you're looking at the engagement metrics and what are your customers actually feeling and getting more instrument with them to really know, not just looking at the social channels or organic social.

But also what is the data you're using to look at the effectiveness of your digital ad [00:11:00] campaigns? How much of that, those clicks and engagement is real, and how much is synthetic? So I mean, those are the things that come to mind for me, and they're very top of mind for our clients.

Steve Halsey: And you've got, you've got so much integration of this synthetic world into, uh, into different feeds.

Uh, TikTok, Instagram, things like that. It looks really real that, hey, when you save the bear cub on the side of the road, grizzly mama's gonna come up and give you a hug. I don't think in reality, if you tried that in Yellowstone, that would, uh, would quite work that way. But it's interesting to me that. In some ways, you know, there there's almost celebration with these tools of the synthetic imaginary world we can create.

But the challenge for us as communicators is how do you then prove trust in this world? Right? Because you're not really telling story anymore, you're trying to prove what's real and, and we'll get into that in a little bit. I think that's where it really becomes to. You can't just communicate at one point in time about something.

It's gotta [00:12:00] be that consistency. So you're actually generating authenticity through. That kind of, uh, kind of consistency is something that we're gonna need to think about. You know, and that's also one of the reasons, one of the trends I threw out there was, I think external influencers are going to become even more important in B2B.

And, you know, we've, we've used. What we dubbed influencers for decades. You know, those would be the scientists, the university researcher, you know, the third party expert. But I think, I think what we're seeing, even with the shift that we were talking about earlier, about just how everything's instantaneous and lives in the feed.

In B2B marketing, leveraging more and more this year influencers for really adding that authenticity and becoming more of a go-to discipline. I thought this was interesting. I saw recently in Fortune that this year 75% of enterprise B2B [00:13:00] companies. Plan to increase their budget for influencer relations engagement, uh, particularly around subject matter experts, third party voices.

So I think that's kind of interesting here in, um, an AI powered discovery environment. Buyers are relying on more and more external validations and just trying to find different ways to get into their feed, even in really complex B2B sale. I, I've just found that fascinating.

Anne Green: I, I think it makes total sense.

I'm not, I mean, that's a huge stat. I guess I'm not totally surprised, but it's exciting to hear, and in some ways, as we talked about in a more synthetically created reality, different types of influencers, whether it's the ones you write, Steve, in the communication setting, and in many of the works we've done, we've done this for years.

Whether it's those types of influencers or ones that. Have created a following in different online channels or social channels. There's a sense that they've created trust with their audience and the audience knows who they are and they, [00:14:00] there's a sense of familiarity and, and I, I also feel this ties very tightly to something we're seeing strongly in our sector and in our kind of business, which I'm calling the rise of the counselor.

We need. In this world today to really know who has true expertise. Where do you seek that expertise? And frankly, the AI of it all, and using AI as a thought partner, as a force multiplier and enabler, it's augmenting that intelligence. It's those who have sector expertise and have seen a bit. And you know, it can come at at many different ages, but especially those that have been seasoned in their field.

You know, that level can become quite supercharged by technology today. And we see both, um, within our clients and also between agencies and clients that need of the counselor to show that human expertise as a stabilizer and as a filter, a cultivator, an assessor powered by technology. 'cause the noisy [00:15:00] systems, those trusted perspectives and voices start to matter a lot more.

Steve Halsey: And you, you and I are hearing though that hearing that a lot in all the conversations we're having, even just. How the, uh, agency client relationship is, is changing a bit based on that, that need for that counselor. It's no longer, Hey, I need you to help put together the strategy and let's do a quarterly check-in.

Now it's just with a pace of change and all those stacking pressures, you know, how do you make sure you've got access to more senior council on a more regular basis? And that's, that's really is changing some of the, some of the dynamics, um, in terms of. How we staff, how we interact with our corporate clients.

I mean, what, what's, what's kinda your perspective on this shift and how it's gonna shape out over the course of this year?

Anne Green: Yeah. I, I, I just feel that we need to empower all the levels within an agency environment to really use technology and the knowledge that surrounds us. One of our strengths is we have [00:16:00] multi-generational workforce that's learning in all directions all the time, mentoring, cultivating, and so in that way.

Helping folks leverage technology to become stronger, faster, smarter, quicker to become orchestrators of many different tools, agents, knowledge bases, and then raise that up to sort the wheat from the chaff along with the council for maybe more senior people. I think that's going to be, say, professional services in our sector looks like going forward.

To me, the AI piece brings us to our next theme, which is AI grows up or under pressure, and I just wanna put the pin in the fact that I do need to hear you singing Bohemian Rhapsody at some point, like all the parts. So if that was AI generated, then I think we may need to put a link in the show notes, but we'll, we'll see if we can get that out of Steve later.

Um, but the AI grows up piece I'd said earlier. We had informally dubbed for our own team because again, making it legible, knowledgeable, understandable that 2024 was [00:17:00] about exploration, 2025 was about enablement. We've dubbed this coming year, the year of standardization and acceleration, meaning. What are the standard operating procedures for, in our context, any given type of client, what are the types of agents prompts, the knowledge base that should just be standard?

How are we using AI to onboard, do all the different things and how are we using it at a ground operational level as well as a very high level thought partner? So that's the standardization piece. That standard operating procedure, that's something we're talking about a lot and I'm hearing. That in many different conversations I'm having and I'm evangelizing it, and I'll talk about this more later about the human side of this transformation.

'cause I got a real soapbox on this one. But with the standardization, the other piece I'm seeing about AI growing up under pressure before, you know, you jump into this anchor theme, Steve, is this question of. 2025 was a year where a lot of companies cut a lot of jobs, [00:18:00] and in some cases the rationale was very tied to AI and AI efficiency.

At the same time, there was a lot of discussion about the fact that the real ROI of AI was still yet to come. And I'm not throwing shade here. I'm just trying to figure out what is actually happening, because you and I have both been having deep conversations with this, with pretty much anyone we can, and my hypothesis here is that there was a lot of cutting that had to take place anyway.

Yes, AI is a part of it. But it's not the only part. And in some cases, I think there was an over indexing on the narrative that it was ai because in many cases we're not seeing the implementation of AI throughout enterprise organizations to the point yet where agents are truly replacing humans if they ever should.

Right. Um, so my sense may be, and I'm just gonna put a stake in the ground here, that we may see some rehiring in certain sectors for, for cuts that were made too deep. Where AI can't pick up the slack yet, knowing full well [00:19:00] that many of these companies have said all along, look, we're going to be trimming, but we're also gonna be shifting roles and hiring at the same time.

So, you know, let's watch those trends. I think we may see more about. The movement of jobs and rehiring than we will about, oh, this, we're cutting 'cause of ai. But I, I don't know. What's, what is this AI grows up piece signaling for you?

Steve Halsey: Well, I, I, I think it, it's interesting with, with disruption, everybody e even those in Silicon Valley at the Edge everybody's just working through this at, nobody really knows, uh, knows what, what the end game is.

So when I think about something like rehiring, I think that's all part of the learning process, right. Rehiring isn't really a failure of ai, so to speak. I think it's a sign that humans were removed before the systems were really ready to, to leverage 'em. And so when I'm thinking about the real gap as it relates to ai, it's, it isn't who is using it, but who is using it with discip.

Right. And [00:20:00] getting back to what we were just talking about a few minutes ago about the senior counselors, that's where it's so critical as to who is training your model and how are you constantly putting in your ip. 'cause that's when you can leverage it across the full generations of your workforce and really, really tailor it to something that, that creates value.

So, so that's kind of, kind of, kind of my take on it. And you and I were talking the uh, uh. The other day and you, you referenced a, a Fortune article you saw, which, which I thought just captured exactly what you were talking about on the spend of AI versus just humans.

Anne Green: Deloitte, this is hot off the press, um, like right at the end of December.

So it's really quite fresh still as we record this in early January that, um, Deloitte came out and their CTO was saying that they have research that says 93% of spend on AI transformation. I'm sure they surveyed, uh, they always survey [00:21:00] tons and tons of enterprises, you know, and, and c-suite or tech leaders.

So 93% of the spend in AI transformation is on technology, and 7% of the spend is on the people side of it, which I think is deeply problematic and that's certainly what they're. Deloitte, CTO was saying. And I, I think you look at that and that is a stark stat and needs to shift. And I, I'm gonna have a soapbox on that at the end of, of our podcast today, when we talk about one shift, leaders can make

Steve Halsey: Well, and, and what I, what I thought was interesting that, that struck, struck me about that article was, um.

You know, I always like a, like a good anecdote. And in that it was, it was he, he compared it to basically trying to make paella and ending up only with cilantro. You know, you've got all the ingredients, but none of the recipes. So how does it come through? And I just. To me, I just think that's a really powerful reminder that technology alone doesn't transform business leaders, like you [00:22:00] just said, have to invest in that human side of it.

Training, process, redesign, culture evolution. 'cause without that balance, even the best models or even the best computer chips aren't gonna deliver meaningful impact. So I think getting back to what you were talking about with rehiring and those types of things, I think that's what, what. Business in general across all sectors is trying to figure out.

What is that new operating system going to be and look like? Which bridges me to actually, which was my first prediction, which is basically we're sitting in a world right now where content is infinite, right? Narrative really is becoming that both a constraint and an advantage. So in 2026, I think. As I talk about narrative as an operating system, I mean, we need to move beyond just messaging a campaign to really think about how do we align leadership, culture, AI output, crisis [00:23:00] preparation and posture, market presence.

How do you use all those to create a narrative spine that is always on? Because before a human even curates something, it's constantly being curated by ai.

Anne Green: Yeah, it's, it's interesting, this idea is corporate narrative is an operating system. It reminds me of conversations we've had in past podcast episodes about how comms or corporate affairs is structured in different organizations.

So you both have speed, agility, knowledge of the business units, but also you have a very strong center of gravity that's agile can pivot, has access to leadership. So that corporate narrative remains solid and repeatable. I remember hearing from, you know, a friend who runs another agency, leaders are repeaters.

Um, another thing it reminds me of is, um, our conversation on the podcast last December with Benjamin Thiele-Long, who wrote an incredible book about the unified skillset of public speaking and interviewing and your presence, and how do all of these things [00:24:00] create a narrative coherence. I think in sometimes like training or the narrative, it's been largely located at the most senior levels and more episodic in how it's trained.

And maybe it's episodic in how that narrative is updated. But truly, and I, I think you see this, you know, we talked earlier about sort of Verizon being restructured under Dan Schulman and bringing corporate affairs back together. And he talked about that brand, the importance of, um, that through line. So the idea of narrative coherence.

Is more important than ever in all the voices that are bringing it forward. So yeah, I, I resonate with that a ton.

Steve Halsey: I like that narrative, narrative coherence. So I guess as we kinda wrap this section, it's almost like. AI doesn't really create clarity. The organizations have to have to bring that. And it's not always easy.

Anne Green: No, it's, it isn't. And you know, I'll talk again about the people stuff, but to me the people are equally as important as the technology. Clearly the technology is striking, but we don't have 7 billion books [00:25:00] about change management written because the people piece is unimportant. It's, it's literally the most important piece.

So. Um, our last anchor theme we're calling cross sector signals that Leaders can't ignore. And one that I've been hearing a ton about that I find very, very fascinating is the impact of a drug. GLP-1s. We have all heard about them, they've exploded onto the scene. It's funny in some ways. They're not as big as maybe the AI revolution, but if you think about how chat GPT sprung onto the scene, it had been around for quite a while, this kind of machine learning moving into their attempts to create these large language models.

But there was a moment when that certain model of chat GPT changed everything. Same thing with GLP-1s. We've had diabetes drugs, they've been researching them. They've seen some of their impact, but suddenly. The move and it was Novo Nordis with Ozempic. Although Eli Lilly has really taken the poll position now, um, in the [00:26:00] sector, it exploded on the scene and it's reshaping everything.

And the reason I was thinking about this is, you know, a group that we continue to do work with pwc, um, I'm, I'm citing all the big four today. Um, Ali Furman, who's head of their consumer markets that she and Paul Lineal just wrote a piece in HBR in in last October, and they were talking about how GLP-1s are across sector phenomenon.

So if you think about impact not just in the healthcare space, and that could reduce spending through reduced comorbidities and better health, especially if it spreads beyond. Just weight and obesity into heart disease or other, even addiction. I mean, there's so many as form factors change. Is there a weekly pill?

Is there a annual injection? All of these things are gonna be explored, but PWC was charting the impact on grocery spend decline if the main purchaser is on one of the GLP-1s. Apparel spending increases fitness and wellness, [00:27:00] spending shifts, travel shifts, restaurant patterns, less quick service, more.

Full service. Just I, I think I had to respect. The massive cross sector change that not just AI is making, but GLP-1s and how many people in the financial sector and others are talking about this as one of the big trends. So again, that to me is a great example of cross sector signals. What do you take away from all this and what, what's on your mind in this theme?

Steve Halsey: Well, on that one, I've been surprised how much I've heard that conversation in spaces I didn't expect logistics company actually talking about how that's fundamentally changing things. And I, I guess when I think about the, the GLP-1 impact, I'm, I'm just reminded of the saying. Disruption doesn't stay in its lane, right?

So you're seeing it with something like a medicine like GLP-1s. We're definitely seeing it with things like ai and we're kind of seeing the framework that if your [00:28:00] story only works in one sector, you may be a little bit too niche for what may be what may be coming. Because the interconnectivity of everything in these industries that, I mean.

Think about how quickly that story about GLP-1 changed, right? Five years ago it would've been medication. The medication would've worked. So these would've all happened in like a sequential series of storytelling versus boom, it's everybody everywhere. Trying to think about what is the real. Financial impact as well as the, the, the health impact on those, those individuals.

So to me that's where this whole idea of narrative becoming the, the connective tissue and in a lot of ways, being prepared to respond to things that you otherwise wouldn't have anticipated coming. Because in the past it had been said as well, this is a healthcare issue. This isn't a grocery retail issue.

Anne Green: It kind of is this example, to bring it back to your idea of connective tissue, we we're having a lot of [00:29:00] metaphors around narrative because I think it's just so powerful and, and helping us create systems of thinking about how do, how do we respond to this? But I guess I was summarizing it, GLP-1 show, what does it mean to stay in your lane?

You know, as, as a company, as a sector, as a topic, as a theme, it's hard to think that there's. In some cases there may be, but there the lanes are much more interconnected and there's a lot more shifting and moving between them in a world where everything is so interconnected and I think it's actually really fun and exciting to think about this new challenge.

Not easy, but you're right. When something that might've sat purely in the healthcare pharma. HCP healthcare provider setting, insurance payers, like the, the purview of that world becomes, you know, something that logistics in the cold supply chain has to worry about. That, that, that shows you that the matrix is ever more interconnected.

Steve Halsey: [00:30:00] Well, I'm gonna be really interesting to see how, uh, how these predictions played out, uh, for those listeners of the show. You'll remember at the start of 2025, we gave our predictions and we revisited those, uh, uh, midway point of the year. And, uh, we were remarkably on track. So we will, we will see whether our predictions for 2026, uh, hold up and what other exciting things, uh, come down the pipe.

As we're working our way through 2026. So I guess as we get ready to wrap this predictions episode, and I think we really need to think about what do we need to tell the leaders that we're working with and our peers? You know, if you have one big leadership shift lesson that you wanna talk about for 2026, what advice do you have for our listeners?

Anne Green: Yeah. And check back in June. We'll be accountable June or July about our predictions. We, we love to check in, but, so one shift. It was great. I love [00:31:00] that you challenged me to think about this. Um, so I wanna get back a little bit of my soapbox. I don't throw rocks in glass houses. This is hard, what I'm gonna talk about, but I, I, I think it's important.

I wanna encourage leaders. To embrace the recognition that AI enablement and transformation is as much about people as it is about technology. People are talking about this, but I don't know that the depth and importance of it is really embraced. And that Deloitte quote, about 93% on tech, 7% on people, if that's at all true, if that's even within a 10% margin of error, we are in trouble societally, I feel, because, um, it's not just the question of upskilling.

I, I think upskilling is something we're sadly quite poor at in the United States and other nations. We talk about the need for it a lot, but I see very little will or energy or hard dollars put against it at a truly macro level. So we've, we've run into this before, say the globalization craze that close a lot of factories and plants, [00:32:00] so much talk about.

Relocating jobs and upskilling. Very little of it done. So that's a piece of it. But the bigger thing I'm thinking about is the urgent need to shift mindsets and understand the cultural and personal psychological impacts of this kind of rapid change around ai. In particular, it's both filled with potential and excitement, but it's also tied to really intense dialogues around workforce loss, around massive societal shifts, around a lot of consequences.

We'd like to avoid. I'm hearing some very nuanced discussions around water uses and energy uses, but these things are hard. So our people who are trying to get to embrace these technologies and our organizations as a whole, we know we only change as much as our people change with us, you can only evangelize from the top so much because you need everybody throughout the organism to change.

So. If people are not allowed to be holding both of these complexities [00:33:00] at once, it's really hard to change. It's actually a very scary, and it can feel disingenuous. So I will say lean hard into the human aspects of this transformation, and in doing so. Be open, encourage your teams to speak about and hold the paradox of AI upsides and downsides that exist simultaneously.

And I think that speaking to the nuances and the realities here is more likely to help catalyze change than just sweeping all that complexity and the stuff that's inconvenient under the rug. So that's what I'm offering leaders for 2026.

Steve Halsey: Those are great insights and, uh, certainly not a boring time to be be in a leadership position.

Mine's, mine's, uh, kind of shocker to you. I'm gonna go back to this whole idea of a narrative system. So the one shift I would really encourage leaders right now to do is to stop thinking about communications as managing messages or managing campaigns and really start thinking about it as a governing [00:34:00] narrative system, or like I said, an operating system of, of.

Of a company because in a world of instantaneous AI summaries of synthetic content that we had talked about, incredibly compressed always on news cycles that don't always have a human curator anymore, and a lot of more third party influence. You really can't control every output, but what you can do is really govern that story.

People encounter over time. What is that consistency? What is that cadence that you're delivering, but to what you were just talking about there in terms of leaders and organization and culture? It also means being really, really clear on what you stand for, how you show up in those moments of pressure matter now more than ever, and how ai your people and your partners are aligned with that same narrative is really important for, for your success.

So the leaders who treat the narrative as an operating system and [00:35:00] not a department or a group that sits over there, they're gonna be far better positioned in in 2026. So. That's kind of what, what I'm predicting here. I think 2026 is gonna reward those leaders who at the same time can really hold and handle that pressure, uh, that can maintain trust, and that can communicate with clarity.

So I, I think that's our roadmap ahead for 2026.

Anne Green: I love it. We'll try to practice what we preach here. You know, we, we have our predictions and we're trying to bring it to life in our own little pond here at G&S, at our integrated marketing communications group and our two agencies. And we're trying to help our clients bring it to life.

So, as Steve said, we'll be excited to check in in a few months to see how our predictions are unfolding. But before we close here at the start of the year, just wanna thank every listener of Building Brand Gravity. We are. This is the start of our fourth season, Steve. It's very exciting. We have fourth

Steve Halsey: season.

Anne Green: Thank you

Steve Halsey: listeners.

Anne Green: Thank you listeners. It's so exciting and thank you to all of our [00:36:00] incredible guests. We've had so many over the course of, of these past few years, we've had a couple repeats, friends of the pod. Maybe you'll see some of those folks again this year. But overall, as always, we've got the full library of episodes.

A lot of them are very evergreen. Check 'em out. Share, challenge us, you know, come at us with contrary points of view.

Steve Halsey: Add your predictions for 2026.

Anne Green: That's right. That's right. We love, we love to hear it. And, um, keep listening. Just check us out and thank you for going on this journey with us.

Steve Halsey: So thank you for joining us on Building Brand Gravity.

I'm Steve Hals.

Anne Green: And I'm Anne Green, and we'll see you again soon on the pod.