Stop doomscrolling the AI webinar circuit. Start moving.
There's a peculiar kind of anxiety making the rounds in PR and comms right now. It doesn't come from clients. It doesn't come from a bad news cycle. It comes from your inbox, your LinkedIn feed, and your Tuesday afternoon calendar slot.
It comes from the webinars.
You know the ones. How to use AI as a comms agency. GEO optimisation: are you ready? How our competitors rewired their entire business model around AI and why you're already behind. Sprinkle in a few panels of agency heads explaining how they've pivoted their entire value proposition to accompany in-house PR teams on their journey to "AIfication", all of it while you're still wrestling with GDPR concerns and watching your budget shrink under the weight of international economic headwinds.
Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy attending most of them. But the message, whether intended or not, that sticks around for most participants is always the same: panic. The game is FOMO.
The fear is real. But so is the noise.
Let's be honest about what's happening. There is a ticking clock. At some point, those who took too long to act, who are still pondering, debating, workshopping, will fade. Those who were slower will struggle, but the better ones will eventually catch up. This is not hysteria. It is the ordinary logic of technological change applied to an industry that has historically been slow to embrace it.
But there's a crucial distinction being glossed over in every breathless webinar: the gap between starting and not starting is infinitely larger than the gap between starting slowly and starting fast.
You cannot catch up overnight with those who have been building for months or years. Not on your own. Not for free. You can buy their tools, assuming you have the cashflow for that, which many agencies right now do not. You can attend their webinars and nod along and take notes. And then Monday comes, and nothing moves.
The runner's mantra nobody wants to hear
There's a saying in running circles that gets mocked for being cheesy, because it is cheesy, and also because it is completely true:
"No matter how slow you go, you're still lapping everybody on the couch."
No one is promising that going slow guarantees survival. The couch potato might have a trust fund. The slow runner might get injured. Heck, I was running two marathons per week and still had a heart attack before I turned 40. But the principle holds: motion beats stasis. Doing something imperfect today is categorically different from doing nothing perfectly.
The same logic applies to AI adoption in comms. The question is not whether you have a comprehensive AI strategy, a dedicated transformation budget, or a head of AI innovation on your org chart. The question is whether you are moving at all.
What AI "moving" can actually look like
Here's a confession. The first AI agent I shared publicly with my team would make a lot of people in this industry laugh.
A colleague was frustrated. She could never find the most recent version of a case study written for a specific use case. Digging through folders, asking around, cross-referencing emails — every time. A small problem. An annoying, recurring, expensive-in-aggregate problem.
Some readers will say: "Well, our credentials deck handles that perfectly." Great. Genuinely. But not everyone is there, and even those who are know the credentials deck has a shelf life measured in weeks before it's out of date and nobody's told the junior account exec. And at a time when each client wants to be presented with a 100% tailor-made proposal, you know as well as I do that the slide in your creds deck is not the one you will copy-paste in your presentation.
Three days after that first conversation, we had two agents running:
Libby, our librarian, automatically archives and populates a database of every proposal and presentation we produce, focused on the strategy and content we designed, bypassing any privileged/proprietary information.
Sherly, our investigator, lets anyone on the team ask direct questions about past work — including presentations from before they even joined the company.
Total cost? Some hours of development time. A few more hours supporting Libby in her initial population effort. And €1.16 in Google Studio API usage.
Total output? Three weeks later, over 250 presentations properly archived, uniformly tagged, and instantly searchable.
Was this a moonshot? No. Was it on any AI transformation roadmap? No. Did it solve a real problem for a real person on the team in a matter of weeks with negligible cost? Absolutely.
The point is not to win the race
The point is not to become the agency that everyone else benchmarks against. The point is not to have the most sophisticated AI stack, or the slickest case study about your own transformation to share on a panel.
The point is to look at your own team, your own processes, your own daily frustrations and ask a simple question: what is the smallest thing I could automate, augment, or improve right now, with the tools and knowledge I already have?
Not next quarter. Not after the GDPR guidance is clearer. Not once the budget situation stabilises.
Now.
Because the webinar circuit will still be there next week, offering you new reasons to feel behind, new benchmarks to fail against, new frameworks to consider. And while you're considering them, someone else, possibly someone with far less resource than you, is building their version of Libby.
Get started. Not perfectly. Not comprehensively. Not with a strategy deck and a change management consultant.
Just started.
That's the lap that counts.