By Chris Gee, AI Strategist
Eighty percent of companies that cut staff to fund AI saw no improvement in returns.
That’s not a hot take from an AI skeptic, that’s Gartner, surveying 350 global executives at companies with more than a billion dollars in revenue.
The organizations that got ahead didn’t reduce headcount. They gave their people capabilities they didn’t have before.
Here’s why that should matter to everyone reading this newsletter: the same logic applies to your practice. Cutting time isn’t the move. Cutting the right work is.
There is a specific category of work in communications that is high-volume, lower-stakes, and consuming a disproportionate share of your best hours. Not low-priority work, but work that shouldn’t take as long as it does. That’s what AI agents were built for.
Most Comms Leaders Are Asking the Wrong Question
When AI first surfaced in our industry, the question was: “Will AI replace communicators?” That was the wrong question, and most of us knew it. Strategy, relationships, judgment, narrative: none of that is automate-able, and it’s still where the real value lives.
But there’s a follow-up question that’s more important: “Are you spending your time on those things, or are you still doing the work AI could handle?”
For most agency owners, in-house leaders, and independent consultants I talk to, the honest answer is both. The administrative grind hasn’t gone away. It’s sitting alongside everything else, consuming hours that should be going to the work only they can do.
Nobody’s falling behind because they’re anti-AI. They’re falling behind because they haven’t stopped long enough to figure out which part of their work to hand off first.
What’s at Stake
An agency principal I know tracks three client accounts. She told me she spends four to six hours a week on monitoring and briefing prep alone, work she knows could be automated, work she hasn’t automated because there’s no window in the delivery schedule to stop and figure it out. She hasn’t fixed it because delivery doesn’t leave room to stop and redesign how you work. That’s the trap.
In-house leaders are fielding the same pressure (“what’s our AI ROI?”) from their C-suites while their teams are still doing that work manually. Consultants are losing work to people who figured out how to produce in two hours what used to take eight.
The Opportunity
The work that’s automatable is also the work that’s been eating your margin, or your time, which is the same thing if you’re billing hours.
The frame I keep coming back to: what to automate, what to protect. The grind gets automated. The human touch (the relationships, the judgment, the counsel that no AI can replicate) is what you protect. And when you’re not spending your best hours on the grind, you can actually deliver on it.
Automate the grind, own the strategy. The comms pros who do that first will be the ones setting prices, not defending them.
Where to Start
CommsCollectiv Partner, Monica Talan, and I are running a one-day workshop on July 25 for PR and communications professionals who want to stop talking about AI agents and start using them. Agency leaders, in-house comms directors, independent consultants, anyone who is good at their work and wants more of their hours back.
In four hours you’ll build AI workflows mapped to the work that’s been eating your hours. You’ll leave with a personal AI stack and a 30-day plan. Think co-pilot, not autopilot: everything is prompt-based and you’re in control. If you can write a briefing, you can build this.
The workshop is on Maven. The date is July 25. Registration is $650.
If the honest answer to “am I spending my hours on the right work?” is uncomfortable, this is the room to be in.