The Nuance Premium: Why AI Makes Strategic Communications Invaluable

On a recent(ish) episode of the “Pivot” podcast with journalist Kara Swisher and highly experienced NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway, the latter flipped the script on the cultural flashpoint of AI job loss, acknowledging the issue but positing that AI is also poised to make some jobs invaluable.

Which jobs? Specifically, strategic communications, investor relations, and PR.

Wait, really? Yes, really! AI can create comms content in a matter of seconds, and that use case is rapidly expanding, fueling an exponential increase in information volume and messaging velocity — as well as the risk of blunders, ranging from tone-deaf social posts to poorly timed IR statements and strategic missteps, all of which can cause immeasurable reputational damage.

Additionally, given the massive rise of AI, rampant misinformation, AI hallucinations, and deepfakes are creating an entirely new category of PR crises — and managing crises rooted in the general public’s inability to reliably identify what’s real while effectively salvaging, if not improving, brands’ credibility requires expert human crisis communicators. 

As such, the value of strategic communications is skyrocketing. 

Why? It’s simple. Authentic human voices and strategic communications stand in stark contrast to the growing sea of AI slop and command a premium for their ability to connect and resonate with people.    

• Judgment > Output: AI is great at the “how” of things but terrible at the “why,” and “why” is what makes communications resonate with the right audiences. Content needs to be rooted in relevance to connect. It needs to clearly communicate why audiences should care in order to capture their attention, be worthy of their time, and have the potential to merit any action.  

• The Trust Deficit: Trust is essential to relationship and reputation building, and it can’t be earned with synthetic content. AI generates content based on statistical patterns rather than personal knowledge or understanding, so there’s no authenticity, accountability, or transparency — all of which are key to establishing trust.

• The Nuance Gap: Communication is more than just words on a page or a screen. Effective communication requires emotional intelligence, empathy, and judgment calls. And while AI is an undeniably valuable tool for many things — communications amongst them — these are well beyond its core capabilities. Additionally, given its structure, that’s at least relatively likely to remain true, even as developers aim to amplify its emotional intelligence, causing many IT experts to tout the value of a hybrid approach that combines AI’s incredible capabilities with humans’ unique emotional intelligence.

In fact, the market is already reflecting this reality. Tech giants like Netflix, Anthropic, and OpenAI are currently paying senior communicators between $200,000 and $775,000 a year to leverage their writing and storytelling skills — because effectively explaining complex concepts and products to stakeholders ranging from employees, investors, and regulators to customers and the general public requires authenticity, judgment, and nuance. And even AI companies recognize that strategic communications are essential for earning the trust, legitimacy, and validation they need to succeed. 

But this trend isn’t limited to AI or even tech companies. Compensation for chief communications officers at Fortune 500 companies is surging for the same reason, with median salaries hovering in the $400,000 to $450,000 range, which is about $50,000 more than last year. 

For comparison’s sake, the average base salary for a communications director in the U.S. is currently $111,862. So, it’s clear that strategic communications, investor relations, and PR are becoming even more valuable in the age of AI, not less relevant, as many assume. 

For communications professionals like us, this means leveraging AI to further amplify our impact rather than viewing it as a competing force or existential threat to our careers. By using AI to ideate, kickstart content generation, and outsource repetitive, low-level, rule-based tasks, we can dedicate more of our time and effort to tasks like strategic planning and trust-building, which even AI companies readily acknowledge have a real impact on people and are essential for achieving operational goals.