In the latest episode of AI Loves PR, Rob Davis, Chief Digital Innovation Officer at MSL and PR Council Digital Community Co-Chair, joins Kim Sample for a candid conversation about how AI is fundamentally reshaping communications. At the heart of Davis’ argument is this idea: “Search has transformed from a waypoint to the destination itself.” In an LLM-driven world, the AI-generated answer isn’t just one step in the customer journey—it’s often the final one.
That shift, Davis says, demands a new strategy. “It’s no longer about optimization: it’s about influence.” Specifically, he urges PR professionals to consider two factors: what the algorithms are trained to surface and how the target audience is likely to react to those surfaced answers. “We need to understand how LLMs ingest and interpret brand content,” he explains.
For PR, this opens both a gap and a responsibility to “fill the void” with content that is accurate, compelling, and complete. If brands don’t tell their story in depth, LLMs will do it for them, pulling from incomplete or unofficial sources. “The LLM is going to write the whole story,” Davis cautions. “So if you’re not covering off the basics of your brand, your product, your mission, that’s the kind of void that will be filled quickly.”
Davis recommends every communicator regularly test their brand in tools like Perplexity and track what platforms are shaping the response. Right now, Reddit, YouTube, and Wikipedia are among the most influential. “Think of them as ethical extensions of your brand,” he says. “This is pure PR with a technological layer on top. It’s still about the conversation. It’s still about the message.”