Nick Leighton returns to the podcast to talk about how artificial intelligence is revolutionizing public relations.

He explains his concept of the "Narritect," a person who designs and engineers brand messages, similar to how an architect develops blueprints.

As AI accelerates content creation, brands risk drowning in content and starving for clarity. The Narritect's task is to construct coherent narratives across PR, marketing, and leadership communications, turning insight into strategy.

Key Takeaways

1. The job of the "Narritect" is to design, engineer, and structure brand messages, elevating PR professionals closer to leadership roles.
2. AI assists in research and drafting but cannot replace the nuanced insights and strategic decisions made by seasoned professionals.
3. AI's ability to tailor messages to different cultural contexts is powerful, yet human interpretation remains crucial.
4. The increasing role of AI in communications challenges entry-level positions, emphasizing the value of experienced professionals.
5. Successful brands will effectively merge clear, simple, human narratives with AI-driven content creation strategies.

About the Guest

Nick Leighton is the founder and CEO of NettResults, an award-winning Middle East-based public relations agency launched in 1999 with offices in Dubai, Abu Dhabi & Riyadh. He has over 25 years of experience in media relations and marketing and has lived and worked in the United States, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. He has represented the public image of Fortune 500 companies, some of the largest non-profit organizations in the world, political parties, and members of royalty. Nick's latest bestseller is available in paperback, Kindle, and Audible: The AI Effect: How Artificial Intelligence Is Rewriting the Rules of Public Relations.

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.

Hi, my name is Nick Leighton, the founder and CEO of NettResults Middle East, a media and marketing company that does work throughout the Middle East region.

Nick, you were kind enough to ask me to contribute to a book that you have recently published called The AI Effect, How Artificial Intelligence is Rewriting the Rules of Public Relations. And the idea here that you are putting forth is that we, those of us that use AI or are considering it, really need to stop thinking about it, you know, as a disruption and how to think about it as part of our toolkit and that we need to really be thinking strategically about developing our strategies using it. And you have created a term called the “Narritect.” And I'd like you to talk a little bit about what that means and what you think about it as a strategy in terms of how we are going to start or how we should be starting to think about what AI can do for businesses.

Sounds great. Let's jump into that. So I think traditionally, over the last year or so, a lot of agencies, a lot of PR folks, a lot of professionals in marketing have been using AI and the generative functions that are there. And they've been creating more content, just more content. And so this is a look at, let's be a little bit more strategic. So what is a narrow tech? It's someone really who designs and engineers the brand and the messages. So it's the rigor of an architect that brings it in and develops a blueprint that's where I’m trying to elevate pr walls to be so right now brands are drowning in content but they're really starving for clarity and the fact that we're using ai to generate more and more content does not help, AI has accelerated the noise, but the narrative becomes more of a competitive edge. So Narritect really builds coherently across PR, marketing, comms, leadership, messaging. It's not copywriting. It's really building that structure of storytelling so we have better outcomes.

Who is the Narritect in an organization?

Nice. So that's where we're trying to elevate the PR pro to. It's someone who doesn't just write a press release it's not traditional pr announce react rinse and repeat the narrative is someone who's building structure so they're much closer to the CEO so that's where I’m challenging someone who works in the world of pr or media to be it's you it's the role that you are holding how to use ai to that best advantage.

So we've talked a long time, you know, that communications professionals should be in the room, should be at the table, should have a seat with the C-suite. And this idea really brings that home even stronger, that we have this tool at our disposal, but the back-end information, you know, as you say, the developing of the blueprint is more than what the outcome is, is there's got to be a plan to get to that. And that mindset that we should be bringing to the table, the one that comes with your communications professional, really is about and should be about designing the narrative, thinking about the impact it's going to have. Yes, we have these tools that help us do things quicker, maybe more efficiently, but nothing can replace the human element. I mean, somebody still has to start with putting that content in before we can take content out. And so really that Narritect individual is really the smart person in the room that looks at what we've got and how do we maximize what we have at our disposal.

For sure. So I think the question is, how does AI support or transform narrative creation? So AI can accelerate ideation, but it can't replace that insight. It's a co-pilot. It's not the architect. so it's perfect for drafting for researching for organizing complex matters ai reveals patterns the customer behavior research it can help with sentiment but it allows the Narritect that it allows you the professional to spend more time on strategy less on the admin but you still need a human to decide what the story should be.

So can you, you know, maybe share as you were putting together this book and you were reaching out to members of the Public Relations Global Network and other communication professionals to sort of wrap their head around, you know, where this was going? You must have learned some interesting case studies and examples of, you know, really in action how this concept is working. Can you share maybe a good example of how this is being put into, you know, a real world communication strategy.

Sure. So let's take the strategy first. So what does an architect process look like when we're working with a client? And this is not just from our agency, from other agencies around the PRGN network. So discovery, extracting the soul of the business or the product or the brand. And yes, they have souls, but we need to get hold of that. And then we need to build messaging, define pillars, proof points. That's the narrative arc that we need to work on. and then we need to create a map so how do we tell the top the middle of the funnel so the whole sales needs to be around this not just the pr and then how do we integrate that into pr sales marketing leadership comms and then we activate that by rolling it out using media but also using events, digital marketing, etc and then we've got to review everything so that's the strategy so let's bring that into real life so right now as we record this we're working on a campaign for a client. They have used some global research. They've looked at 6,884 articles, which have been published across the Nature family of journals at the beginning of this year. And they've looked at all these scientific discoveries and what MLs, what machine learnings have been used. So from that, at a global scale, they can see which countries, which technologies are being used the most in the scientific world. But if we look at that, there's a lot of information, first of all, to understand. But now if we want to tell that story, obviously different countries want different messages. So right now we're using AI to find the right messaging for the US as opposed to China or India or the Middle East. And then the great thing about PRGN is obviously we have local people in those countries who can take those findings, but localize them and make it resonate before they reach out to the right media. So I think that kind of explains the kind of architecture we use.

Can you dig into the details there just a little bit, obviously anonymizing things as necessary, but this idea that AI is finding the story angle in these culturally embedded contexts is intriguing to me as a linguist and as an anthropologist. This whole idea of narrative design, I think is something humans have thought was exclusive to us. In other words, you know, the old chestnut about, you know, if you had a thousand monkeys riding in a room, would they ever produce Shakespeare, you know, whatever. We have sort of put human creative output on a pedestal. And what you're pointing to here is a kind of AI assisted creation process. How did that actually work?

So I think the biggest mistake that we see companies making is they're telling their story instead of telling a story that the audience sees it as themselves. So we now have the tools to allow us to break that down and to create that. So previously, we're given a lot of information. Okay, so what does our company or the brand we're representing really want to get out to the world? That's one point of view. What I'm saying is now let's take that, let's think about that through a different lens. AI is great for doing that. It's a great co-pilot. It can discuss with you what's working, what isn't working, or then take you through a different lens to look at the same information. So that's where AI really has a great power. And if we do that correctly, we're not confusing features with values. We're finding the right message that's going to resonate. But it allows us also to have one clear messaging house, an overwriting message, but just understanding it from different cultural points of views.

So let me just push on this just a little bit, because I think you're onto something and I'm skeptical at the same time.

Sure. Sounds good.

You said that AI can help identify the resonance, and that's where I am genuinely curious and skeptical. AI doesn't have history. It doesn't have experiences. It's never had its heart broken. It's not been made fun of on the schoolyard. And whether that happens in Chicago or China, there are some human experiences factored in through cultural and linguistic overlays. So you're using the machine learning algorithms to identify story arcs that would move someone in a human way in Beijing or Boston differently. And I'm just not clear on how that happens.

Okay, great question. And I think it's important that we kind of delve into how could that happen. If you think back at the most prominent book you read that affected the most as a child. So some things that happened to you as a young adult that affects your frame of references. Yes, getting bullied on a schoolyard might be one of those elements. But is that feeling correctly portrayed in any written literature anywhere? And if it is, then that's a reference point that your AI could be learning from. So in effect, there aren't many things that we've experienced that is not written about in some way, shape or form, and from a cultural perspective. So if you are training your AI correctly, then you should get the right results. So let me visualize that for you. There are several different AIs that can create images for you today. One comes from the US, one comes from Germany, one comes from China. These are just the largest players. I'm even mentioning their names. These are platforms you go to and create an image. Now, if I said to those AIs, create an image of a classic car that a 50-year-old male would want to purchase. If it was in the US, it's going to have a US car. It's going to have one of those maybe classic 1960s cars that people drive around in.

Yeah, a Camaro, a Mustang. Something like that.

Exactly. I'm thinking Mustang, right. Okay. Now, if I go to Germany, chances are it's going to be a brand new Audi. And if I go to China, it's going to be a different car again. So these different learning materials are cultural. So we just need to pull the right cultural narratives and be able to build from them.

Well, and I think for me, that maybe is really where the concept of this, you know, the humanization, the Narritect comes in. Yeah. The AI platforms that you use, whichever one is your favorite or all of them, if you use them in some capacity, is only as good as the information you put in, first of all, but it brings out what's available. And it's that analysis and lived experiences and other things that inform what we do with that information when we get it. And I think that's where, for me, and it was really kind of a mind shift for me in all these conversations over the last handful of years that we've had about AI and in this high level. And I think you were one of the first people I really talked about it with was in that idea that it was, you know, it's going to disrupt what we do and it's going to change the way we do. And it did. It has done that. But what it hasn't changed is us. I mean, we just now have more ways of doing the things that we do, but we have our lived experiences, our knowledge and expertise, our understanding of a process that has to be then put into all this data that we can get. we can get. And that was, it shouldn't have been, but it took me a little while to get there, that I can use this to help, but it will never replace. It can't replace. Now, we know there's been conversations, all of us in the communications, at least from an agency perspective, have probably had the question asked, why do I need you to write my news release? Can I have AI do it? And yeah, you could. You certainly could. But what AI can't know is the nuance of your organization. They can't know 100% the reason why we need to write this in the first place. And so AI. We, I think, have to, we need to continue to embrace what it is, what it provides for us, but remind the organizations that we serve that it is the human element of this that is going to make that information successful.

A hundred percent. And that's exactly what the narrow tech does. Exactly. It's taking this unique moment in time where the professionals with the experience, 10, 15, 20 years experience of media and PR and their exact expertise can be framed with the AI as a co-pilot. If you look back at any of the AI crisis, the companies that have suffered bad press because they've used AI, it's always been a junior person who's used the AI because they don't have that experience. So there's an element of risk there. And also as an employer, I have to ask other people who are employing staff, who do we want to keep on our team? I want the most senior people right now, because honestly, what a very junior and entry-level person does is something that is admin-led, which can be far more AI outsourced, if you like. So I think what we're seeing, and I'm seeing this across the PRGN network, is that there's a lot of very senior people who can use these tools very effectively. That throws up some other interesting conversations about what is the entry like for people coming out of colleges right now, but maybe that's for another podcast.

Yeah. And I'd love to dig into that one because we've definitely discussed it. And quite honestly, that discussion has been across other professional services is what will this do to the entry level position at an accounting firm, at a law firm, you know, the research and such. But I think where I keep landing in this whole discussion, and it's backed up by the concept you're bringing forth in the book, is that nothing will 100% replace who we are from a strategy perspective and that those of us that embrace what this tool can do for us and the organizations that we represent embrace it as an opportunity to expand, to be smart, to have a competitive advantage, whatever reason is that we're using it. But we still have to discuss the information that we're gathering. We still have to dialogue back and forth with the pros and cons of the information that we've received. It's not 100% foolproof. We know that there's some content that's being created by AI that isn't necessarily 100% factual. It has hallucinations. It does other things. But if we position ourselves, again, in the Narritect role, as the strategic role, and that the human component has to stay top of mind, then AI, as you referred to it, as a co-pilot, as a partner in creation, in helping us have a quicker, more efficient way to dive into information is for the benefit of our organizations from our businesses and should be seen that way, then we bring life experiences, our education, our past participation in programs like this to the table and say, this is what we've learned, this is what we have, and this is how we are going to use this information to help you, business owner, director of marketing, understand where this is going in the future. And this becomes future opportunities for all of us.

Absolutely. So I think the question you're asking is, what's the future of this narrative design, the work we're doing when the world also has AI and accelerated content? And what direction are we going in? So the world will have more content. It'll have more content than oxygen. Clarity will become this currency that we can bring to these decision makers. Therefore, the narrow tech will sit closer to the C-suite. It will be advising at a higher level. PR will merge with strategic communication and the architecture around that, the messaging. The AI agents will produce content, but the humans who are involved in this will choreograph what that meaning is. The brands that will win will be the ones telling the clearest, simplest, most human story.

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

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