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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,

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