FIR #506: Battle of the Bots!
From For Immediate Release by Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz
March 23, 2026 · 1h 43m · Episode 506
About this episode
Neville and Shel discuss the impact of AI on communications, including surveillance technology, PR budgets, misinformation, and bot traffic.
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…
People in this episode
Hosts: Neville Hobson, Shel Holtz
Topics covered
- AI in communications
- digital monitoring
- PR budgets
- misinformation crisis
- bot traffic
- Fediverse
- Mastodon
Keywords
- AI
- communications
- digital monitoring
- PR budgets
- misinformation
- bot traffic
- Fediverse
- Mastodon
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Anthropic, JP Morgan, Gartner, C2PA
More episodes of For Immediate Release
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- FIR #515: Agents Everywhere · May 25, 2026 · 1h 48m
- FIR #514: Was Twitter A One-And-Done Phenomenon? · May 19, 2026 · 28 min
- FIR #513: Why Communications Must Build the Narrative Code for the Agentic Age · May 11, 2026 · 34 min
- FIR #512: The AI Shift in Executive Decision-Making · May 4, 2026 · 31 min
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