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By Paul Shotton, Advocacy Strategy Start with the work, not the market noise Public affairs teams are now surrounded by AI product launches, feature comparisons, and confident claims about which platform is moving fastest. That can be useful, but it can also be misleading. The real question is rarely which tool looks most impressive in the abstract. The real question is which tool is actually suitable for the work your team needs to do, the maturity of your current practice,

By Paul Shotton, Advocacy Strategy The next step is not agentic AI Most public affairs teams do not yet need agentic AI. They need to get better at customising LLMs. For many professionals, the first phase of AI has been exploratory. They have used tools like ChatGPT or Claude to summarise documents, improve drafts, brainstorm ideas, or structure notes. In many teams, that is still where things stand. A few early adopters are using the tools regularly. Others are interested b

By Alan Hardacre, PhD Co-Founder Advocacy Academy, Advocacy Strategy Public Affairs has always used technology. Monitoring platforms, CRM systems, stakeholder databases — none of this is new. What is currently new is the scale and speed at which AI is changing what those tools can do, and more importantly, what your team is expected to do with them. I am sure everyone has heard in their organisation that 2026 is the year of AI. We are at an inflection point. The question is n

By Paul Shotton, Advocacy Strategy Most discussions about AI adoption in public affairs focus on capability: can it do this task, is it good enough, should we try it? That is the right starting point. But there is a second question that follows immediately, and it is less often asked: how quickly is the underlying capability changing, and what does that mean for the tools, services, and internal workflows we are building around it? The answer has real strategic implications —

By Paul Shotton, Advocacy Strategy When people discuss agentic AI, the conversation often becomes too abstract. The more useful question is practical: which steps in a real workflow are current models actually good at, which steps are still risky or weak, and which are likely to become more feasible soon? That matters because adoption is rarely an all-or-nothing choice. Teams are not deciding whether to automate an entire function. They are deciding whether a particular model

By Paul Shotton, Advocacy Strategy Most public affairs practitioners who use LLMs regularly have developed habits—some good, some inefficient. The problem is that these habits are largely invisible in a single exchange. They only emerge as patterns across a long-form project. Your prompt history is not just a record of what you asked; it is a data set of how you think, structure work, and refine strategy. This post provides a four-step exercise—including the exact prompts—to

THE STRATEGIC EDGE  |  Blog Series by Stefan Borst Your firm almost certainly has an audit committee. It probably has a compensation committee, a nomination and governance committee, and – depending on the sector – a technology or cybersecurity committee. If it operates in a regulated industry, there may be a dedicated risk committee overseeing financial, operational, and compliance exposures. Now ask yourself a simple question: which committee owns political risk? While geop

By Alan Hardacre, PhD Co-Founder Advocacy Academy, Advocacy Strategy How do you actually build a Public Affairs capability? Most Public Affairs functions are good at responding. The harder question is whether they're set up to lead - to shape the environment before it shapes them. Through some recent work I've been spending time thinking about what genuine capability building looks like inside a Public Affairs function. Not training for its own sake. Not a one-off workshop th

By Paul Shotton, Advocacy Strategy For most public-affairs teams, the immediate AI risk is not a rogue agent secretly plotting against them. It is something more ordinary: not understanding the kinds of mistakes today’s AI tools make once they are connected to documents, monitoring systems, stakeholder notes, internal reporting, and wider policy workflows That matters because we often talk about AI “lying” as if it were one thing. It is not. Recent research from Anthropic, th

By Paul Shotton, Advocacy Strategy The central question for public affairs teams is no longer whether to use AI. It is whether anyone has actually changed how the work gets done — and whether that change is happening by design or by accident. That distinction matters more than it might seem. What the data actually show Across business, the direction of travel is clear. McKinsey's 2025 global survey reports that 88% of organisations are using AI in at least one business functi

By Paul Shotton, Advocacy Strategy The real value of ChatGPT is not in better prompts. It is in structuring recurring tasks so the tool supports them reliably. This article takes one common example — meeting minutes — and walks through how to build a custom GPT around it: what documents you need, how to sequence the instructions, and how to turn it into something your whole team uses consistently. If someone on your team is already experimenting with this, good. This article

By Alan Hardacre, PhD Co-Founder Advocacy Academy, Advocacy Strategy Public Affairs has always sat at the intersection of politics, regulation, reputation and commercial strategy. But in today’s environment — characterized by so much (geo)political instability, regulatory acceleration, uncertainty, activism, disinformation and real-time media dynamics — that intersection is widening. And, as external complexity increases, so too does internal demand. I know no two Public Affa

By Alan Hardacre, PhD Co-Founder Advocacy Academy, Advocacy Strategy I am increasingly asked to help organisations make their Public Affairs teams more strategic. But what does that actually mean and how do you go about it? After years working both in-house and with clients, I have noticed something consistent: Senior leaders are not interested in activity. They are interested in impact. Preferably commercial impact. If you work in Public Affairs, your value is not measured b

By Paul Shotton, Advocacy Strategy Over the past year, the conversation around artificial intelligence has shifted dramatically. Many professionals began by experimenting with tools like ChatGPT or Claude to draft emails or summarise documents. Now the conversation has moved to something more ambitious: agents. In fields like public affairs, it is easy to imagine agents that analyse legislation, produce monitoring reports, or help structure advocacy strategies. The idea is at

By Paul Shotton, Advocacy Strategy What’s the Difference Between an LLM and an Agent? Over the past year, the conversation around artificial intelligence has shifted noticeably. Not long ago, most discussions focused on tools like ChatGPT and how they could help draft emails, summarise documents, or generate text. Now the buzzword seems to be something else entirely: agents . Everyone is suddenly talking about AI agents. Companies are announcing them. Developers are building

By Paul Shotton, Advocacy Strategy Almost every public affairs professional I speak to today is experimenting with artificial intelligence. Some are using tools like ChatGPT or Claude to draft emails, summarise documents, or brainstorm ideas. Others are beginning to integrate AI into more analytical tasks such as policy monitoring, document analysis, or briefing preparation. But a recurring question keeps emerging in conversations with colleagues and clients: are we ahead of

By Paul Shotton, Advocacy Academy Not long ago I ran a workshop with a group of practitioners working across several countries with very different political environments and very different levels of transparency. Some of the systems they operate in are relatively structured. Others are far less predictable, with policymaking processes that are more opaque and where informal dynamics often play a much larger role. Despite these differences, the questions people were grappling

The Strategic Edge - by Stefan Borst The Association Alibi There is a sentence I have heard in boardrooms across Europe more times than I can count. It usually comes from a CFO, sometimes a CEO, occasionally a general counsel. It sounds responsible. It sounds efficient. And it is quietly eroding competitive advantage. “We don’t need a bigger PA function – we’re members of the XYZ association.” On the surface, this seems like a perfectly rational statement. It may even be root

By Paul Shotton, Advocacy Strategy That's not an accusation. It's just what happens when you start with the wrong question. Teams spend weeks debating which metrics to use, how to weight them, which tool to build in. They produce something that looks rigorous. Leadership nods. It goes into a folder. Nothing changes. Call it a dashboard, a portfolio review, or a one-page executive summary — the format matters less than most people think. What matters is the logic underneath. A

By Alan Hardacre, PhD Co-Founder Advocacy Academy, Advocacy Strategy In Executive Teams across regions and sectors I am seeing a question that is being asked with increasing frequency: “What are we really getting from our Trade Associations?”. This is not a new question by any means – but it is being asked more frequently and more seriously than ever before. For decades, Trade Associations have been seen as a standard line item in Public Affairs budgets — essential for repres