Mel: [00:00:00] If you want to know what's happening in our industry, you can't just sit back and wait to be told. You have to get out there and get amongst it. I'm thinking courses, blogs, podcasts, LinkedIn content, and of course, industry conferences.

Now, last fortnight, I had the pleasure of emceeing the IABC APAC Fusion conference here in Brisbane. There were 34 speakers across the two days, and despite the huge amount of speakers and huge amount of time, there was a handful of very clear themes that shone through about where our profession is right now and where it's headed.

What were those themes? Stay tuned, because that's what today's episode is all about.

Hello, friend, and welcome to Less Chatter, More Matter, the communications podcast. I'm Mel Loy, and I'm recording this episode on the lands of the Yuggera and the Turrbal people here in Meanjin, Brisbane. Today, hot off the press, I'm sharing five trends that came through loud and clear at [00:01:00] our Asia-Pacific Regional Conference.

Some won't surprise you, but together they show how much our profession has shifted and what we need to prepare for in the very near future. So let's get into it. Trend number one, data-driven decision making. We now have oodles of data at our fingertips. AI can pull in and synthesise information from many, many sources in record time, and you can even set up agents to keep scanning for new insights and feeding them to you all the time But the real skill isn't using the tools.

It's being discerning with the data and drawing out the insights that matter to leaders, to your clients, and to your team members. Julia Lockland, she's a Victoria consultant and she's a former chapter president of IABC actually. She showed this beautifully in her session that was titled You Can't Automate Belief, and she used the example of a hypothetical company rolling out a new strategy and identified four things employees needed to believe in [00:02:00] order for that to be successful.

And then she showed how AI could test those beliefs, and she used a prompt that read, "Analyse this employee feedback engagement data and town hall transcripts. What evidence supports or challenges the four beliefs we need employees to have to adopt our business strategy?" And from there, she could use those insights to keep improving the rollout of the strategy.

My takeaway was we need to be all about the data, searching for it, interrogating it, and using it to strengthen our practice. The tools do the processing, but it's our brains that make sense of the insights, and it's us who shares them with stakeholders in ways that matter to them. And that's kind of what the second trend is about, which is become influential advisors.

Now, several speakers tackled this elephant in the room. What's our role if AI is doing so much of the work we used to do? And the answer was pretty clear. Stop doing the doing and become [00:03:00] influential advisors at the most senior levels. But of course, the million-dollar question is: how do we do that? Well, Petra Zink, who is a past guest on the show, you can go back and listen to a couple of episodes she's done with me actually.

She was saying that because AI is making output cheaper, we need to move closer to outcome. So that means less focusing on delivering tactics and more on helping audiences understand, feel confident, and act. She also drew a really great distinction between an expert and an authority, and she said an expert is someone who knows a lot, but an authority is someone who is known and respected for what they know.

And her challenge was turn something you know into something you are known for. Now, Trudy Rowley and Katie Bennett Stenton, they are from Victoria. They shared research they'd conducted on how communicators are valued, both by us and by leaders. And the one key insight that they really brought [00:04:00] home was that executives want an early warning system for what's coming.

They don't want a scoreboard of what's already happened, and they want evidence of business impact. So it is worth asking, are we reporting our impact in the way that executives actually need? Or are we just giving them dashboards of data that's already been done and dusted? Julissa Shuesby also focused on building our authority, but particularly in in-house roles, and she offered a really simple three-step plan, which I really liked, which was: stop the low-value work, elevate your strategic contribution, and focus on the greatest impact.

And she also challenged us to think about our own brand for a change. And having worked in-house, I know how easy it is to be so focused on the organization's brand or a leader's brand that we forget our own as a team. So she left us with two questions, which I think are really worth you grappling with.

And the first is: When a request comes into your team, what do you [00:05:00] deliver? Is it counsel and strategy, or is it documents? Because obviously, if it's the latter, you're not really providing a lot of value. And the second question: Where do you need to be most visible, beyond emails? Which meetings do you need to be in and with which stakeholders?

And then get yourself in those meetings. So that was number two, and this kind of brings us to trend number three, which was trust. Influence depends on trust, and trust sits at the heart of everything we do. We build it with stakeholders to get things done, we build it with audiences to achieve our business outcomes, and we build it with our brands so they can grow, and they can weather the storms when they hit.

Now, Dr. Donald Lim, who traveled from the Philippines, described communicators as architects of trust, which I love, and he shared seven laws of leading in communication. The first one, substance endures longer than shell. So this is that say-do gap, right? You gotta close it. Number [00:06:00] two was tone carries further than talk, and that's all about empathy in our communication.

Number three, presence commands more than position. So it's not just about role toi- titles, it's about how you show up. Number four, air cover matters more than safe space. So what he meant by this was our job is not to keep leaders safe, it's to make it safe for them to lead, which takes the courage to sometimes share some pretty uncomfortable truths.

Number five was dirty hands earn more trust than clean feet. "The world has enough thought leaders. We need more thought doers," he said. Number six was that drive reveals more than desire. Basically, values are easy to hold until they cost you money. And what is the price that your company is willing to place on keeping those values upheld?

And number seven is consistency outlasts brilliance every time. Now, notice that none of these mention AI or [00:07:00] writing skills or tactics. They're all about how we show up for ourselves and for others And trust also came up in the context of crisis communication. And David Imber, he's also been a guest on this show before, he made the point that crises are no longer just a big, unexpected bang.

More often, they're like what he calls a cancer that grows inside an organisation. Lots of small little things that get ignored or get passed over until they become a major issue that damages trust in leaders and the brand. We need to start looking for those early warning signals. And then the next day, Petra actually built on this when she talked about how trust compounds over time across many different touchpoints.

And we also had a crisis comms panel who made a similar point around trust in the context of relationships. So if you haven't built trusting relationships with journalists before a crisis, you are already on the back foot when it kicks off. And the same goes for trust with your brand [00:08:00] and leaders. You need a bank of trust in place before that shit hits the fan, not after Now trend number four, well, of course, it was all about AI.

It's the world we live in and it's moving so fast it's almost impossible to get up. But the trend is we have to get to know it and we have to get on top of it. Megan Thomas looked at how AI will change our roles and the skills we'll need, and she asked what our jobs could look like in 2030 with possibilities like an agent diplomat.

So that's somebody who negotiates between your AI agents and other people's AI agents. We could be corporate memory curators, so deciding what the company's AI remembers. We could be synthetic society researchers, which simulates a whole lot of different audience types and uses our comms to test there before a launch.

A digital twin manager, so governing executives AI doubles or, and, maybe and, reality [00:09:00] assurance director, so certifying what is actually human-made. And she also gave us a peek at her own setup. She has a whole team of agents and systems and apps working together to get things done. And if you want to know more, I highly recommend you reach out to her, have a look at what she shares on LinkedIn.

That's Megan Thomas. Now, our day one keynote was Brent Hill, who is the chief marketing officer for Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games. And he shared that his small team is encouraged to use AI ethically if it makes the job easier and faster because with a small team and the fast pace they're running at, they absolutely need to consider where they can use that to their advantage.

And Jamie van Leeuwen, who runs the agency Absolutely AI, he talked about hybrid ad campaigns where they mix traditional filming and creative techniques with AI rather than relying on AI alone. And it helps manage costs for things like changing backgrounds or adding items to a photo. But also his team c- can now produce product [00:10:00] imagery twice as fast at half the cost, which is pretty impressive.

But he was also honest about the challenges. We've got skills gaps, we've got companies with no AI roadmaps and of course, concerns about AI slop. And he noted that not using AI could also be a positioning tool for brands as well. So Dove, for example, has committed to never using AI to create or distort images of women.

So something to think about And amid all the AI talk, one final trend tied everything together, our humanity. Many speakers made the point that human judgment is what will continue to set us apart. Saeed Mohammed Aded shared a simple framework for discernment with AI. He called it the HIT test, H-I-T, which stands for honest, integrity, and trust.

So honest, is it true? Is it verified? And is the AI use appropriately disclosed? I for integrity. Is the output fair, [00:11:00] contextual, and aligned with what your organisation stands for? And the T for trust, would I personally stand behind the consequences of using AI output? And he made a point that really stuck with me.

AI may draft the speech, it can generate the video, it can anticipate the questions, it can model the crisis. But it can't take responsibility, it can't feel remorse, it cannot offer a sincere apology or give courage to a frightened room of people in front of you. And this actually links nicely with the session my friend Emma Boddington-Stubbs and I presented on.

We talked about five ways that you can stand out in an AI world, and they were all around that theme of humanity. So the first was volunteer. Emma is a serial volunteer, just ask her about it. But you can volunteer locally or in your own workplace, and it teaches you how different people and groups think and operate, which is gold when you're a strategic advisor.

Our second tip was get to the front line. So go out there, live a day in the life of your frontline [00:12:00] teams. Stop making assumptions about how they work, what they're worried about, how they communicate. Go live it with them. And that's when you'll actually build a bit of kudos with them as well. You can also then bring those insights back to the executive team from your first-hand lived experience.

The third is get outside communications. Get outside change. Go live in other sectors for a while and see what's happening. Um, so for example, I spend a lot of time in the fitness industry. Emma loves criminology and goes to criminology conferences where she's usually the only communicator in the room.

But that gives us all insights that other people do not have, and there's things we can always learn from these, these other sectors that we can bring back to our own. The fourth point we made was seek intentional discomfort. This is about auditing your own practices. What are you doing out of habit rather than because it's the best approach?

You've got to be curious about feedback, and feedback isn't always comfortable. But also putting yourself in places, safely of course, [00:13:00] that make you feel uncomfortable because they're just not the people you would normally be around, or they're not the places you would normally go. See what you can learn from those moments of intentional discomfort.

And the fifth tip we shared was teach others, because the best way to learn is to teach. Every time I've taught a workshop or something at a conference, I've always had to do a bit more research, so I learn something. It's how I created frameworks that I then used in my books, et cetera. But you don't have to do something that formal.

You could just run some lunch and learns for your teammates or other people in the business after you've been to a conference or, you know, if there's something that you notice that people are doing all the time in your business and you know an easy fix for it, teach them. It's a really good way also to show your value to the organisation And Tammy Bart, who is the owner of Black Ignited, took us further into that intentional discomfort idea, and she spoke about cultural intelligence.

Basically, go beyond cultural awareness. And through powerful stories from her own [00:14:00] life, she reminded us that relationships are the work. It is not about ticking boxes. It's about genuinely challenging what we do and being prepared to pay the cost of doing the right thing if it comes to that. So, it's time for your wrap-up of five trends from Fusion 2026, and the first was we need to use data to drive decisions.

So go find it, seek it out, it is everywhere. We have loads of it now at our fingertips. And use AI to help where you need to. Number two, become influential advisors. So that means being able to find the warning signals that the executives wanna see. It's about selling your own brand as well. Number three, build the trust before you need it.

This is about building trust in relationships with your customers, your people, your leaders. It's also about building trust in your brand, building trust with journalists before a crisis happens. Number four is, sorry, get to know AI. It's not going away, and you are going to need to show that you know how to use it [00:15:00] effectively and ethically.

And number five was hang on to your humanity. This is the thing that is going to set you apart, your discernment, your ability to have that gut feel that AI can't give you, and your ability to build sincere and genuine relationships with other people. And if there's one trend that's running through all five of these, it's this: The tools are changing fast, but our value lies in judgment, relationships, and courage, and that is what's going to carry us into the future.

All right, team, well, I hope you enjoyed that little download from IABC, uh, APAC conference from the last fortnight. As per usual, I would love to know if there's anything else you would love me to talk about on this podcast. We are coming to the end of our 200 episodes very soon, when we'll take a short break and then plan our seasons for next year.

So your ideas are gold right now. Send them through. But in the meantime, keep doing amazing things, and bye for now