The Third
Presence

Do you know what I love about people? People. And do you know what I first treasured in the digital environment? The connection it gives us to people. A connection that stretches over time, over space and over distance. It allows us to start conversations and it was in the digital environment that my conversations with Toni Muzi Falconi began, allowing us to explore the purpose of public relations practice and how we might do some good.

From Toni’s Blog to PR Conversations, from Global Alliance meetings to World Public Relations Forum planning, in long hours from opposite ends of the world, they are conversations that have shaped my thinking on practice and allowed me to articulate the fundamental purpose of public relations. Our discussions began much as you might expect. Ever the provocateur, Toni had launched ‘Toni’s Blog’ and was railing against some professional positioning and I, tentatively and with great temerity, posted a comment on his blog in response to his question on the purpose of what we do.

I was amazed when he turned my comment into a post of its own. This was something that had never happened before and his generosity in sharing my thoughts was the start of a conversation — and cherished friendship — that has lasted more than 20 years.

My belief then, and now, is that public relations builds and sustains the relationships that organisations need to keep their licence to operate. That licence — social, economic, political you name it — is the permissions necessary to do the things that we do.

That purpose is supported, as illustrated in my PR Atom of Public Relations practice, through excellence in communication in all its forms, our organisational behaviours, their impact on stakeholders and society, the organisational courage to live up to pronounced values and, finally, developed understanding — the knowledge we share, the stories we tell, our empathy and the attitudes that surround our organisation, our stakeholders and communities of interest.

So that was the starting point for our dialogue and the years since have seen major changes in the datasphere, the digital air that we breathe, which oozes into every pore of our lives. In those early days of social media engagement, conversations were (mostly) still conducted with courtesy and dialogue punctuated with respect. Toni’s Blog became PR Conversations and, in 2011, when IBM’s Watson won Jeopardy, you could feel the wind change. Four years later, Toni and I met together at the Global Alliance gathering in Milan and we talked about the impact of emergent AI on organisational and interpersonal relationships. I’d raised the question and implications of artificial intelligence in public relations as part of the GA ethics review - I could see the storm coming - but sadly the subject was mansplained away in committee, so instead, Toni and I sat down and tried to figure out how best to prepare practitioners for the seismic changes yet to come.

That year saw the launch of OpenAI, the rise of Trump and the slow, bitter poisoning of conversation and dialogue on social media. The algorithms were deployed for dark deeds and most of us were happily handing over our data in exchange for that very human desire — connection. Why? Because people love people. We want to chat. We want to build relationships. We want to be real — even when we exist in the virtual.

Trouble is, our new realities feel increasingly unreal. We exist today in new and challenging dimensions of human and organisational relationships. How we manage and mitigate those relationships is bumped and badgered by what I often describe as the third wheel.

You know how in relationships when there’s another friend who always comes along, who never really gives you the space or time that you are hoping for? Well, for the last few years, that has been artificial intelligence in all its forms. It has been our third wheel, poking its nose in, peering round corners, being directed to keep us company or create frivolous things to distract rather than engage.

But AI is well past the point of being a third wheel, something that we can walk away from, or perhaps just have a tough conversation to enable it to go its own way. Today, artificial intelligence is the environment in which those relationships are formed, interpreted and sustained. Decisions that are taken are shaped by algorithmic systems and those systems routinely filter and sift their way through our connections and our communication, continually distorting the conversations that we begin together.

The relationship environment itself has changed in structural ways and practitioners work inside those conditions whether they recognise it or not. The consequence of this is that ‘old rules’ don’t apply. We have to sit and talk about this new relationship dimension, the reality that relationships must be navigated in spaces where automated systems are not third wheels that will exit and enter at your command. They have become the dominant third presence.

Practitioners operate inside the datasphere, with listening mediated by automated systems at all times. Responses generated often have no direct human involvement, so interpretation and intent are outsourced to technology. There is an old quote that is often seen in the social spaces, attributed to IBM back in the 1970s, with the theme that no computer should be allowed to make a decision.

Unfortunately, when it comes to artificial intelligence, computers are allowed to make decisions, and act on them, as we have moved rapidly and directly into this new agentic space with OpenClaw, Kimi K2.5 and many others now scratching their way to the surface.

All this combined means that the way trust forms between organisations, their stakeholders, their people, their communities — everyone with whom they interact — must manage and scale new relationship barriers, barriers created by organisations for profit, not progress and which inch ever higher thanks to artificial intelligence.

That starting point led to wider global conversations concerned with the responsible organisation and how listening, and how our actions, play such a significant part in the success, or otherwise, of our relationships and, subsequently, our licence to operate.

So 2026 sees double trouble for us because we have to learn and extend our role which now involves us in artificial intelligence and human relations. Our third wheel, now our third presence, is an intermediary between humans. It is, in some instances, a connection, but too frequently it is a disconnection, simply because the technology is programmed to interfere.

It is programmed to dominate, not in a Terminator sense, but in the scraping of conversations, the distortion of accuracy, and in being culpable for sowing the seeds of untruth, which lead to misunderstanding and miscommunication and misinformation and misinterpretation. All of this together deepens polarisation, ongoing loss of social cohesion and a fraying of boundaries that take us from crisis to polycrisis to permacrisis.

Human relationships are never perfect. There will always be moments of compromise and pauses in dialogue. One of the most valuable aspects of any relationship is the ability to disagree, to understand another’s perspective and the intent behind an action. Excellence in communication supports the relationship, good behaviours strengthen it and understanding forges the bonds that protect it.

New roles in our newly-formed AI wrapped world will see us maintain the responsibilities I have touched on, creating meaning and making sense of environments where interpretation can occur without any relationship being in place. Pseudo-relationships emerge, with automated systems producing responses, classifying sentiment and detecting patterns (which is their superpower) but they cannot understand the human patterns of understanding.

Meaning still exists and develops among people through lived experience. But as that lived experience is diminished in favour of existence within the datasphere, the pressure increases to replace human interaction with automation principally by those who develop the artificial intelligence models and tools and, as I have said and will keep saying, they are largely motivated by profit rather than progress.

So we have this awful techno-stew of relationship challenges that humans have never faced before. Tim Marshall, a highly respected practitioner here in New Zealand, has often quoted the saying that we operate where issues collide. I have added to that in the last few years, in that today we operate where realities collide.

The algorithmic systems, the technology that is developed, the artificial intelligence agents that are let loose, create competing realities that lead to disconnection and polarisation rather than connection and healthy relationships.

All of this might seem a bit disconnected when it comes to practice and the pragmatic considerations that many in the consultancy world will have, given the dominance of old 20th century models centred on publicity or promotion. The bad news is that world — with all its faults and promise — does not exist anymore and, if practitioners persist in chasing the past, tactic by tactic, they will unfortunately cease to have any relevance.

Another one of my sayings when it comes to artificial intelligence is that you cannot put an engine on a horse to make it go faster. You will just end up killing the horse. In the context of artificial intelligence, what we are doing, once again, is trying to retrofit new technology to old models of practice, but it is simply not going to work.

Great and deliberate harm has been done by the creation of competing realities, by the dominance of particular organisations and companies and by the emergence of political agendas that seek to bolster power, money and profit.

Our global operating system has fragmented. Artificial intelligence has created a novel continental drift, with the world split between providers of models on one side, the United States, and on the other, China. The dominance of US AI providers has led to the emergence of an oligarchy of intelligence, not just an information oligarchy.

This means that power is concentrated among a small number of technology firms. They have sway over how artificial intelligence is developed. We see public discourse increasingly under private ownership, influenced and controlled by those who have purchased the social assets and hidden them away from democratic oversight.

That leaves us in a position where the ethical implementation of artificial intelligence is pushed down to the practitioner, while the owners go unregulated. We are not equipping practitioners to manage these situations and it continues to undermine our ability to function as a society.

Even though social cohesion has been dismantled and cultures undermined, we still need to function. We need to feed ourselves, and we need to work out ways we can live in peace and people do not go without.

But the normalisation of AI slop and churn triggered by the behaviours of our so-called leaders, (in much the same way that dialogue was drip-fed poison in 2015), this has changed the way that we engage with each other at the most basic of human levels. From leaders to locals, a stuffy anger stilts conversations and stifles thoughtful conversation.

I have lost count of the number of posts I see where people gripe and moan and accuse each other of slapping up another artificial intelligence-generated post. Yes, we know - and we can see it too — and for some it is a good thing as it helps them to express their thoughts in a way they may not have been able to do previously. The frustration comes not just from the language but a shift in the rhythm of human recognition. The beat that sits behind the words we share is broken by AI, homogenised and spat out willy-nilly by large language models which are not trained to ‘know better’.

Language matters, because language is the mechanism through which behaviour is normalised and through which the ‘acceptable’ is shifted and changed. This causes us to discover ways to mitigate the reputational damage and the relationship damage that is being done by artificial intelligence — or to be accurate, the humans behind AI.

The technology spread like wildfire when it was released into the wild by OpenAI in 2022, a commercial decision that roared into collective consciousness and upended other norms with its thunderous arrival. General availability meant AI is embedded in our lives far more quickly than social media ever was. Collaborations among the providers meant those using Microsoft had AI at their fingertips before they even knew AI existed. Our own gullibility as humans has allowed us to be pushed, almost blindly, towards widespread adoption without fully recognising the consequences it brings.

And — as the influencers say — ‘here’s the secret’. We don’t have to implement it. We don’t have to use it uncritically. We can use it to support the work that we do, we can use it to improve how we work, we can use it to benefit others and we can draw on our ability to advocate to ensure that there is sufficient oversight or shared control of the technology.

But we cannot continue to allow ourselves to be pushed into multiple — and increasingly — hideous realities constructed on our behalf that see us denied jobs, or housing, or health care, or insurance, or food, or shelter because of embedded algorithmic bias and dumb data that should have been dumped years ago. We need to create realities where the technology supports us rather than undermines our lives and favours the control and exploitation of humanity by a small number of very powerful individuals.

So what can practitioners do? Given what we can do, given our capabilities, what should we do? This was a question that Toni and I discussed 20 years ago. Circumstances have changed dramatically and our conversation today would differ in many respects but fundamentally, one thing has not changed and that is the relationship and its central position in our work. If we, as many practitioners tend to do, ignore this focal point, then we will not have a profession to pursue in the very near future.

We need to turn our attention to the ways in which we can mediate human relationships, organisational relationships, and artificial intelligence and human relationships, so that we act as a balance and a guide for that ‘third presence’ in whatever form it might take. Could be a car that takes you to the hospital. Could be the robot that does your blood test. Might be the algorithm that sets the prices for your food or the one that refuses you that job. We must help our organisations re-engineer the way that they operate. Remember, you can’t put an engine on a horse to make it go faster because you will end up killing the horse.

Management disciplines, governance practices, all of the steady processes that people became accustomed to in the latter half of the 20th century are gone. There were many inconsistencies in those models and many improvements to be made but that horse has bolted and the models are gone. So when we talk about public relations being a management discipline, it’s that old horse again — there are agents being deployed, as I write, instructed to act as managers, to act as decision-makers. If we insist on keeping our position by that particular mast, we will find ourselves hoist by our own petard.

Were Toni and I to start a conversation today, both of us would probably suspect that the other was, in fact, artificial intelligence. The only way we might prove ourselves would be through some magnificent display of illogical thought that allowed us to recognise the differences we have and the spaces we share.

Today, I was looking at a video that purported to explain how you could get an avatar to reveal itself on screen. How much truth there is in this, I do not know, but apparently if you are in conversation with an avatar in a Zoom call or similar environment, and you ask it to put three fingers in front of its face quickly and simply, it will not be able to do it. We have very limited means of determining what is real and what is not.

I have used digital twins in training and engagement for the last four years or more and they are very useful. But for many people, this new engagement reality means they will not know they are engaging with an avatar, so they would never even think to say, ‘pop three fingers in front of your face so I can check if you are real’. But we need to check otherwise we could end up signing away millions like the poor person who ended up in a meeting with avatars they believed to be colleagues.

It is a very confusing world and, when we look at future practice, there is much to be explored and developed, particularly on behalf of our younger practitioners. A great deal of debate has gone into what we are going to teach them. This idea that artificial intelligence can take the place of the intern or the young practitioner. Well, yes, if you try to bolt your new employee to the horse or make it ride an old one, it will be a hard slog for them.

But the reality they can explore is different to the initial experiences those currently ‘in charge’ had when they first entered the working world. Where we can nurture our future talent is by helping them understand how fluid the environment is today, guide them towards discovery and trust them with a compass so that they can be the ones who navigate us forward.

When we have had the chance to talk, either in person or virtually, via blog or message or by some other means, the conversations I have had with Toni have inevitably been long. They have been rich, informative and challenging, and his gift for connection and collaboration is one that Toni has shared for, I think, his whole life.

That ability to prompt us into conversation, to provoke us into reaction and thought, to pique our curiosity — these are great gifts. It is with genuine gratitude that I have engaged in conversations with Toni over many years and I am thankful for every word we have exchanged.

In the spirit of good conversations, I will wrap this contribution here, because while Toni and I might discuss these things until the cows come home, I am sure you have other things to turn your attention to — not least the many other contributions to this space. But in parting, I would thank you for reading, listening or engaging with this piece and ask you to think about the future.

Think about the way you are going to work in this world and mediate artificial intelligence and human relationships, minimise harm and help your leadership team, your organisation, whoever it may be, to act responsibly and in the best interests of those we serve, and not to display the kind of corporate cowardice that has, unfortunately, been all too common over the last twelve to fifteen months. I would urge you to start good conversations with others, conversations triggered by serendipity or you might be nervous about joining. Don’t be shy — those conversations will lead to learning and friendship of the very best human kind.