Long read: What AI, sacred cows, and the next generation have in common.

Something clicked for me this week.

I’ve been tech-savvy for as long as I’ve been in this profession. I was writing about AI and blockchain’s impact on crisis communication a decade ago, when most colleagues thought I was chasing shiny objects.

But this past week was different. I built my new consultancy website with AI. I created a situational awareness dashboard with AI. I designed the full architecture for a team of AI virtual assistants to run my business operations. Not in theory – in practice.

Seeing the impact first-hand – the speed, the depth, the volume of operational work that simply disappeared – changed how I think about what’s coming for our profession.

Then Sequoia Capital’s Julien Bek published a thesis that gave me the framework for what I’d been experiencing: two types of work – intelligence and judgement.

Intelligence is pattern recognition, research, synthesis, translation. Work that follows rules, even complex ones. Judgement is what sits on top: experience, instinct, taste, the ability to read a room or a situation and know what the data doesn’t tell you.

AI has crossed the threshold where it can handle most intelligence work autonomously. It hasn’t crossed the threshold on judgement. Not yet. Maybe not for a long time.

Bek wrote this for founders building software companies. But I read it as a crisis communicator – one who’d just spent a week watching intelligence work evaporate in real time. I couldn’t stop mapping his distinction onto our profession.

Think about what a communication department actually does in a week. Not the job description – the real work.

Monitoring media coverage. Scanning social platforms for emerging narratives. Drafting internal updates. Compiling stakeholder maps. Researching a counterpart’s position before a meeting. Pulling data for a quarterly report. Formatting and distributing a press release. Producing talking points for leadership. Scheduling content across channels. Tracking engagement after a campaign goes live.

All of that is intelligence work. Every bit of it.

Now think about the other part. Deciding whether to issue a statement at all. Choosing which narrative to lead with when three are competing for attention. Reading the political dynamics between two government departments and adjusting the messaging to navigate both. Advising a CEO that less is more. Knowing that a technically accurate message will land catastrophically with a frightened community – and rewriting it in the car on the way to the press conference.

That’s judgement. And no AI system on earth can do it reliably. Judgement is built on something data can’t replicate: the experience of having been wrong before and understanding why.

Most communication professionals spend the vast majority of their time on intelligence work: monitoring, drafting, formatting, scheduling, research, reporting.

Day after day, intelligence work expands to fill every available hour, leaving less and less time for the judgement that’s supposed to be the point of the role.

And when a crisis hits, when judgement is suddenly the only thing that matters, too many teams discover they haven’t exercised that muscle in months. They’ve been so busy with intelligence work that their judgement has atrophied.

AI can fix this. It won’t replace judgement. It removes the operational weight that crowds it out. If the intelligence work is handled, the communication professional is freed to do what they were actually hired to do: think strategically, advise leadership, read the environment, and make the calls that no algorithm can make.

But that only works if you accept what comes with it. If your entire value proposition is intelligence work – if you’re the person who’s really good at media monitoring, or really fast at drafting press releases, or really thorough at compiling coverage reports – then yes, your role is at risk.

AI isn’t targeting communication professionals specifically. It’s targeting intelligence work, wherever it sits.

The professionals whose value is judgement have never been more important. The ones whose value is intelligence have never been more exposed.

In routine corporate communication, the line between intelligence and judgement can be hard to draw. Fair enough.

In crisis and emergency communication, the line is razor-sharp. And the stakes of getting it wrong are measured in lives, not likes.

Intelligence in crisis communication:

Situational monitoring across platforms and channels. Social listening for emerging narratives. Compiling verified facts into a situation report. Drafting initial holding statements using pre-approved templates. Translating key messages into multiple languages and formats. Mapping stakeholder groups and their information needs. Identifying which channels reach which audiences. Analysing historical precedent: how did similar organisations handle comparable events? Producing internal briefing documents for leadership. Tracking regulatory and policy responses in real time.

AI can do all of this. Today. Not in some hypothetical future. Now. Faster and more comprehensively than any human team.

Judgement in crisis communication:

Deciding how quickly to go public – and calibrating what to say at each stage. Assessing whether community anger is genuine or manufactured. Advising a minister that the technically correct statement will destroy public trust. Navigating the political dynamics between two government departments that both want to lead the narrative. Recognising that the second wave of a crisis, the narrative crisis, is more dangerous than the first. Choosing which audience to prioritise when you cannot reach everyone at once. Insisting on accuracy when leadership wants to spin. Sensing when a crisis has shifted from operational to reputational, and changing the entire communication posture in response.

No AI system should make these decisions. It could generate a plausible answer. That is the danger.

A plausible-but-wrong decision during a crisis is catastrophic. A generated press release that misreads public sentiment during a health emergency does not just damage a brand but erodes the institutional credibility that communities depend on for survival.

Let us be direct about what that judgement actually looks like in practice. It is not comfortable.

It is the moment you tell a CEO they need to apologise when every instinct and every lawyer in the room says not to. It is pushing for transparency when the entire organisation wants to stall. It is the 2 am call where you advise a government spokesperson to admit uncertainty rather than project false confidence – knowing that admission will dominate the morning headlines but save institutional credibility in the long run.

These are hard decisions. They require nerve. They require the kind of experience you cannot shortcut. And they require a willingness to be the most unpopular person in the room. AI can simulate the reasoning. It cannot carry the weight.

Judgement is non-negotiable here. Full stop.

I often ask communication colleagues who want a seat at the C-level table one simple question: are you positioning yourself as a strategic advisor, or are you still seen as the person who does SOS work – Sending Out Stuff?

Because if your value proposition is drafting press releases, compiling media lists, and distributing statements, you are not a strategic function. You are an operational one. And operational functions get automated.

The same challenge applies to PR agencies. Many position themselves as strategic advisors. But look at the revenue breakdown: how much comes from actual strategic counsel, and how much from SOS? From monitoring, content production, distribution, coverage reports?

Be honest. If 80% of your revenue is intelligence work dressed up in strategy language, the next few years will be a reckoning.

And yes, this includes media relations. Genuine relationships with journalists matter, but how many do you actually have? Five? The rest is research, targeting, and personalisation. Intelligence work. The little black book of journalist "friends" is a nostalgia fantasy. Most reporters respond to relevance, not relationships.

This includes press material writing too, which was never the craft we pretended it was. Press releases follow formats. Holding statements follow templates. Structured outputs from verified inputs. Intelligence work by definition.

None of this is cynical. It is clarifying. The real value was never in the sending. It was in knowing what to say, when to say it, to whom – and having the judgement to calibrate transparency to the moment without ever defaulting to silence.

Bek's thesis includes a line that stayed with me: "Today's judgement will become tomorrow's intelligence." As AI systems accumulate data about what good decisions look like in a domain, the frontier shifts. Slowly, but it shifts.

The window to establish yourself on the judgement side of that line is now. Not in two years. Now.

The crisis communication professionals I respect most have always known this intuitively. They have always been frustrated by the operational overhead that kept them from the strategic work. They just never had a way to fix it.

Now they do.

Audit yourself honestly. Reflect on your past month. What percentage of your time was spent on intelligence work: monitoring, drafting, compiling, formatting? What percentage was devoted to judgement: advising, deciding, reading the room, making the hard call?

If the ratio is 80/20 in favour of intelligence, you now know where you are exposed – and what to do about it.

The Sequoia thesis was written about the software industry, but the principle is universal. Every profession will face this boundary between intelligence and judgement. In crisis communication, because of the stakes involved, getting it right may matter most.

If you are early in your career and reading this, I can imagine what you are thinking. The intelligence work is being automated. The judgement work requires decades of experience. Where exactly do you fit?

Right here. This profession is changing faster than at any point in its history, and you have the chance to build your career on the new foundation instead of retrofitting the old one.

There are not enough experienced crisis and emergency communicators. Not nearly enough. Demand is accelerating: polycrisis, disinformation, climate emergencies, AI-driven information disorders.

The supply of people with genuine crisis judgement has not kept pace. We need a new generation – urgently. And that generation has an advantage none of us had.

You do not have to spend years stuffing envelopes or compiling media lists by hand to earn your way to the strategic table. AI handles that now. This means you can compress the mechanical apprenticeship and get to the work that actually builds judgement sooner.

I started in 1994, printing press releases on paper, stuffing them into envelopes, and physically dropping them into the post office mailbox on my way out of the agency. But the envelopes did not build my career.

I was lucky – as the only junior in a small agency, I was dropped into crisis situations almost by accident. I sat in on every senior meeting. I watched experienced practitioners read situations, make calls, and navigate pressure in real time. That proximity to judgement made the difference. The room made my career. The envelopes did not.

So here is what I would tell you: do not compete with AI on intelligence. You will lose.

Instead, get yourself into the rooms where judgement happens. Volunteer for crisis simulations. Sit in on response calls, even if you are just taking notes. Study the decisions, not the deliverables. Ask senior practitioners why they made the call they did, not what they wrote afterwards. And when volunteers are needed in the field, go.

Nothing builds judgement faster than meeting the communities you are communicating with face to face. Leave the office corner and the coffee machine behind. That is where the real learning is.

Learn to use AI as infrastructure from day one – not as a shortcut, but as the layer that handles the operational work so you can focus on developing judgement. That is the career.

And to those of us with experience: this part is on us.

Open the doors. Bring juniors into the crisis room. Let them observe, question, and learn. Be humble enough to learn from them in return – they might be the ones who finally get you off those spreadsheets and onto systems that actually work.

Mentoring is not optional. It is how the profession survives. Because the bottleneck was never the press releases. It was always the judgement. And judgement only transfers through proximity, practice, and people willing to teach it.

The profession’s future is not threatened by AI. It is threatened by a shortage of people who can make the calls that AI cannot.

We need to grow that number. And we need to start now.

Philippe Borremans is the Managing Director of RiskComms FZCO and creator of the Communication Nexus Framework (CNF). He advises governments, UN agencies, and multinational corporations on crisis, risk, and emergency communication. He publishes the Wag The Dog newsletter for crisis communication professionals.