In this episode of AI Loves PR, Chad Latz, Chief Innovation Officer at Burson, brings a veteran futurist’s lens to the AI moment facing the PR industry. With decades of experience embracing emerging platforms (from blogs to social to influencer content), Latz sees the current inflection point as unlike any before.
“This is a renaissance moment for PR,” he says. “For once, we’re not being told what to do by media platforms — we’re shaping how content is created and discovered.” Generative AI, he argues, gives PR the chance to lead rather than follow, but only if we rethink how we work.
Latz introduces the idea of “comms-centric engineering,” a mindset that treats content creation as an orchestrated, strategic discipline. “We need to think about how content is formatted, where it lives, what signals it gives off, and how it’s interpreted by machines,” he explains. It’s not enough to generate great ideas. They must be engineered to be discoverable and valuable in an AI-driven world.
Latz places strong emphasis on team training. He encourages agency leaders to focus less on learning every new tool and more on helping teams understand how to work in tandem with AI. “The real value isn’t in the output. It’s in the interrogation,” he says. Communicators must be trained to ask smarter questions, apply strategic context, and recognize when and how to bring in AI to enhance—not replace—their work.
“This is about changing the operating system of PR,” Latz concludes. “If we can train ourselves to think in systems, act quickly, and lead with purpose, the opportunity ahead is transformative.”