FIR #506: Battle of the Bots!

In this monthly long-form episode for March, Neville and Shel tackle a trio of interconnected themes reshaping the communications profession in the age of AI. The conversation opens with Anthropic’s top lawyer declaring that AI will destroy the billable hour. That thread leads naturally into JP Morgan’s controversial use of digital monitoring to verify junior bankers’ working hours, where Shel and Neville question whether surveillance technology can substitute for genuine managerial trust and engagement. The episode also examines Gartner’s widely circulated prediction that PR budgets will double by 2027 as AI search engines favor earned media. Shel delivers a detailed report on the escalating misinformation crisis, citing a 900% surge in global deepfake incidents and new research from the C2PA on content provenance standards. The episode closes with a discussion of Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince’s prediction that bot traffic will exceed human traffic by 2027, and a sobering peer-reviewed study on how social bots hijack organizational messaging — research reported by Bob Pickard, who has experienced bot-driven attacks firsthand. Dan York also contributes a tech report on the state of the Fediverse and Mastodon, as well as on AI developments for WordPress. Links from this episode: AI will destroy the billable hour, says Anthropic’s top lawyerGartner predicts PR budgets will increase 2x by 20275 takes on Gartner’s new optimism for PR and earned media in the age of AIPR is back, baby — Gartner is predicting… [LinkedIn post by Lindsay Bennett]The Gartner claim that public relations and earned media budgets will double by 2027JPMorgan starts programme to monitor junior banker hours [Financial Times]FT Exclusive: The US bank has started to… [Financial Times LinkedIn post]Senator Bernie Sanders Discusses the Impact of AI on Privacy and Democracy with ClaudeLet’s Talk Keyboard Jamming and Why It Might Suggest Bigger Problems at WorkTelling Fact From Fiction With Online MisinformationOnline bot traffic will exceed human traffic by 2027, Cloudflare CEO saysPublic Relations & Organizational Communication [LinkedIn post by Bob Pickard]Social Bots as Agenda-Builders: Evaluating the Impact of Algorithmic Amplification on Organizational Messaging Links from Dan York’s Tech Report: Mastodon post by Eugen Rochko (@Gargron) — mastodon.socialMastodon — Decentralized social mediaHow to Generate a WordPress Theme with TelexTelex — AI-Assisted Authoring Environment for WordPressWordPress.com now lets AI agents write and publish posts, and moreYour AI agent can now create, edit, and manage content on WordPress.comEnable MCP tool access for AI agentsWordPress.com MCP prompt examples The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, March 23. We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email [e-mail]. Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music. You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients. Raw Transcript Neville:  Hi everyone, and welcome to the Forum Immediate Release podcast, long form episode for March, 2026. I’m Neville Hobson. Shel: And I’m Shel Holtz. Neville: As ever, we have six great stories to discuss and share with you, and we hope you’ll gain insight and enjoyment from our discussion. Perhaps you’ll want to share a comment with us once you’ve had a listen. We’d like that. Our topics this month range from AI in the end of the billable hour to Gartner’s predictions about PR budgets to monitoring work in the age of AI to newsrooms battling AI generated misinformation and more, including Dan York’s tech reports. Before we get into our discussion, let’s begin with a recap of the episodes we’ve published over the past month and some list of comments in the long form. In episode 502 for February, published on the 23rd of that month, we explored how rapidly accelerating technology is reshaping the communication profession from autonomous agents with attitudes to the evolving ROI of podcasting. We led with a chilling milestone moment, an autonomous AI coding agent that publicly shamed a human developer after he rejected its code contribution. A leader can build goodwill for days and lose it in seconds. In FIR 503 on the 2nd of March, we reported on the president of the IOC, that’s the International Olympic Committee, who had no answers to reporters’ questions and suggested on camera that someone on her communications team should be fired. We got comment on this, haven’t we, Shel? Shel: Boy, do we have comments on ...