Voice interfaces are normalizing AI as an arbiter of truth in everyday conversations, and introducing a human behavioral change with significant implications for credibility and third-party validation
The central benefit of public relations (PR) comes from the credibility of a message shared through a third-party. As I’ve long quipped, nothing you say about yourself has the credibility of someone else saying it about you. Why? Because at the most basic level, a third-party has less incentive to say nice things unless they are actually warranted,
Many of my peers will argue that third-party validation is limited to specific PR duties, like media relations or analyst relations, where the effort produces favorable mentions in news or market research reports. PR is a bigger category than just media relations.
I agree with the latter but have a different perspective on the former. I believe community relations, investor relations, social media and content marketing, which may be better described as “brand journalism,” all rely on third-party validation.
When PR efforts facilitate community interaction – that’s word-of-mouth – arguably the most valuable form of third-party validations. Ditto for investor relations or the content that gets shared, or better still cited with links, mentions and search results. Those are all signals of third-party validation, both for humans and the algorithms that decide what content to show you are factoring. People might say retweets are not endorsements, but such disclaimers can’t override Kahneman’s System 1.
So, in my mind, third-party validation is what sets PR apart from any other marketing or communications activity. It’s essential to the definition. It’s also what makes measurement so vexing: linking the influence of a third-party output to a behavior change is hard, because it’s virtually impossible to isolate that influence from other factors. And, collectively, these things are what make PR so valuable; third-party validation, by definition, has to be earned and cannot be purchased.
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Do AI mentions offer third-party validation?
AI visibility is giving PR a moment. Many big industry thinkers predicted last December that generative AI would make PR a priority this year. That’s largely come true. Just like Google supplanted newspapers as the new front page, so too are LLMs becoming the new-new front page. Even Gartner, the technology analyst firm, chimed in on PR’s opportunity in the AI era.
Certainly, citations in AI searches are similar to mentions in media and analyst reports, which is becoming the de facto measurement practice. Yet there’s something else that’s happening that hints at a more profound behavior change: the AI audio interface is being used to win friendly arguments.
People have friendly arguments all the time. The old way of resolving a disagreement or establishing facts was a Google search. Today, it’s increasingly becoming the voice AI interface. For example, a disagreement over who was POTUS in 1982 is easily solved, with “Hey, Grok, who was President in 1982?”
The machine will read back the answer and it’s accepted as fact. That’s an amazing behavior change when you pause to think about what’s happening. One side of the argument knew the answer, but no matter how deft an orator – the other side wouldn’t accept it as fact from that source – but it would accept it if from AI.
Examples of third-party validation don’t get clearer than that one; there are a gazillion conversations like that happening every day. I find it to be simultaneously an unnerving idea and a business opportunity. Similarly, the capabilities of AI are way overhyped, but at the same time, it’s also having a gradual, yet profound, influence on human behavior.
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