The policies are clear and well communicated. The guardrails are firmly established. Every last employee has been trained. And someone in your organization still releases a public document riddled with AI-generated errors. What went wrong has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with internal culture and accountability. In this long-form April episode, Neville and Shel examine a company that seemingly took all the right steps yet still had to apologize publicly for a court filing riddled with hallucinated citations. Also in this episode:

Gartner predicts that, by 2028, 75% of employees will rely on an internal chatbot to get the news that matters to them. How will internal communicators need to rethink their role to ensure everyone knows and understands what they should in order to achieve strategic alignment?
One of the promises AI executives have made is a leveling of the playing field, giving lower-level employees the opportunity to excel and rise through the ranks. According to one new study, exactly the opposite has been happening.
PR hacks have been accelerating the pace at which they churn out press releases and pitches. That has raised the bar for what it takes to earn a journalist’s trust (and journalists do still rely on press releases, according to a survey of reporters).
Apple’s announcement of its CEO transition offers communicators a clinic on how to announce a new top executive.
“Slopaganda” from Iran has proven remarkably effective, which means it is undoubtedly coming for your company or clients soon.

In his Tech Report, Dan York outlines big changes coming with WordPress’s next update.

Links from this episode:

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, May 25.

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 fircomments@gmail.com.

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

Shel: Hi everybody and welcome to episode number 511 of For Immediate Release. This is our long-form episode for April 2026. I’m Shel Holtz in Concord, California.

Neville: And I’m Neville Hobson, Somerset in England. We have six great stories to discuss and share with you this month and to delight and entertain you, we hope. Topics range from the consequences of not following company guidance on AI use, chat bots, employee use, and the workplace divide, using AI to work smarter, what we learned from Apple’s CEO transition announcement, and the future of slopaganda. Lovely word, that one, show. Plus, Dan York’s tech report.

But first, let’s begin with a recap of the episodes we’ve published over the past month and some listening comments. In the long form episode 506 for March, published on the 23rd of March, our lead story was on Anthropic’s view that AI will destroy the billable hour, a topic we’ve talked about before on FIR. We also explored digital monitoring of employee work, Gartner’s prediction that PR budgets will double next year, the escalating misinformation crisis, and Cloudflare’s prediction that

bot traffic will exceed human traffic by 2027. That’s next year, by the way. On LinkedIn, you’ll find no shortage of posts stridently deriding the notion that anyone should ever use AI to write them. In FIR 507 on the 30th of March, we rejected roundly that idea and looked at the actual trends in using AI for writing. And that prompted some comments from listeners, right?

Shel: Yes, it did. Starting with Susan Gosselin, who’s actually with a client of mine back in my consulting days. She writes, there are many types of writing that I think AI is great for interpersonal communications, summaries, et cetera. But for marketing writing, that’s another thing. There are issues of copyright to consider and what you’re feeding into the channel.

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