Terrie Ard returns to discuss the findings of the 2026 M.Cast™ Trends Report. She explains the importance of adopting a "futurist mindset" and looking for signals and patterns of change to anticipate what is coming next, rather than simply reacting to the present.

Terrie explains the concept of the "Invisible AI Revolution," predicting that artificial intelligence will soon move from a novelty tool to transparent infrastructure, much like the internet and electricity have in the past. Because of this shift, an organization's true competitive advantage will not be the technology itself, but rather "durable skills" — distinctly human capabilities like critical thinking, empathy, and strategy.

Abbie and Terrie also discuss the trend of "Verified or Vulnerable," highlighting why proving trust is a business imperative in an era of skepticism and misinformation. Terrie offers practical advice for leaders on how to use third-party validation and data transparency to earn that trust and how to apply the report’s framework to their 2026 marketing plans.

Key Takeaways

1. Think Like a Futurist: Success requires looking for patterns and implications to act on trends before they become mainstream, shifting focus from "what's now" to "what's next".
2. The Invisible AI Revolution: We are approaching a point where AI will become "invisible" infrastructure, seamlessly embedded into business operations rather than functioning as a standalone tool.
3. The Human Competitive Advantage: As AI becomes a commodity, the organizations that win will be those that prioritize human strengths—such as critical thinking, strategy, and authentic storytelling.
4. Verified or Vulnerable: In an age of deepfakes and misinformation, reputation alone is not enough; brands must provide "verifiable proof" through data, certifications, and real customer testimonials to earn trust.

About the Guest

As Partner, President & COO, Terrie Ard leads the strategic direction and growth of Moore, a future-forward agency, including key initiatives, partnerships, and client development. With a passion for collaboration and culture building, Terrie oversees the Moore Team, boasting a 92% retention rate. Her leadership and insight have propelled the agency to achieve a remarkable 98% client retention rate, positioning it as a top 50 marketing agency nationally and top 200 globally.

With 30 years of marketing and business strategy experience, Terrie has been instrumental in leading the integration of artificial intelligence into the agency's operations, client servicing, and product development, enhancing innovation and efficiency in marketing campaigns and internal processes. Terrie's expertise in corporate positioning, branding, and crisis communications, combined with her passion for innovation, has solidified her reputation as a visionary leader in the industry.

A graduate of Florida State University with a bachelor’s degree in communications, Terrie is Accredited in Public Relations (APR) and a Certified Public Relations Counselor (CPRC). She has been recognized by Florida Trend as one of the top 500 most influential leaders. She is a recipient of the Florida Public Relations Association Stanley Tait Award for Leadership, the American Advertising Federation Silver Medal for outstanding industry contributions, and recognized by PR NEWS as a Top Changemaker in the nation.

About the Hosts

Abbie Fink is president of HMA Public Relations in Phoenix, Arizona and a founding member of PRGN. Her marketing communications background includes skills in media relations, digital communications, social media strategies, special event management, crisis communications, community relations, issues management, and marketing promotions for both the private and public sectors, including such industries as healthcare, financial services, professional services, government affairs and tribal affairs, as well as not-for-profit organizations.

Dr. Adrian McIntyre is a cultural anthropologist, media personality, speaker, and strategic communications consultant for PR agencies and marketing firms. He's lived in over 30 countries and spent more than a decade in the Middle East and Africa as a researcher, journalist, communications adviser, media spokesperson, and storytelling consultant. He earned a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a Fulbright scholar and National Science Foundation fellow. Adrian helps agency leaders strengthen their positioning, sharpen their messaging, boost their visibility, and win new clients by replacing impersonal, intrusive and ineffective marketing tactics with authentic human conversations.

PRGN Presents is brought to you by Public Relations Global Network, the world’s local public relations agency. Our executive producer is Adrian McIntyre. The show is produced by the team at Speed of Story, a B2B communications firm in Phoenix, AZ.

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From the Public Relations Global Network, this is PRGN Presents. I’m Adrian McIntyre.

And I’m Abbie Fink, President of HMA Public Relations in Phoenix, Arizona and a founding member of PRGN. With public relations leaders embedded into the fabric of the communities we serve, clients hire our agencies for the local knowledge, expertise and connections in markets spanning six continents across the world.

Our guests on this biweekly podcast series are all members of the Public Relations Global Network. They will discuss such topics as workplace culture, creative compensation and succession planning, the importance of sustainability and environmental, social and governance programs, crisis communications, and outside of the box thinking for growing your business.

For more information about PRGN and our members, please visit prgn.com. And now let’s meet our guest for this episode.

I’m Terrie Ard, President and COO of The Moore Agency. We are a communications and marketing agency based in Tallahassee, Florida. We’ve been in business 33 years and we have team members that span across everything from communications, digital, public affairs, crisis communications.

Some of my favorite topics! One of the things that your agency is known for is your forecasting report, the M.Cast™ Trends Report. And I’m intrigued by research in general because it’s not where my brain typically goes. I like to just dive right in. So I’m always happy when someone else takes on the heavy lift and does some of that deep dive into particular topics. But what was kind of the inspiration behind the decision for Moore to make this investment in this work?

And what were some of the findings, maybe in this year’s study that might have surprised you or were a little bit different than, you know, what you did in last year’s, because that’s one of the best parts of research, is to do some compare and contrast.

Well, Moore has produced the M.Cast™ Trends Report for three years now. And Abbie, I love your question of where did this start? And I have to give the credit to one individual that I crossed paths with about 15 years ago. We represent Ford Motor Company and Ford has a futurist on their leadership team. And at that time her name was Cheryl Connolly. And I had the opportunity to engage with Cheryl on many fronts through our work and seeing how she approached strategy and recommendations to leadership team based on thinking like a futurist.

And so I learned a lot about what does that thinking mean? And from that moment, it was really my goal to go out and help other leaders to think like a futuristic, you know, think about what’s next rather than reacting to what’s now. And I think, you know, she said it Best of a futurist is more about looking for signals of change, looking for patterns, understanding the implications, acting on something before it becomes mainstream. So our M.Cast™ Trends Report really aims to do that for leaders and employees to all get into that futurist mindset and to think about these trends and how can they be applied to everyday strategy and approach and implementation.

So to think like a futurist really has to put all preconceived notions to the side, right? You have to open up your, your thought process and say anything is possible, anything is doable if we’re going to think towards the future. And you know, if, if you were introduced to this concept, you know, 15 years ago in your work with your client, we could have, well, maybe she could have predicted the things that we are looking at today that are so much a part of our everyday society. But you know, the, the, this idea of artificial intelligence and the impact that AI is having on all, all aspects of our life. Certainly as communicators we are maybe a little bit more in tune to its impact and the role that it can play in our world.

And what, as the human element still needs to be considered. But what are we seeing as it relates to AI into the new year? Are there changes that we need to be aware of? What is this going to be, this competitive advantage in terms of understanding and working with AI and having it be a part of our everyday culture?

Well, I think it’s absolutely fascinating what is transpiring with AI. And we know AI has been around for decades, but now it is mainstream and so there’s more patterns, there’s more signals, and even more important, there’s data driven insights that are telling us where AI will go next. So in our M.Cast™ Trends Report, our first trend that we spotlight is the invisible AI revolution. And this is really where technology becomes transparent.

I like using the analogy of in the ‘90s when websites started, right? It was what is your website www.or it was, I have a web banner. It was, you had to be intentional because it was new and different. And now websites are every aspect of an organization. One of the most powerful marketing tools is embedded across every aspect of how an organization has to think and has to deliver a product or service to their audience.

And so our prediction is that the invisible AI revolution is upon us where AI will start to be embedded so much into the operations and functions of organizations that it becomes more transparent. Now we will start to see this shift even more in 20 26. The patterns are there to tell us that. But the data is also there on that front.

So when you say transparent. And I think the tough part of the conversation around AI for me is as communications professionals, we understand to the best of our ability, we understand what AI is, we understand the importance of the transparency, why we need to, you know, humanize any of the content that we’re getting from AI, why we need to fact check all these things, because we work in that space, but because it’s becoming so much a part of everyday operations.

Our, our business partners, our clients may not have that, that same level of understanding. To the extent that they may say, I can just AI that and that’ll be good enough. Well, we know it’s not good enough. So understanding what it means is very different than applying it in everyday work. And how we make that transition from it being a tool to something that provides us with a competitive advantage and how it can be something that we communications professionals work with our organizations, our clients, to use this tool to elevate in the competitive advantage. Right.

And it isn’t just, I’m going to ask AI or any platform to write this document. The strategy, the understanding, the background, all has to feed into the technology in the first place.

That’s right. It is a tool. But Abbie, I like your phrasing of the competitive advantage. And I believe that that competitive advantage at the forefront has to be the human connection that ensures the usage of AI keeps at the forefront the brand or organization’s authenticity and how they’re relevant with their audience. So our differentiator isn’t really the ability to use AI, really. It’s about taking into account, you know, what is the adoption of AI so that that uniquely human strength of critical thinking and strategy and emotion and leadership can combine with that AI tool and technology.

And we hit on this in the M.Cast™ report in terms of durable skills, right? There’s a rise on those durable skills. There also has to be a rise on the upskilling of use of AI. But at the forefront has to be the strategy and critical thinking that is driving the machine of AI. And that’s really where we will see the greatest competitive advantage for organizations is when they keep at the forefront those distinctly human capabilities that will ensure you have the edge, because the commodity is going to be, everyone will have access to AI.

You know, I think historically, and I’m struck by parallels between this AI revolution and earlier technologies that followed a similar path. In other words, they started out being revolutionary, but then they became invisible because they were just part of literally everything we do. A lot of people have talked about electricity. There was a time when electricity was revolutionary. People were scared about it. But then, now electricity is just in everything.

And you don’t think to yourself, “the competitive advantage I have is that my stuff runs on electricity.” Right? It’s what you do with it. But the one that I was thinking about the other day was even older than that. Double entry bookkeeping. Sometime in the 13th century, 14th century, probably in Italy, some folks worked out a system of accounting that had, you know, every transaction has two affects two accounts. You know, it comes out of one, goes into another.

This is part of what we would now call this commercial revolution. It’s the foundation of modern capitalism. Every bank that you’ve ever used assumes this, right? QuickBooks. Xero. It doesn’t matter what tool you use, they’re going to use this system with a chart of accounts and all this stuff. So the competitive advantage you have in business is not that you do your books with double entry accounting, right, but that your business has been optimized for profitability because of your, you’re. You’re able to track these transactions and do other things.

I think AI is kind of like that. There’s a lot of hype about it, but eventually it just. The real question, as you said, Terry, becomes, okay, but what’s your actual competitive advantage? You know, what’s your differentiation? What sort of innovation can you now do? Because this is incorporated in anything, is that calling that invisible? I think is a little counterintuitive. But is that kind of what you’re. You’re getting at there?

Well, it’s two parts, I think. Yes, Adrian, you know, the point of the competitive advantage is the human thinking that will be combined with AI. But it’s also how organizations will have AI running aspects of operations and functions. And once that is embedded within the organization, and we already see this in some of our technology tools we use, it has AI embedded in. And right now they’re promoting this is driven by AI, but there will be a day where that will not even be promoted. Just like double data entry is not even discussed anymore. So, you know, I think there’s many aspects to this, but the bottom line is that those distinctly human capabilities that we bring to the table, if we take 10 people and give them all the same North Star to aim for and say, now go use AI to come up with what is your best strategy.

You’re going to get 10 different strategies, and the best one is going to be likely from the person that has the highest critical thinking and the best Strategy, the best empathy of understanding an audience and how to relate and to reach them. And so in our M.Cast™ report, so much of this report is about exactly that. How can we best reach our audiences, our customers, in a way that they want to be engaged with. That is an underlining tone throughout this entire report.

And if we, using these examples of, you know, how we’ve progressed, you know, the, the we had to learn how to trust in the process, right? We have trusted for the most part. We trust when we go to a website that, that, that is a accurate and information shared there is truthful. We know how to find the websites now. We don’t need the www. We don’t even actually need to know the exact name of the organization to be able to find it.

But we as consumers have, in our, whatever way we have, have figured out a way to trust what we’re finding. We, we, we can pick up some of the cues that a site might be a little bit vulnerable or however it will be. So one of the things in the, in the report was this concept of verified or vulnerable and why we have to be looking at proving that we’re trustworthy or, you know, somehow indicating that in this particular document or campaign that this, this was addressed by the human behind it.

You know, if you play around with AI enough, you know that it, you know, it isn’t 100% factual all the time. It’s, it’s accur as the information that’s out there. It does oftentimes have, I laugh at the word hallucinations, but it has, you know, things that it doesn’t know. So how do we, you know, if we’re, if this is going to become such an important part of our, our work and society as a whole, how do we prove that what is being produced by us is trustworthy enough? Is it, can, is it, have we verified or are we making ourselves more vulnerable by using these tools now that are so readily available to us?

Yeah, Abbie, at the core of this, people want proof before they believe. And that is a tenet that has always been at the forefront. But now in this era of misinformation and also AI generated content in a hyper way, in our world, consumers are more skeptical than ever. So trust is now the new business imperative. And without trust, we know that even the best products, the best marketing campaigns will fail.

If your audience doesn’t trust that you will deliver or that you will drive to what their needs are, the best marketing campaign will not overcome that. So this verifiable proof becomes real. Critical in this era of misinformation. And I want to take a minute to really explain what is verifiable proof. We hear this from a technology standpoint, from a marketing standpoint, and you know, it’s real simple. It’s just evidence that can be independently confirmed, right?

Facts, certifications, rankings, all of these things start to build in to this verifiable proof. And so I think about, you know, how can organizations really put into the forefront of their strategic plans and their marketing plans building more of this verifiable proof into their implementation. Show the transparency, share that data openly of, you know, how did you arrive at a certain outcome or a certain product?

Like bring the audience behind the curtain on that. Show the metrics, show the details, show the performance results that makes brands feel more authentic. It also is that side of transparency that audiences love. You know, another way to do this is to build in that third party validation. As organizations, where can you go to a trust trusted source that can be your third party voice and really give you the applause versus yourself giving you the applause.

So whether it’s industry rankings or awards, or even partnerships with like minded business organizations, how can you build that into your third party validation? And then the final point and tip I would suggest is highlight those real voices, your customers, your audiences that have had a great engagement. Bring those testimonials to the forefront. That is yes, third party endorsement, but there’s nothing richer than that testimonial of I’m a real person and I had a great experience.

So thinking about the report which is chock full of really, really good data. What can business leaders do right now to take this information and you know, translate that into a tangible strategy today? What, what are some of the things at top level that would say these are things that really, you know, strong business leaders who want that competitive advantage. These are what you can start implementing right now.

We tried to make this turnkey in the MCASH trends report of pulling out two major aspects for each of the seven trends. And one aspect is the why. Why is this a trend? And the second aspect is so what’s going to happen next? And at more we really subscribe to that philosophy of what’s next. And so within each of the trends we talk about the why and what’s next. Leaders can take just those two aspects and overlay those to their 20 26 marketing plans.

Think about it in terms of how you’re establishing your goals and objectives. What does your audience really want and think and need and where can you best reach them. And then when it comes down to communication channels and the implementation of your message through those channels to reach an audience, you know, take the why and the what’s next of these seven trends and apply them throughout your marketing plan.

You know, we presented and launched the M.Cast™ Trends Report here in Florida at the Future of Florida Forum, and from that stage we heard lots of response about the report. You know, the genuine curiosity of how is AI going to further impact industries? AI did dominate that conversation as a response to the report, both on the ethical considerations and how do we find balance and make sure we have that combination of automation and authenticity.

But what I loved the most as the response was several leaders shared this report with their team members and I think that’s really where the magic happens. You know, Share this in a staff meeting. Send the link out to your team because everybody will read these seven trends and digest it a little different. It’s chock full of data and research and insights and yes, patterns that help us to think about what’s next and how can we apply that to our marketing and business strategy.

Thanks for listening to this episode of PRGN Presents, brought to you by the Public Relations Global Network.

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