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By Paul Shotton, Advocacy Strategy As AI use becomes routine in public affairs, the question is shifting from whether to use it to when it is safe to rely on it. Most teams have settled, often informally, on a rough rule of thumb based on the output: internal work is fine, client-facing or external work needs more care, a summary is low stakes, a recommendation is high stakes. It is a reasonable instinct, and the type of output does matter. But on its own it is not enough,

By Paul Shotton, Advocacy Strategy Something has shifted in the way AI is sold to public affairs teams. The early conversations were about simple, general-purpose assistants. Increasingly, teams are being introduced to far more advanced things — custom datasets, bespoke knowledge bases, complex platforms with elaborate dashboards, and integrations that promise to do almost everything at once. I have recently heard several examples of teams being walked through these advanced

By Paul Shotton, Advocacy Strategy A growing number of public affairs teams are now trying to write an AI strategy. That is a healthy development. A year ago the conversation was about whether AI had any real place in serious policy work; today it is about how to adopt it well. But sit in enough of these conversations and a pattern becomes hard to ignore. The discussion almost always begins with tools. Which platform should we buy? Should we be on the enterprise version? Has

THE STRATEGIC EDGE | Blog Series by Stefan Borst A few days ago I sat with the global head of Public Affairs of a large chemicals company. We talked about AI and how it affects PA functions. His problem was not what you might expect. He wasn't short of the right tools. He had tools. Good ones, by his own assessment. Monitoring platforms, stakeholder systems, AI assistants, the whole lot. His problem was that his teams around the world wouldn't use them consistently. They di

By Paul Shotton, Advocacy Strategy Leadership has started asking public affairs teams a sharper question. Not just “what did you achieve?”, but “how do you know the work is doing anything?” It is a fair question, and a hard one — because advocacy rarely offers clean proof. The political process, as we put it in our training, is more like gears than a railway. Outcomes arrive through many hands, and you can seldom show that your action alone caused the result. That is why the

By Paul Shotton, Advocacy Strategy Public affairs functions are under more pressure than ever to show their value. Budgets are scrutinised, functions are professionalised, and dashboards, reporting templates and AI tools have made it easier than ever to generate numbers about the work. So it is worth asking a simple question before producing any of them: what is measurement actually for? Because the standard answer to why objective-setting goes badly — "people don't like KPIs

By Paul Shotton, Advocacy Strategy Something has shifted in how senior leaders ask public affairs teams to account for themselves. The question used to be “what are you working on?” Now it is closer to “what are you trying to change, and how will you know whether you are winning?” That is a harder question, and most teams cannot answer it in one breath. They can list activities — meetings taken, papers filed, consultations answered. What they struggle to state, cleanly, are t

By Paul Shotton, Advocacy Strategy A few years ago, my colleague and research collaborator Dr Adam Chalmers introduced me to a series of ideas drawn from computational linguistics that offered a different way of thinking about written advocacy. Adam was exploring how concepts such as readability, complexity, concision and action orientation could be used to evaluate the effectiveness of written communication in a more systematic way. Together with Alan Hardacre, we subsequent

By Paul Shotton, Advocacy Strategy This is not the first time I have written about workflows and use cases in this series, and it will not be the last. The topic keeps coming back because it is foundational: nothing else in AI adoption — tool choice, governance, scaling, agents — pays off if this layer is wrong. And it keeps being wrong in the same way. A new tool lands on the agenda, the discussion turns into a comparison of platforms, and the harder question quietly slips o

We have spent the last year getting clearer on what AI does to public affairs skills. Which tasks it automates. Which capabilities it amplifies. Which human advantages it makes more valuable by raising the baseline on everything else. We are developing frameworks that are sharper and that will help us navigate the years to come. The BestinBrussels 2026 AI survey — which lands on 25 June — will give us more context on what is being done across the profession in the EU. But cla

By Paul Shotton, Advocacy Strategy Across many years of working with public affairs teams in trade associations, in-house functions, and NGOs, one framework has come up more often than any other in our consulting work. We use it for setting priorities, for quantifying the impact of issues on the organisation, and as the spine of an annual public affairs plan. It is the means by which a team translates its ambition for the coming period into a clear cascade — from what we want

There is a conversation happening inside Public Affairs functions right now that almost always starts the same way. "We have the licences. People are using the tools. We ran a session on prompting. But honestly? It doesn't feel like we've actually changed anything." I hear this from Heads of Government Relations in Brussels, from VP-level PA leaders in multinationals, from Trade Association Directors managing increasingly stretched teams. And every time I hear it, my answer i

By Paul Shotton, Advocacy Strategy This weekend, while working through how AI is reshaping public affairs practice, I found myself returning to a chapter I co-authored with Arco Timmermans of Leiden University for the Research Handbook on Public Affairs. We argued that public affairs competence is multidimensional — it combines knowledge, skills, attributes, professional seniority and the ability to operate across different political, institutional and organisational contexts

By Paul Shotton, Advocacy Strategy A recent working group I joined with senior public affairs professionals included a discussion about late adopters. The conversation made me reflect on: how do you bring the rest of the team along? The participants were, almost by definition, early adopters. They had strong personal practice, several configured tools, and a clear sense of what AI is now capable of. The teams behind them looked very different. Some colleagues were not using A

By Paul Shotton, Advocacy Strategy Before deciding what your dashboard should look like, decide what decisions it needs to support. That shift changes everything — which data matters, which audiences need to be served, and how ambitiously to begin. Dashboards built without that clarity tend to be impressive at launch and gradually unused. Dashboards built around real decisions tend to improve continuously, because the teams using them understand why the data matters. The sect

THE STRATEGIC EDGE | Blog Series by Stefan Borst Most companies review their software licenses annually. They audit consulting contracts. They benchmark supplier costs. But ask a head of Public Affairs when they last rigorously evaluated their trade association memberships, and you’ll usually get a pause followed by something along the lines of “it’s complicated.” Association memberships are not social clubs. They are political instruments – and powerful ones if you manage

By Paul Shotton, Advocacy Strategy Two years ago, a demo of public affairs software would typically lead with coverage — which legislatures it tracked, which alerting rules it offered, how many documents it ingested per day. Today, the same demos lead with AI. Every vendor now has an intelligent summarisation feature, a policy assistant, a semantic search layer, or an agent that drafts reports on request. Some of these features are genuinely useful. Many are thin wrappers o

By Paul Shotton, Advocacy Strategy For the past two years, the headlines about technology employment have been uniformly grim. Oracle has announced thousands of job cuts. Block is shedding nearly half of its workforce. The so-called “magnificent seven” of American technology have barely grown their payrolls since 2022, and in San Francisco, overall employment is down three per cent. The easy explanation, repeated in boardrooms and op-eds alike, is that artificial intelligen

By Alan Hardacre, PhD Co-Founder Advocacy Academy, Advocacy Strategy Most Public Affairs functions have a data problem. They just don't know it yet — because the tools have been hiding it. Most Public Affairs and Government Relations teams do not have a data strategy. They have subscriptions. They have a monitoring platform, a CRM of sorts, a shared drive full of documents, and a collection of consultant reports landing in inboxes. Each of these contains genuinely valuable in

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,