A veteran marketing executive recounts an early lesson in misunderstanding who a public relations agency truly serves. After a major newspaper broke an embargoed product launch story days ahead of the agreed date, the executive demanded that the agency threaten to cut ties with the publication. Only later did it become clear that the agency’s most valuable assets were its relationships with reporters and editors, and that no single client could compel it to jeopardize those connections. The dynamic was not a simple single sided market in which the company was the only customer, but a multi sided one where the agency balanced many clients against a core network of media relationships it needed to protect.
That realization eventually broadened into a general rule about service providers and consultants. Public relations firms, lobbyists, architects, contractors and other vendors all maintain critical long term ties to gatekeepers, regulators, subcontractors and institutions that matter more to their ongoing business than any individual account. Most clients are just one of many, often a smaller one, and can be replaced if they become unreasonable or demand the impossible. The mistake many leaders make is to treat these relationships as purely transactional and to measure value only by the immediate service delivered, rather than by the opportunity to absorb the provider’s expertise and mental models.
The executive describes a later misstep when hiring a world class consultant to build distribution and manufacturing in Japan. The project worked operationally, but almost no institutional knowledge was retained, leaving the company dependent on a single expert and limiting its strategic options. In retrospect, the consultant should have been paid not only to execute, but also to teach how Japanese distribution worked, what mattered, and why. Founders frequently fall into the same trap, claiming a lack of time or interest and thereby capping their own learning. Some providers guard their methods as proprietary, but others will share if compensated appropriately, and those are the ones that help clients become better strategists and more effective partners.
The piece then shifts to how artificial intelligence agents are set to transform these service roles, starting with public relations. Today, public relations agencies already use artificial intelligence to draft initial versions of press releases, blog posts and social media updates, to customize pitches to journalists based on coverage history and interests, and to generate personalized email subject lines and body copy. Public relations artificial intelligence agents can monitor and scan millions of sources to track brand mentions, sentiment and competitor activity, detect emerging negative narratives, and forecast potential reputational threats weeks before they reach the mainstream. Bloggers and journalists, in turn, will rely on their own artificial intelligence tools to scan and filter incoming pitches, raising questions about how much personal connection they will sacrifice for efficiency in sorting through noise.
These applications are currently standalone tools, but they are moving toward end to end workflows in which artificial intelligence agents perform most tasks autonomously while humans supervise. Eventually they are expected to become just another class of internal, quickly built applications that in house marketing teams and even small businesses can spin up themselves. Companies that lag in adopting such tools will fall behind, and traditional public relations agencies will likely disappear or morph into providers of higher level services. Most artificial intelligence agents will operate as black boxes that deliver results without clear explanations, with no standard “explain how and why you did this” mode, raising concerns about whether they will truly make organizations smarter or simply generate more opaque output.
In this environment, core lessons for managers emerge. Service providers and consultants always maintain relationships that matter more than any single client, and they will preserve those relationships first. Clients are usually one of many, so assuming vendors work only for them is a mistake. Treating engagements as one way streets focused solely on deliverables squanders a strategic chance to learn how these experts think. Paying extra to have them teach their frameworks can make leaders better strategists and improve long term results. As future providers increasingly become artificial intelligence agents, clients will need to seek out those who combine these tools with strong human judgment and are willing to share how they use artificial intelligence effectively, so that companies can build their own capabilities instead of remaining permanently dependent.
