FIR #527: Delegating Hiring Decisions to AI

About this episode

At one company, a leader discovered by chance that AI was rejecting job candidate applications within seconds of their arrival. One reason: They graduated from college before 2010, which contradicted the instruction to surface candidates who displayed “youthful energy.” What’s worse, the talent acquisition manager didn’t see any liability issues, since AI made the decision.

Also in this long-form episode for August 2026:

• An expert witness used ChatGPT to prepare a report. The prompts he used to generate the report were uncovered during discovery and entered into evidence.
• Nutrogena parted ways with its spokesperson, Hayden Panetierre, more than a decade ago. Its rationale for that decision has created a crisis for Nutrogena today in the wake of Panetierre’s untimely death.
• Brands suddenly care about Reddit thanks to its (perceived) role in AI-generated overviews and summaries. Redditors haven’t returned the feeling.
• Meta is facing a trillion-dollar-plus judgment in its current trial, but even more consequential could be a requirement to strip from its social media platforms the devices that addicted young people, many of which have become standards for social media. Will social media as we know it change in the wake of the verdict?
• Some companies are compensating employees who join the ranks of influencers and creators sharing content about the companies’ products and services. It sounds like a good idea, until you look at the labor, HR, and legal issues that arise.

In his Tech Report, Dan York provides more statistics about the decline in referral traffic thanks to AI overviews and searches via LLMs, Time magazine’s decision to inject ads into markdown files targeting AI agents (and Perplexity’s decision to block them), and LinkedIn’s “Seems Like AI Slop” option — is it working?

Links from this episode:

• ‘Show How 3M Is 0% at Fault:’ Expert Witness Used ChatGPT to Write Report Defending Company in Deadly Explosion Lawsuit
• Man Obliterated When Court Obtains His ChatGPT Transcripts
• I Just Ran My Thesis, Written in 2014, Through an AI Detector
• Hayden Panettiere’s Old Neutrogena Story Resurfaces After Her Death
• Neutrogena Faces New Backlash After Hayden Panettiere’s Death
• Hayden Panettiere Dead: Clip of Star Discussing Neutrogena Dropping Her Over PPD Resurfaces
• Neutrogena Faces Backlash After Hayden Panettiere’s Death. How Should the Brand Respond?
• Hayden Panettiere Said Neutrogena Dropped Her Over Postpartum Depression. Now Fans Are Boycotting
• Neutrogena Faces Backlash Over Hayden Panettiere’s Postpartum Depression Claims
• Brands Suddenly Care About Reddit. Redditors Don’t Return the Feeling.
• Reddit Fades From ChatGPT Citations
• No More Doom Scrolling or Instagram Stories? A Meta Trial Loss Could End the Social Media We Know
• Meta Trial Could Spell the ‘End of Social Media as We Know It’
• LinkedIn Adds an Option to Report ‘AI Slop’
• I Just Had a Deeply Alarming 45-Minute Sync With Our Talent Acquisition Team
• Gap Inc. Opens Creator Program to Employees
• Gap Inc. Expands Cross-Brand Creator and Social Advocacy Program to Employees
• Employee Creators Are a New Brand Strategy
• Inside David’s Bridal’s New Commission-Based Ambassador Program for Creators and Employees
• David’s Bridal Ramps Up Its Creator Strategy
• Why Starbucks Is Betting on Employees as Creators
• Why Brands Are Inviting Their Employees to Be Creators
• Why Major Retailers Are Turning Employees Into Content Creators: Billo
• Should Brands Build Creator Programs From Their Own Employees? 32 Experts on the Risks and Payoffs

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report:

• Publisher Traffic Falls 33% Globally as AI Overviews Reshape Search
• In 2026, Less Than One Third of Google Searches Still Send a Click
• Time Has Started Serving Ads to AI Agents
• Perplexity Blocks Time’s Ads Being Served to AI Agents
• LinkedIn Adds a Button to Report AI-Generated ‘Slop’
• LinkedIn Says Its ‘AI Slop’ Button Is Working

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The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR is tentatively scheduled to drop on Monday, September 28.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email [email protected].

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

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Raw Transcript:

Neville Hobson: Hi everyone, and welcome to the For Immediate Release podcast, long form episode 527 for August 2026. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz: And I’m Shel Holtz, and Neville, you’re back in your office. It’s good to see you back there again. It must mean that the heat wave has broken there in the UK.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, it has. I’m enjoying a temperature of low twenties in here with the air conditioning on. It’s very nice. And beats what we’ve had with thirty plus upwards. Not good. But it’s been an interesting few weeks and on a number of levels. One of the highlights, in fact a big highlight, was the fact that when Laura and I and our grandkids and my daughter were visiting California at the beginning of August in Novato in Marin County, we met for lunch. We came into the city and you and I and the whole crew got together and we had a phenomenal time at that lunch, didn’t we?

Shel Holtz: Yeah, we did at the Waterbar, right on the waterfront on Embarcadero

Neville Hobson: Nice place.

Shel Holtz: Overlooking the Bay Bridge. And it was fun to be able to have you sit in there, this wonderful building, and to say we built this because the company I work for

Neville Hobson: Yeah.

Shel Holtz: Did build the structure that the Waterbar is in and the steakhouse next to it, that whole complex. So that was fun, even though that was before my time that we built that. But it was great to see you and Laura. It had been since 2019.

Neville Hobson: A while.

Shel Holtz: And it was just delightful to meet your daughter after having heard about her for so many years. And to meet your wonderful granddaughters. They’re terrific.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. Well, you made a big impression on them because they talked about you a lot afterwards. But it was it was good. I mean, it as we’ve both said, you know, in real life face to face can’t beat it. But this is the next best thing on video. So it was great catching up and enjoying a delightful lunch over a few hours. The wine was super that we had. It was Californian wine if I’m not wrong, Shel.

Shel Holtz: Stag’s leap, if I remember correctly.

Neville Hobson: Okay, no Spanish Rioja there. So that’s good. And we did enjoy our week overall, even though some of the circumstances weren’t quite as we had originally planned it. But it was good to, from my point of view, certainly, where a change is as good as a rest. So a change of scene coming over there I found extremely beneficial to recovering from some of the health problems that I’ve been having prior to that. So enjoyed it a lot, Shel, and we gotta do it again soon, I hope.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, Michelle and I were talking about the fact that we need to get back over to the UK. So it won’t be won’t be next year. We already have our vacation next year plotted out, but maybe twenty-eight we’ll cross the pond and come see you. We’ve not been to Somerset, so need to make

Neville Hobson: Okay, we’ll make a pencil note. Yeah.

Shel Holtz: That journey.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, this is this is quite something to experience for some assets. There’s a lot. Yeah, I look forward to that if we can if we can swing it, it’d be great.

Shel Holtz: But we’re not gonna talk about personal stuff for the entire show. We will

Neville Hobson: No.

Shel Holtz: Be talking about stories in the news that have a connection to organizational communication and technology. And we hope that one of them at least sparks a comment from you listeners. And there are a number of ways that you can comment on. This show, the first is to just leave a comment in the comment field in the show notes at the FIR website, firpodcastnetwork. Com. You can also leave that comment on the post where we share updates on episodes that we have published, LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, Blue Sky. We share on all of them. And you can leave a comment there. We check those for your comments. You can send an email to FIR comments at gmail. Com and attach up to a two-minute audio file. If you would like us to play it, we would be happy to. You can even record that. No fuss, no mus, right there on the FIR website. We use a service called SpeakPipe. It has a tab on the right-hand side of the page that says send voicemail. Click and record, and I’ll get that. And there’s also the FIR community on Facebook where you can not only leave a comment but engage with other listeners. And yeah, lots of ways that you can share your comments and become part of the show and drive the content. We have some comments in this episode to share with you. Also, your reviews are very

Neville Hobson: Super.

Shel Holtz: Much appreciated wherever you have the opportunity to rate and review podcasts. That’s a great way for others to

Neville Hobson: Mm-hmm.

Shel Holtz: Discover FIR.

Neville Hobson: Let’s begin with a recap of the episodes we’ve published over the past month and some listener comments. In the long form episode five twenty three for July published on the twenty seventh of july, You shall reported on rethinking thought leadership, maintaining brand sovereignty in the AI era, and whether hedging in your communication can serve a useful purpose. In FIR 524, on the 3rd of August, you addressed the topic of whether managers are ready to lead an AI fluent workforce or not. Too many indicators suggest they’re not. The subject of workslop. Was our topic in FIR five twenty five on the twelfth of August, with mounting evidence that it can create long term problems for companies. We discuss the latest research and share our thoughts on what businesses can do about it. And we have one comment.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, from Mike Klein, who said, Of course, organizations have been clocking externalities as productivity gains since the time they started clocking anything at all.

Neville Hobson: Okay. In FIR five twenty six, we added our thoughts to the growing debate about Anthropic’s new watermark feature that’s rolling out on Claude. That episode was published just last week, actually. We discussed one firm’s new AI writing policy and its four guiding principles for employees, which make far more sense to us than trying to detect a watermark. And we have some comments on this one.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, Suzy Urjavik Parker wrote that this will never apply to me as a professional communicator because my writing is mine and mine alone. I don’t outsource any of it to a technology destined to destroy the environment, our water resources, and the creative process of humanity. Here’s to everyone saying no to this nonsense. And Ike Piggott, in a reply to Susie, said, let me search online and see if someone has written the thing I want so I can copy it. Is plagiarism. Yet for the AI evangelists, let me ask for a smoothie blend of hundreds of plagiarized documents is somehow fine. Feels like idiocracy is nigh. And Patrick Coyle in an independent comment said, No, we should definitely be asking, Did you use AI to write this? So a lot of people continue to object to this at a fundamental level.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I you’re right. I noticed that myself even. So the debate will continue, in my view, the wrong topic to be debating. It’s not it’s not doesn’t carry the same importance or weight as the one people should be talking about, which is the content that is produced, guidance on how to do it well and do it right. So, you know, this debate will continue for quite a while, I’d say. So yeah, now you’re up to date on FIR episodes.

Shel Holtz: Great. Now let me bring you up to date on Circle of Fellows episodes. This is the monthly panel discussion featuring fellows of the International Association of Business Communicators. I usually moderate these and when I’m not available, Brad Whitworth does that. We have published episode number one hundred and thirty one. This is a monthly program, so you can imagine how many of how long this has been going on to get 131 of them out there. This was on the evolving media landscape and what it means for media relations, the fact that so many journalists are starting their own media companies with Substacks and YouTube channels and the like. And what does this do to pitching and the notion of reaching out to reporters in order to get coverage because the audiences that these media companies have is much smaller than the mainstream media. So it was a great conversation with Diana Degan, Ned Lundquist, Martha Muzychka. And Jennifer Waugh. The next episode is the first of a two-parter, and it is coming this Thursday. And it will feature Adrian Cropley, Bonnie Caver, Theomary Karamanis, and Mike Klein. We’re going to be talking about artificial intelligence and the leadership moment for the communications profession. So should be a good, robust discussion. And I as I say, we’re doing that in two parts. There will be four. Different fellows picking up part two of this in September. So now you’re all caught up on previous episodes, on Neville’s travels, on Circle of Fellows, and we’ll dive into our six stories right after this.

Neville Hobson: So our first story is an interesting one, I find. Three people died, around 200 homes were destroyed, and millions of dollars were at stake. And an expert witness hired by 3M to help defend the company and the resulting litigation turned to ChatGPT to help write his expert report. That alone might raise questions, but it isn’t really the extraordinary part of the story. According to reporting by 404 Media, The expert, Josh Autenrieth, told ChatGPT that he had been retained by 3M and asked it to help him create an exceptional expert witness report defending the standard of care at 3M. More remarkably, he instructed it to show how 3M is 0% at fault for the explosion. In other words, this wasn’t here is the evidence, help me analyze it and determine what happened. It was much closer to here is the conclusion. Help me build the argument that supports it. And we know this because his ChatGPT conversations became part of the legal discovery process. The prompts reveal something else rather astonishing. Autenrieth reportedly has about 20 years’ experience in gas detection. Yet at one point he uploaded a photograph of a gas detector to ChatGPT and asked, What am I looking at? According to one of the plaintiff’s lawyers, that detector was central to the entire case. There are obvious questions here about professional standards, disclosure, and the appropriate use of generative AI in expert testimony. But I think that’s a bigger question for organizations. AI can make it extraordinarily easy to construct a persuasive argument for something you’ve already decided to believe. Give it enough documents, tell it the conclusion you want, and ask it to assemble the strongest case. That’s not necessarily analysis, it can be automated confirmation bias. And if organizations increasingly use AI to support decisions, strategies, investigations, and recommendations, how do we distinguish between using AI to help us discover what the evidence says and using it to manufacture a convincing justification for what we already want the answer to be? And one more thought if your AI conversations might eventually be discoverable, perhaps we should start thinking about prompts, not simply as instructions to a machine. But as records of our reasoning. There’s an awful lot to unpack here, Shel, it seems to me.

Shel Holtz: There certainly is. And at its core, this is a governance story. I don’t know if

Neville Hobson: Mm.

Shel Holtz: This expert witness was an independent contractor or if he worked for somebody. But at some level you need to have that governance that gives you the rules about how to use this and what you are going to retain. I mean this is why legal needs to play a part in that whole governance conversations because they understand the rules of discovery from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and they understand what kind of challenges can arise when in a lawsuit the other party has access to all of those prompts, all of those conversations that you’ve had with a large language model. So you need to have governance around this to begin with. The other issue that leaps to mind is that output could be three pages of highly polished slop that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, but because it answered the question he set out to have it answer, he’s perfectly happy with it. I wonder if he challenged it at all. Did he put it through a any kind of a red team? I’ve I spent days creating a communications red team skill in ChatGPT. And I can run anything through this. I can run a detailed communication strategy through it. I can run a three-paragraph email we’re sending out on behalf of the CEO through this. And it puts it through all of these various levels in order to challenge what I’m saying here. What’s a fact and what’s an assumption? How are different audiences within the organization likely to react to this and so on and so forth. So I think, you know, first of all. Front loading the outcome that you’re looking for is dangerous enough. Leaving that paper trail there for a belligerent legal team to find is another level of bad. But then just assuming that the output is perfect and relying on that without putting it through some kind of challenge, I think is dangerous. I think this was a disaster waiting to happen from the get-go.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. The thing I find extraordinary, frankly, is did anybody at the client check any of this? Was there a human client in the loop? I wonder. There’s something else too to mention that the Futurism also reported on this as well as 404 Media. They’re they reported that over three hundred and fifty pages Of ChatGPT activity were turned over in the discovery process. And I’m thinking to myself, what this suggests to me, apart from the obvious things, is that this was someone who didn’t quite understand how ChatGPT works in terms of what it retains, how it retains it. And the other side did. So when they did the discovery, they knew what to look for and how to ask for it. So it still comes back to Probably the legal team at three N. Did they not rehearse this? Did they not know what this expert witness was going to be asking or going to be presenting? I from reading the four media report, this all came out during the presentation of by the expert witness in the lawsuit. So it came unknown to anyone. I mean, goodness me, that’s no way to run a defense in a lawsuit of this magnitude, it seems to me. So, I’m surprised it’s not got more coverage than it has, actually, but it is extraordinary that this actually happened, it seems to me.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I’m not surprised it hasn’t gotten more attention because it’s, my God, another law story where somebody used ChatGPT and it bit in the ass. You know, we hear those pretty frequently. The difference here though is that it’s expert witness testimony, and

Neville Hobson: Right.

Shel Holtz: How discovery played a part, that I think should get people to pay attention to this. And you know, why would 3M not dig into it deeper? I can imagine, I’m just making this up. I don’t know if this is true, but I can imagine, you know, you’ve worked with an expert witness for decades. They’re great. They have helped you win multiple cases. And now this person has discovered ChatGPT. You don’t know this as the legal team. You’ve been working with this guy for years. He’s been

Neville Hobson: Mm.

Shel Holtz: Fine. So you just accept the outputs that he produces based on that experience and the trust that has built up. The only difference being now he’s made life easier for himself by employing a large language model. And there the trouble begins. So I think we’re gonna need to start needing to ask for disclosure from people that we have worked with a lot. Hey, you know, we’ve been working together since before there was generative artificial intelligence. Are you using it? How are you using it? Let’s go over this to make sure that we’re covered. I think you’re gonna need to ask that of pretty much every supplier these days.

Neville Hobson: I totally agree with that, Shel. I think it hasn’t happened. Obviously they didn’t ask any of those questions. So you’ve got a kind of fault, if you will, at the client for not asking those kinds of questions. Maybe a maybe it’s a comfort thing that think everything’s fine and we don’t need to worry about this. But you’ve raised the point quite well, I think, that the time has arrived now where you need to audit everything. You need to be clear in your mind. So you’ve got to go through the what if. You’ve got to, you know, what’s the what could happen if that will guide you in terms of what you need to do with the people you do business with or who you hire to help you do something such as an expert witness in a lawsuit, where the consequences are not minor at all, the outcome of this if it goes against you. And use an all an expert witness who. Is great because you’ve worked with him before, but is completely current with the right way of doing all this is an ethical issue here too. So that’s something I think you need to add to-do list to make sure that you are clear with the people you’ve hired to work with you that they are on board with the right way to do this. That may well come into play in terms of your own policies about third parties working for you as contractors or some other manner, that how they use AI needs to be declared. And you also then the obvious, you need to put in place the checks and balances that the human in the loop activity we’ve talked about a lot on this show.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, it’s a vendor AI audit is a new requirement. That’s inventory all the vendors we work with and check on their AI practices. I mean, what if you work with a freelance writer to supplement your own staff’s ability to crank out copy? You’ve been working with them for years. They’ve only recently started using AI. They need to disclose to you how they’re doing that so that you know what you need to be looking for when you’re reviewing their content.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. Boy, this opens up a

Shel Holtz: What it comes down to.

Neville Hobson: This opens up a an eyebrow raising area, it seems to me, because I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that hardly anyone’s doing that.

Shel Holtz: I would be surprised if I surveyed twenty c communicators, if I found one whose organization was auditing all of their suppliers and vendors for AI practices, that would that would surprise me. I don’t think this is one

Neville Hobson: Boy, boy.

Shel Holtz: That has seen the light of day yet in terms of general awareness.

Neville Hobson: No, my I agree.

Shel Holtz: Yep. Well, Neutrogena is in a genuine crisis right now. The kind of almost impossible to game out in a tabletop exercise because it didn’t start with anything the company did, you know, yesterday or this week. It started with something that has been on the record for some time, discoverable with a two minute search. It’s been up there for more than a decade. You may have known Hayden Panettieree from a TV series called Heroes. I didn’t. I guess I’m cultural culturally illiterate or maybe I’m just old. But I saw my daughter had

Neville Hobson: You’re not a you’re not a you’re not a you’re not you’re not a Gen Z shell, that’s the point.

Shel Holtz: That’s a problem. I’ve you know, I think I’m glad I’m not. I hope I just didn’t offend all the Gen Z Gen Zers in our audience. But my daughter had posted an RIP to Hayden on Instagram. So as I was reading about all of this with Neutrogena, I had to reach out to my daughter and say, Okay, tell me who this person was. One thing she was, though, was the face of Neutrogena, the spokesperson for about 10 years from 2005 to 2015. Not long after she gave birth to her daughter, she went on live with Kelly and Michael and talked openly about her postpartum depression. Panettieree said that what that’s what got her dropped by Neutrogena. They said that they viewed her disclosure of her postpartum depression as a violation of their morals clause in their contract. She told the story again this past May while promoting her memoir, generating some mild but manageable backlash at the time. Then she died on August 16th at the age of 36. She was found unresponsive at a residence in Greenville, South Carolina. There were no signs of trauma, no signs of foul play. The cause of death, last I checked, was still pending, although there are indications of some kind of overdose. The internet, though, went straight back to that interview. And within days, the phrase Neutrogena boycott was trending, and the stock of its parent company, Kenvue, that used to be a Johnson unit, took a real, but not necessarily a substantial, hit. But for four days, Neutrogena didn’t say anything. And this is interesting because they responded within hours to an unrelated advertising flap involving Tate McCrae. And no, I don’t know who he is either. Shameful. I know. But the point is that this wasn’t a company that doesn’t know how to move fast. It just chose not to on this one topic where speed and empathy probably mattered most. And by the way, postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis are front and center in the news right now with the trial of Lindsay Clancy making headline news. She’s the former news nurse who killed her three children, then tried to kill herself, paralyzing herself in the process. She sought help for a rapidly worsening postpartum mental health crisis, and the system failed to identify and treat the psychosis that ultimately overwhelmed her. And of course, society here in the US is kind of polarized over this case. But with that going on, Neutrogena should have been able to see how its firing. Of the celebrity back in 2015 might have sparked renewed attention. Anyway, this past Thursday, Neutrogena finally posted a statement on Instagram. They were deeply saddened. They were proud to have partnered with her. And the line getting the most attention, we understand that we made her feel unsupported during a very difficult time. And then they promised a significant investment to a postpartum support health partner. Details to come. And notably, they turned off comments on the post itself. So, what do crisis professionals make of all of this? Molly McPherson of NBC News said that it isn’t a press release problem, it’s an action problem. The company faced one of these unknowns in crisis management, but still could have planned to be empathetic. It cost Neutrogena four days of the narrative being written entirely by other people. Two LinkedIn reactions from communicators get exactly what’s wrong with the response. Jerry Corbett, former chair and CEO of PRSA and now CEO of Red Flag, and a past guest on FIR, wrote for Strategic Magazine the day before Neutrogena broke its silence that a corporate crisis does not always begin with a new event. Sometimes an old decision returns under circumstances that give it new meaning. His point. Was that the silence itself became the story. And Erica Cardina, a PR manager, went further on LinkedIn. Her critique, the moment to acknowledge this was in May when she was still there to receive that acknowledgement. We were proud to partner with her. Ring’s pretty hollow given why the partnership reportedly ended, and we understand why we made her feel unsupported is corporate cushion cushioning. Her suggested fix, just say we failed to support her because that’s what it was. Then there’s the comments being switched off. And as Erica put it, you can’t publish a statement about accountability and immediately shut up shut the door on the conversation. By August, she argued it read less like accountability and more like a brand trying to contain damage. And people can tell the difference. Communicator

Neville Hobson: Mm.

Shel Holtz: Lacey Haynes commenting on Jerry Corbett’s post raised a related gap. The donation pledge is easy money unless it’s a really substantial amount and backed by real executive commitment. And what would actually reassure people is a stated policy on how Neutrogena will support its spokespeople going forward, not just a one time gesture because of something we did in the past. So, what’s the lesson for us? Real quickly, three things. One, your discoverable history is your risk profile. Assume anything a public figure has said about your brand anywhere at any time is going to resurface at the worst possible moment and plan for it before that moment arrives. Two, silence is never neutral, and neither is turning off comments on the statement meant to address it. Both say we’re managing this and not we’re listening. And three, soft language reads as evasion. If your statement needs a phrase like we understand we made someone feel X. Ask whether the plain version we failed her is the one you’re actually avoiding and why you’re avoiding it.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, it’s a very sad tale, itself. But these revelations about Neutrogena and going back just over a decade to what they did to literally get rid of her, how they reacted at that time, and then now all this has come out and the lack of response. So they are in trouble in the court of public opinion without any doubt. Cynics would argue does it’s it all blow over. Does it really matter? Well, yes, it does matter. You’re if you’re a public listed company in particular, it could affect your stock price, which you notice their parent company has taken the hit. But it will have a negative effect on people’s perception of you and your brands. When they’re out in the pharmacy or wherever buying products and they’ll r recall this perhaps if they’re fans, they definitely will have a negative reaction to you. So I just found it Extraordinary. Some of the things you said, Shel, such as publish what they did and then turn off all the comments. There’s one of the reports I read, I think it’s in the independent newspaper, talked about posts on Reddit that have attracted thousands of r responses and likes and so forth and upvotes, all that. That’s there for all to see for time immemorial, I would say. And they’re not part of the conversation. So I’m not gonna try and second guess what they might have done in crisis communication planning, except to say it doesn’t look they had a plan ready for this eventuality.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, we say this pretty much every time we do a crisis communication story about a company that blew it. We ask was a communicator in the room when any of these decisions were made? Did they just choose to not listen? But to those who would say that this will all just blow over, and we hear this a lot is you know, all crises are transient in nature. Well, remember this is now part of your permanent record too. So in five years, when Neutrogena gets into some sort of a dust up with another spokesperson or an influencer or a creator that they’re paying, people are gonna remember this. And if they don’t remember, they’re gonna do a quick search and they’re gonna find it and it’s gonna re-emerge and just add fuel to the fire. You see, they did this before to this woman, and they bought everybody off by making a contribution to a nonprofit that deals with postpartum issues. And then they went along their merry way and now they’ve abused another person that they had on their on their payroll because they didn’t change their policy to how they treat their spokespeople when they went through this before. So it’s

Neville Hobson: Yeah. Well

Shel Holtz: Just waiting to happen again.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. I just performed a completely unscientific experiment. I just opened up Google and typed in Neutrogena. We’ve got sponsored results is the first item that appears in the in the in the in Chrome from Neutrogena. Explore our range, as it says, and link to something provided skincare results. Then the very next thing is Neutrogena responds backlash after Hayden Panettiere dies. And then there’s links galore to media stories about this. And that’s just entering the word Neutrogena. And beyond that, you know, it’s got it’s got a link the way Google’s now doing all this. More news, you click on that, and you get pages of this stuff. Then further down, if you scroll, you’ll then start seeing links to some of their products. But If you land on the page and the first thing you see is the is what happened with this woman and how they dealt with it, you’re likely to kind of explore that a bit, I suspect. Not a good look for them at all.

Shel Holtz: No, it’s not. It’s a classic crisis communication. Is it existential for Neutrogena? Probably not. But I can see that the particularly among this actress’s fan base, there are probably people who are simply going to switch to a competitor’s product a and be done with Neutrogena. At this point. So you’re gonna you’re gonna lose some faith with some of your existing fans, you’re gonna lose trust. And you’ve pretty much established an approach that you’ve taken to this sort of thing that I think is underwhelming and unsatisfactory for a lot of people who are looking for more from an organization like this.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I agree. So, the obvious question I’d ask you is if you were advising Neutrogena, what would you advise him to do now?

Shel Holtz: Well, now it’s all reactive and it’s I mean this is after

Neville Hobson: It is

Shel Holtz: The proverbial horses left the pu proverbial barn. But at this point I would I would come right out and say the our previous statement was inadequate. We take full responsibility For our actions. We should not have there clearly somebody suffering postpartum depression is not a violation of a morals clause. That was inappropriate. Here is what we are doing by way of our policies with spokespeople going forward to make sure that we treat our spokespeople fairly i in the future. And this is what we are doing in order to support. People who are suffering through postpartum issues and challenges, because we wanna play a part in this in order to try to make up for our transgressions thus far.

Neville Hobson: So neutrogen, if you’re listening, there’s some good advice there for you.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, they w they’re not listening.

Neville Hobson: Well, I mentioned Reddit in that story, and that’s the heart of our next story, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. So, 20 years ago, when companies were first trying to figure out social media, we used to give them some fairly simple advice. Don’t walk into somebody else’s community and immediately start talking about yourself. Listen first, learn the culture, understand why people are there. And if you eventually join the conversation, contribute something useful. That holds true today, as it did 20 odd years ago, but apparently we’re having to learn all that again, it seems to me. Because marketers have suddenly fallen in love with Reddit, according to the Journal. And there’s a p very particular reason why. According to the Journal’s report, Reddit has gone from being something of an afterthought in many companies’ digital strategies to one of the places marketers desperately want their brands to appear. We’ve talked about this a number of times on FIR o over the past year, the rise of Reddit as a literally a number one place to see discussions about you and your brand. It’s interesting what the Journal says, and the reason for it is not simply because consumers use Reddit, but because AI does. Reddit conversations turn up extensively in the material that AI systems use to answer questions. So if somebody asks ChatGPT or Claude which running shoes to buy, which software to use, or whether a particular company is trustworthy, what people have been saying on Reddit could help shape the answer. Naturally enough, marketers have spotted that opportunity. Unfortunately for them, Redditors have spotted it too. When jewelry company Brilliant Earth have advertised for a Reddit strategy manager whose job included shaping conversations. That would cascade across search engines, LLMs, and customer decision making, moderators of the jewelry subreddit immediately raise the alarm. One described Reddit as possibly the very last place on the internet for genuine company reviews and feedback. And that gets to the fascinating contradiction here. The more valuable authentic human conversation becomes to AI, the greater the commercial incentive to manipulate that conversation. And the more brands try to manipulate it, the less authentic and therefore potentially less valuable it becomes. Some marketers have already approached are already approaching Reddit exactly as you might fear. So those old behaviors have never ever gone away. The journal found agencies operating brands dozens of Reddit mentions every month, using accounts that appear to be legitimate community members, and even promising services involving negative comments. But some companies have discovered another approach. Don’t market. Audio equipment manufacturer, Sonos, built goodwill by having an identifiable company representative help people with technical problems and translate corporate announcements into ordinary language. There in itself, by the way, is a lesson for communicators. How about trying to communicate in the first place in ordinary language? So investment solutions and services firm Fidelity created communities around useful financial discussion and information. And Reddit itself says brands should arrive with three things: utility, humility, and respect. Which sounds remarkably like the advice we were giving companies at the beginning of social media over 20 years ago. There’s an AI story here, certainly. There’s a marketing story. There’s also a communication story about authenticity, community, and trust. But as AI makes genuine human conversation increasingly valuable as a source of information, are we about to see an escalating contest between the people creating those conversations and the organizations trying to influence what those conversations tell the machines? And if marketers succeed too well, do they ultimately destroy the very thing they’re trying to exploit? Welcome back to social media circa two thousand six.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, which is exactly the same as social media twenty years ago in terms of what organizations should be doing. Of course, what organizations should be doing and what they do frequently are misaligned. But i every couple of years we report on a story that leads me to invoke Christopher Barger and the time that he spent at General Motors running their social media team. Because if anybody understood how to do this well, it was Christopher. And this was long enough ago that social media was basically the blogosphere. This predates all the social networks. But what Chris did was he had members of his team assigned to the various car blogs that wielded a certain amount of influence. I remember Jalopnik was one of these. There were there were several of them. But the instructions they had were very clear. He says, You’re not parachuting in from GM. I’m here to help. I’m going to tell you why you’re wrong with what you just said about one of our vehicles. Their role was first to listen, second, to participate in conversations where they had expertise that had nothing to do with General Motors, just be a member of the community and participate and build the connection with the other people in the community. And when GM comes up, At that point, you’re already known. You’re trusted. You’re not the spokesperson from GM. You’re Bob, right? And now you can comment, and people are going to listen to you because you are on equal footing with other members of that community. That’s the way to do this. Dell was another great example. They had that, you remember that, that listening center. I don’t know if anybody still has these, but those. High-tech futuristic mission control like social media listening centers would use an algorithm to surface discussions that were taken to the appropriate department in the organization for action. And then the person who was in that community would be able to solicit more information, then come back and say, okay, we’ve listened to you. There was one particular case where there was a lot of discussion about why this particular Dell laptop cost so much more than a different model when the only difference was that it had been loaded with bloatware. And you know, they took it to the team that was the product management team for that for that particular product and they looked at the argument and they said, you know what, they’ve got a point. And so they dropped the price and they were able to go into the community and say, Well, thank you for this conversation. It’s been really enlightening. You’re absolutely right. And we’re taking action, we’re lowering the price. How do you imagine the community reacted to that? I mean, 100% positively. So there is a way to engage in these communities. Should your organization be on Reddit? I don’t know, is your Community on Reddit? Are your fans on Reddit? Are your customers on Reddit or other stakeholders or thought leaders and influencers? Is there a good strategic reason to be there with your brand or your organization? Maybe. Should you be there just for the GEO? I don’t think so. And in fact, this was just in the news. From July 18th through August 7th of this year, Reddit accounted for an average of 3. 83% of ChatGPT search citations. By August 14th, that had fallen below 1%, averaging just 0. 52% through this past Monday. That’s an 86. 4% drop. So according to the Axios piece where I read this, they’re suggesting that you shouldn’t pin all your GEO hopes. On one mythical unicorn. Now, who called it a mythical unicorn? Our friend Steve Rubel, who is an executive vice president for Media Insights and Measurement at Burson these days. That mythical unicorn, he says, doesn’t exist. It’s a long game, and brands need to be engaged on many different channels. Some will go up, some will go down based on citations. But doing yourself reputational damage by misbehaving in a social network. Just because you think that’s where your citations in AI results are gonna come from, man, that’s just dumb.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. I mean I would say, you know, if you’re not already on Reddit or another place that’s relevant to where conversations are happening about your brand that’s relevant to you, it’s gonna present you with a with a huge hill to climb to establish a credible presence now. I’ve already seen some examples, I’m not gonna mention any names, of companies who are doing this, going about this utterly the wrong way. Going, doing literally what you said not to do earlier. You know, hey, I’m here from X, company, not X, but Company X or whatever. Let me know what’s bothering you and try and help, that kind of thing. Whereas it would be better if you are Bob from X. Who’s got a who’s got a passion and a strong interest in whatever the topic might be, that’s relevant to that community, joins that community and doesn’t do anything for three months except listen to what people are saying. Might like something or upvote something, and he’s already filled out a comprehensive profile describing himself, where the focus is on him and his passion, not Him and who he works for. And it’s kind of like a by the way, I also I work for so and so. But these are this is just me here. Either way, that was what I would recommend to anybody. And with the with the caveat, it’s gonna be hard work to establish a presence now if you haven’t already done one. And if it’s kind of not perceived to be the kind of behavior you would expect from your company, your work is even harder in that case. But Flip it over and say it’s never too late, indeed, better too late than never. So I would say you know, it this is worth listening to what these examples show and look back at two thousand six to see what people are doing, and join the conversation the right way.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, the other example that we can take from back in the Jurassic era of social media would be Frank Eliason in the Comcast Cares account on Twitter, where they were actively searching

Neville Hobson: Yep, another good example.

Shel Holtz: For people complaining about Comcast, and then not going in to tell them they’re wrong, but going in to tell them, let me see if I can help you with that. You some people were a little creeped out, you know. You’re monitoring me. But most people

Neville Hobson: Yeah.

Shel Holtz: Were delighted that somebody was being proactive, not waiting for. Me to pick up the phone and deal with the labyrinth of customer support and instead reaching out when you’ve identified that i’m having a problem with a solution yeah i think most people are very grateful for that so

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I agree. So there’s lessons to be learned here from just twenty years ago, but even that, this isn’t like was invented twenty years ago. This has been since the days of forums, that this was good behavior to exhibit on those old forums that were control freakery writ large, those forums. But if you were there you as Bob from Company X Hey, you know, it’s chatting with people about the things they’re interested in, you would have stood good stead in building relationships. So the medium may ch the mediums may have changed and social attitudes certainly have changed. But the these fundamentals of listening, getting to understand people’s issues, making an effort to come across as genuinely interested in helping them. Stan we’ll stand you in good stead no matter what.

Shel Holtz: Well, thanks, Dan. Yeah, I’ve been reading all about the LinkedIn option now. A little pull-down menu from the three dots that you can signal that you think that something is AI slop. I haven’t used it. The only thing I use there on a regular basis is not interested, as LinkedIn seems to be populated more and more bipartisan political posts that have absolutely no connection to business whatsoever. I don’t mind a political post on either side of the aisle as long as there’s a connection to business because that’s what LinkedIn is for. But if it’s just a blatant partisan attack, I don’t yeah, and I do this with people who are posting positions I agree with. I am on LinkedIn for the business connections, for the business thought leadership, for the business reporting. And if it’s if there’s no connection at all, I’m not interested. And I find that I’m able to adjust my feed. The more I click that, the less of that type of thing I see. And LinkedIn goes back to being what I joined it for in the first place. But I have not yet clicked the one that allows you to identify this as AI slop. Have you done that yet?

Neville Hobson: No, I’ve not encountered I’ve not actually encountered anything that made me search for something to report it at all. I tend to ignore all of this stuff, Sean, to be frank. I rarely proactively do anything only. If I get a pop-up saying, Do you like this? Sometimes I might. Particularly no, there’s one thing I do is report stuff. Please block this. I’ve seen this too often. And I asked me a reason why. Often it’s just not of interest to me or I see it too often. I always get fine, we’ve taken it off, won’t appear on your feed anymore. Great. I should do that more often now that I think about it. But you know, it’s fine. And I see as Dan mentioned, i in one of the I think it’s TechCrunch he refers to, reporting that this seems to be working. Now I’ve not looked into any more detail about how do they know it’s working, but I mean, hey, great. If it is, it’s good. But I think it’s so arbitrary, isn’t it? I mean, a button, this is AI slop. I mean that is so generic.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I saw dashes, it must be AI slop.

Neville Hobson: Amazing.

Shel Holtz: All right. On Tuesday this past week, Meta went to trial in Oakland, facing a coalition of 29 state attorneys general. This is being led by the attorneys general from my state. This is Rob Bonta, the attorney general from California, also Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey. These are the lead plaintiffs. They’re claiming that Facebook and Instagram were deliberately designed to hook kids, and that Meta knew it and hid it. Meta itself told the told the court the penalty calculation could run as high as $1. 4 trillion if they are found liable for everything that they’re being accused of. Mark Zuckerberg is expected to testify. I’m sure that’ll go extremely well. So is Instagram’s Adam Mosseri. The dollar figure is mind-boggling. I mean, I mean, imagine if Meta had actually wind up paying Over a trillion dollars. I mean, what would that do to the organization’s future, its finances? But there’s a lot more at stake here than the existential threat to Meta. This isn’t a personal injury case, it’s a consumer protection case, which means the states aren’t just asking for money, they’re asking the judge to order Meta to actually rip features out of the product. We’re talking about infinite scroll, video autoplay, disappearing stories, beauty filters, algorithmic feeds for minors. And this isn’t happening in a vacuum. A Los Angeles jury already found Meta and Google negligent in a similar case back in March. They awarded six million dollars in damages. And California’s attorney general said flatly that Meta is just first in line. YouTube and Snap are already facing their own lawsuits. So, what do people who study this think will actually change? Well, Kate Winnick, a principal analyst at Forrester, called this potentially the end of social media as we knew as we know it, and drew the comparison a lot of people are drawing to the big tobacco settlements of the 90s. Her prediction isn’t that social media will disappear, it’s that the product gets harder for young people to access and the cultural conversation around it shifts the way it did with cigarettes. She also expects competitors like Snap to make preemptive changes rather than wait to be sued themselves. Analysts covering the advertising side of this are already sounding a warning. A Storyboard 18 analysis this week made the point that engagement has always been the currency of social advertising. More time in app means more advertising inventory, more data, more monetizable moments. If courts start forcing platforms to strip out The very features that maximize engagement, that inventory shrinks, particularly for younger audiences. DesignRush put it even more bluntly for marketers. Platform risk is becoming brand risk, and agencies need to start factoring regulatory exposure into media planning the same way they’d factor in a supply chain risk. So practically, what should you be doing right now? Social is a centerpiece of your strategy. Well, stress test your channel mix before you’re forced to. Don’t wait for a verdict to ask what happens to your plan if Instagram Stories or infinite scrolls simply isn’t there anymore. Start modeling these things now. You also should be shifting your measurements of success. The engagement as currency model, time spent, scroll depth, session length, is exactly what’s on trial. Start building your reporting around qualified reach, completed views, and actual brand lift, not raw time on platform. So your metrics don’t collapse the moment the underlying mechanics change. Also, if your brand targets younger audiences at all, start scenario planning for tighter age verification and access restrictions now, rather than reacting when a court order lands. This isn’t hypothetical. It’s exactly what the states are asking for. And fourth, and here’s the one that I think is particularly comms specific, not just marketing specific. Get ahead of your own internal conversation about platform dependency. If your organization’s quietly let one platform become the backbone of both your marketing and your external communications, the trial is your prompt to ask leadership: what’s our plan B?

Neville Hobson: Mm.

Shel Holtz: And are we building it now, or are we just waiting for the verdict to force our hand? Obviously, we don’t know how this trial ends. It just started. It’s expected to go on, I think, six weeks, is what I heard. But the lawyers, the analysts, and Meta’s own court filings all agree on one thing. Whichever way it goes, it’s a signal event for the whole industry, not just for Meta.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. That makes sense. I agree. It’s got a lot of attention over here too. And I think that’s partly or primarily it’s because it’s Meta. And it’s Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, the whole parade of apps behind it that everyone uses in one way or another. So the speculation my god, is this the end of Instagram? I see people talking about that. But I add a dose of cynicism to some of this shelf, to be honest. In that we’ve been here before with threats of lawsuits, that’s the end of this or whatever it might be. I can’t imagine that Meta is going to go down the tubes with a one trillion dollar financial penalty. I just couldn’t see it happening. Look at look at what happened with Cambridge Analytica back in twenty eighteen. I mean, that was a scandal beyond the pale. Nothing really happened to them. I mean it was business as usual and they repeated some of the bad things that they did. Not long ago, even. So it needs something a lot more existential threat like than a trillion dollar fine. Petty cash. It’s not even you know, it’s only twenty five percent of the US national debt under Trump, so it’s not a big deal

Shel Holtz: Ha.

Neville Hobson: Really, you know. So it’s it’s nevertheless it is serious without doubt. And one good thing of it is it’s drawing attention to some of the things that you know Meta are now talking about we’re gonna do something about. Here in Europe and specifically in the UK, there’s a lot of talk. It’s constant, although it’s died down in intensity in recent weeks, about the damage to young people, particularly preteens who are active on these platforms. And I saw a news story the other day that OpenAI is rolling out a version of its chatbot called ChatGPT for teens, for users under 18, that they say has stronger built-in safety protections. I mean, I don’t know what message they’re trying to get out here, but why haven’t you done this before then? With stronger built-in safety protections? Why isn’t that in place for everyone doing this? So I think from a comms point of view, Meta and everyone else who are suddenly scrambling to make announcements what they can do. Be wary of talking about that we’re doing this dedicated thing to address you know concerns about safety protections all that kind of stuff because that’s what you’ve been resisting for decades. And Sally don’t now try and play the good guy. You’re not the good guy. This lawsuit demonstrates that quite clearly. And I think it’s interesting to observe what happens. That could this spread out into something mega, I mean truly mega. In parallel I see other interesting things going on. I saw a story just the other day saying that in the midst of all this, it’s rumored that MySpace is about to make a comeback. Now

Shel Holtz: I saw that.

Neville Hobson: If they yeah, if they are looking to do something like they did back in the day, that might appeal now, actually. I’ve still got a MySpace account by the way. I haven’t visited it in a long time. But So this is kind of in the midst of one of the reasons I think why it’s getting attention, in the midst of society level concerns that we’re seeing manifesting itself in some of the opinions pressure groups have here in the UK, certainly, often run by women who you can’t truly genuinely argue against what they’re saying. Although some of them are argue against it. That there’s no proof, where’s the evidence? And you know, it doesn’t match our data, all that kind of stuff. And I think it will need a groundswell, I think, of public opinion to be behind some of the criticisms. Again, cynicism kicks in here because we’ve seen this before and nothing really happened. So I’m not sure whether this will make any difference, again, depending on what happens. And as you say, this is only just kicked off. So I did see because one of the TV station the news channels here, Sky News, covered the opening of the trial outside the courthouse in where is it in LA or somewhere in California, is it? It might have been new yeah, San Francisco. Okay.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I think I think it’s up here. I th I think it’s in Oakland. Yeah.

Neville Hobson: So and it showed there’s a picture of the courthouse. It had all these rosettes, red, white, and blue, hanging off the balconies. And it gave the razzmatazz show that’s very American. You wouldn’t see that happening over here. But all these women talking about and strong opinions, and they were credible in some of the things they were saying. It wasn’t, you know, misery being on display here. These were people who had strong opinions. They can see an opportunity to highlight their case and I think they’ll get attention if they do it the right way. So add that to the mix. I Other than that, we don’t really know much more because it’s only just starting. So but it will be definitely an interesting story to keep an eye on.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, even if the court fines one hundred percent for the plaintiffs in this case and one hundred percent against Meta, they’ll appeal. And the appeal will take a couple of years and then that can be appealed. And you know, how many times can you appeal? This will be years before there’s a resolution. But I

Neville Hobson: Yeah.

Shel Holtz: Can see you know, when all of this plays out, that the change to social media could be substantial. And it’s the analogy to tobacco that I think makes me feel that way because it took forever to change attitudes about tobacco. But it is not socially acceptable now. After

Neville Hobson: No.

Shel Holtz: Piecemeal laws, I mean it was first you can’t smoke in bars and restaurants and people were up in arms about that. And but you take that for granted now. You’ve you get rid of the advertising that’s aimed at kids, Joe Camel, for example. You get rid of the cartoons, the cool camel smoking an unfiltered cigarette. And you’ve really shifted societal attitudes about tobacco. And I could see the same thing happening over the long term with the same type of approach taken. So if it starts with not letting kids take advantage of the features in the social networks that they like, you know, just removing those, making it harder for them to access some of this stuff or just removing it from the platform altogether, then those platforms become less desirable, the kids aren’t there. Who’s left? You know, us. Yeah, how appealing are we to marketers as a target? And everything sort of snowballs from there. So yeah, I over the long term I can see this having an implication. Do I think in

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I

Shel Holtz: Six weeks there’s going to be a finding and suddenly social media as we know it is gone? No, I think that’s absurd. But I do agree with you. Meta’s not the good guy in this case. I think in the previous cases that have been tried, and there was the one in California earlier, there was also a bigger one. I think it was in Arizona or New Mexico or Colorado. Where it was literally hundreds of millions of dollars that they had to pay, that the Discovery found emails that supported the case, that they knew that this is what they were doing. They did it deliberately and they didn’t care that they were addicting kids to these platforms. And I assume that same evidence is going to be introduced in the current trial. So yeah I’d be surprised

Neville Hobson: Mm.

Shel Holtz: If this one suddenly and miraculously goes Meta’s way. So I think this could be the start of some significant changes

Neville Hobson: No. Yeah.

Shel Holtz: To the way social media is offered to people and the kind of influence this that it’ll have. And by the way, could be excellent timing for MySpace’s return to come and say, hey, you know, we’re back. We’re the social media that always took safety seriously.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, exactly.

Shel Holtz: And if what you have been hearing about Facebook troubles you. Rejoin us and come visit MySpace Island in Second Life too, you know. So

Neville Hobson: It’s funny, I was watching about a month or so back now, a video I’ve got. You’ve seen this, I know. Thank you for smoking,

Shel Holtz: Mm-hmm.

Neville Hobson: About the lobbying industry of tobacco, booze, and I’ve forgotten the other one, firearms. It got me thinking, and mentioned it popped into my mind again as we were discussing this, that I seen recently here in the UK editorial articles or maybe placed media. I haven’t paid too close attention to it. About the upcoming likelihood that the only product, the only tobacco product that doesn’t carry any health warnings on them at all is cigars. And that’s about to change. And

Shel Holtz: Hmm.

Neville Hobson: These ugly announcements about cigar smoking will kill you. Stop smoking now, all that in black letters on a white background that obscure the packaging. The interesting argument I’m seeing though is that the it’s to arguing about this is such a shame because some of the designs on cigar packaging is iconic from a century ago. And we’re gonna lose all this, and this is bad. I’m thinking I see a lobby event happening here. And I wonder what they’re gonna crank up in Meta’s defense, specifically relating to social media, how they’re gonna address this. But be sure this is gonna crank up.

Shel Holtz: When I when I was a kid, we all kept our little memorabilia in cigar boxes and they’re gorgeous. The designs are spectacular. And

Neville Hobson: Beautiful.

Shel Holtz: I don’t know where I got them from because my dad did not smoke cigars. He was a cigarette man. Lucky Strikes, I remember that very, very well. But yeah, we all had cigar boxes

Neville Hobson: Boy, boy.

Shel Holtz: And that’s where we kept our little collectibles.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, as you do.

Shel Holtz: Yeah.

Neville Hobson: Well, that was that’s an interesting story though, Shel, nevertheless. I think it’s only just starting, as you point out. The trial is just getting underway and revelations are going to emerge and see how it develops. So I’ve got an interesting one here that the title of it, well, what can I say? I mean, the as I wrote about it on LinkedIn, it’s an AI story that stopped me in my tracks. That’s the only way to describe it. When I came across it just a few days ago. And I and I want to put an important caveat around it before I introduce the topic. So It originated in a post on X. I haven’t been able to independently verify that every detail happened exactly as described. It may be entirely literal, it may be embellished or maybe partly be intended as a cautionary tale. But the organizational behavior it describes is absolutely worth talking about. The author of the tweet says he joined a meeting with his company’s talent acquisition team to discuss their new AI-driven. Resume screening system. And apparently it was working brilliantly. The team reported that the software had reduced time to hire by 60% in a month. Think about that as a management KPI for a moment. 60%. If you’re sitting in the executive suite looking at a dashboard, that’s a sort of number that gets people’s attention. The technology investment is working. Productivity is up. Hiring is faster. Great result. Except the author asked another question. What exactly had they told the AI to optimize for? The answer was digital natives with high runway potential and a useful energy. So he asked them to look at the demographics of the candidates the system had rejected. According to his account, it had rejected 100% of applicants who had graduated from university before 2010. Suddenly that spectacular 60% productivity improvement looks rather different. But there’s a line later in the story that I think is even more revealing. When the potential discrimination problem was pointed out, because that’s really what you’re talking about, age discrimination. The HR manager apparently argued that the AI made the decision, not her. So the company was insulated from liability. We’ve delegated the decision, therefore we’ve delegated the responsibility. And that to me is one of the most dangerous misconceptions organizations can have about AI. And if this example is typical, this is not uncommon. I bet you that is the case. It’s really dreadful. You can delegate a task to an AI system. We’ve talked about this on the show before, Shel. You can automate a process, you can allow an algorithm to make recommendations or even decisions, but you cannot automate away accountability. There’s another aspect of this that I think should concern communicators in particular. Look at the language supposedly used to instruct the AI system. Digital natives, high runway potential, useful energy. Those are exactly the kinds of expressions that can float around organizations sounding like harmless jargon or management shorthand. Put them into an AI system, making consequential decisions about real people, though, and suddenly language isn’t just describing organizational culture. It’s operationalizing it. The machine is turning the euphemism into a decision rule. And there’s something else here that connects to a much wider problem we’re starting to see with AI adoption. When an AI system produces an unexpectedly good result, our instinct is to celebrate it. Perhaps our instinct should sometimes be to investigate it. If productivity jumps 60%, what happened? What trade offs produced that number? Who benefited? Who didn’t? What did the system learn to optimize away? Because automation doesn’t necessarily eliminate discrimination, bad judgment, or flawed organizational assumptions, it makes them scalable. And here’s a final comment from the tweet author. I’m currently drafting a memo to halt all hiring until we manually review 4, 000 resumes, those ones that the system had rejected. So here’s the question I’d put on the table, Shel. If an AI system delivers a spectacular improvement in a business KPI, Whose job is it to ask what the system had to do to achieve it?

Shel Holtz: I think that needs to be baked into the governance, doesn’t it? We’re right back to that

Neville Hobson: Yeah, it does.

Shel Holtz: Governance model and the policies. I mean, we’ve talked about this recently. I mean, my productivity could absolutely skyrocket because I delegated a report, let’s say, to AI. I gave it a thin prompt. It gave me this highly polished five page report. I give it a quick once over and I send it along. And I’m now able to take the time that I would have spent researching and writing that report, doing other high value things for the organization, and the organization can now tout that we’ve had this productivity gain. Meanwhile, the department that I sent that report to is looking at this and going, wait a minute, this reads real well, but there’s no substance here. I need to validate whether there are things that are accurate here. So what happened, I merely shifted. The work to the department that received my output rather than me creating a useful, rel well-researched, well-written document. So, yeah, the first thing I want to question is how are they measuring productivity? The second question is, what are these people doing with their time? Now that they have saved that time by using AI? Is it just more you know, mundane rote work doing, you know, more AI agent management. Or they actually, I mean, you know, we talk about where I work, and I’m on the AI committee. We just wrapped up an AI survey of our entire employee population. And what we have found is that out in the field on the actual construction projects, the people who are saving time with AI are one, spending more time with the client, engaging with the owners, building that relationship, building the trust, and they’re spending more time out on the project, walking the project, doing safety walks, doing project walks, talking to the subcontractors. This is high value stuff that an AI can’t do. So we were really happy to see that in our survey results. We can say okay that what they’re spending that saved time doing is high value strategic stuff that matters to the organization. So yeah, I think, you know, what are you measuring and how are you measuring it need needs to be part of this conversation.

Neville Hobson: Okay, yeah, I d I don’t disagree with that at all. I think though what concerns me about this is the fact that you had an employee involved in the recruitment process who with a straight face argued that AI made the decision, not me, so hey, you know, what can I do? And the author of the tweet Did the right thing, I think, which is investigate the re rejects to see, you know, what clues can he as to why they we were rejected. Yet he knows the answer because the prompt they were given was, you know, those high runway potential digital natives useful energy. And so that’s what it worked on. And I think the what I find strange, if this is a true story, and I have no reason to doubt it’s not, even though this. Only this tweet that you have to go on. No one asked and again I can’t say more than that because I don’t know what the structure is of this organization. Where the kind of curiosity was that would have produced things like what happened if it’s productivity this productivity jump, this is extraordinary. What trade-offs produced that? Who benefited? Who didn’t? What did the system learn to optimize away? They didn’t have anything to guide them on that by the looks of it. So this comes back precisely to the point you made. This is a governance issue. There’s things they should have in place that clearly are not. If this guy hadn’t accidentally encountered this, I mean, I shudder to think if he hadn’t had that conversation with that talent acquisition person in his team. This would have remained undiscovered and they would have blissfully gone about, wow, this is fantastic, this productivity gain. And yet there’s something fundamentally flawed, it seems, that you give this kind of prompt, you get the behavior we understand that it did to reject all these other applicants and produce the outcome that it gave. No one questioned anything, it seemed to me. So there you got a problem at the high level in the organization. And this is a pattern we see in many of the stories we’re reporting, Shel, over the past few months, where you look at the story that developed that led us to talk about it, and you think there’s something missing here at a at a management level in the organization that shouldn’t be missing. And we’ve had the obvious one about the human in the loop, but this goes deeper than that. This is fundamental and this is worrying.

Shel Holtz: It is. And I mean we could we could spend a whole show talking about talent acquisition and AI being used to screen resumes and the like, which is problematic i in its own right. I mean, what do most organizations using the AI to find. It’s the candidates who have the appropriate degree from the right university, that they’ve got the right keywords in their CV, they have the appropriate technical skills. None of these things are predictors of success in the organization, in life. I’m reading a book right now, by the way, highly, highly recommend this book. It’s having a profound impact on my thinking. It’s called Robot Proof by Vivian Ming. She’s a fascinating character. But this book is extraordinary in the approach that it takes to ensuring that humanity remains relevant and thrives when AI is there handling all of these routine tasks that humans are no longer required to perform. So she points out through her work in recruiting and in education, the predictors of success are things like social intelligence, perspective taking, communication and collaboration, the ability to solve novel problems, comfort with uncertainty, and deeply human capacities that increase in value as AI gets smarter. These are things that are predictors of success and wealth and happiness and the ability to be creative and innovative on behalf of an organization. And we’re not looking for those things. So I mean, these are all conversations that I think we need to be having out there is, you know, I mean, just an AI that is faster at looking for the wrong things that recruiters have been looking for decades and decades. That’s not the approach we need to be taking. We need to be rethinking all of this stuff based on the data that’s available to us. And that’s what Vivian Ming has and shares in this book is the data that she has processed through machine learning tools since long before there was a ChatGPT. Highly recommend this book. And by the way, the book also has the best footnotes I have ever read.

Neville Hobson: There’s also much think of you know the HR person saying that the AI made the decision, not me, of something that

Shel Holtz: You made a decision to use the AI, right?

Neville Hobson: Well back in April, February and April, in fact, Sylvia Cambi and I ran a couple of workshops for IBC on ethics in AI. And we gave some case study examples, and one of them is very relevant to this conversation, this is the example of Workday that is involved in a lawsuit where the plaintiffs who were suing Workday allege that AI systems used in talent acquisition resulted in discriminatory outcomes. It’s the concern isn’t simply bias in one decision, it’s systemic exclusion embedded in the design of it. How ranking, filtering, and screening models operate at scale. So what happened, just as one little example, is that someone who was studying all this that came up with the details discovered that there are examples where someone applied for a job and within literally a minute they got a reject email. And there are examples where the reject emails are sent at 2 a. M. In their time zone. That lawsuit is still going on. It’s raised questions about oversight, fairness, transparency, and even vendor liability. So it’s certainly relevant to this story if you’ve got someone arguing that the AI made the decision. But it’s discriminatory and arguably from what we know, the human was behind it, yet the AI made that decision. That’s not really what happened, but that’s how it appears. So this is quite serious, and the Workday one I think is even more serious, the way it’s it seems to be playing out. But nevertheless, these indicate again, as I mentioned earlier, that we’ve got examples in organizations where things aren’t working right, things aren’t being done well, and you kind of wonder what else is going to emerge that we didn’t know about until someone discovered it. So these are things from a leadership point of view. That we need to pay attention to be proactive in setting in place the ground rules for this. So it’s not about guidelines or any of that kind of thing. It is about the fundamentals of AI leadership.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, and you know, at the end of the day, we’re probably not getting the best candidates in the door at the same time, which ultimately that’s what we want. And the way these things are working right now, they’re creating problems and probably leaving us with less than the optimum new hires. Well, retail has a new marketing playbook, and brands are turning their own employees into influencers. Gap. Is the clearest example. In January, it opened its year-old creator program. It had previously been reserved for outside influencers with at least a thousand followers. They’ve opened it up to its own corporate distribution and store staff. Employees can now earn commission and free product for posting about Old Navy Gap, Athleta and Banana Republic. Those are the Gap brands. Gap says the original program had already reached 154 million people across nearly 30, 000 posts. David’s Bridal did something similar. They launched David’s Style Squad, these are store associates, earning the same 5 to 15% commission as outside creators, with top performers up to 20%. A progress update from Modern Retail in April said the program had grown past 250 active ambassadors with roughly 500 applications. Starbucks has gone even further still, building the Green Apron Creators program from scratch and piloting a custom TikTok tool to share ad revenue with baristas. And Staples got here almost by accident. A store associate who went viral talking about their printing services became such an asset that the company leaned into it rather than shutting it down. And you may remember that we talked several years ago about a guy who worked for a paint company who was doing, I think it was either Instagram or TikTok videos, and they fired him for doing that, even though he was a hardcore brand ambassador who was getting people to buy the product. And he ended up getting hired by a competitor, Go figure. But why are brands suddenly taking this position of inviting their employees to become creators. Why now? And the answer is trust. Audiences are tuning out anything that smells like an ad. And the most credible person a brand has is someone who already works there. We’ve told you this for years and years that your employees are your most credible spokespeople and that it comes out in the Edelman Trust Barometer too. Employees almost also come cheaper. Than an outside creator roster. And the content has a built-in supply chain. A barista or a store so you can film something in 10 minutes with product that’s already just sitting there on the shelf. But the people covering this are flagging real problems. Digiday’s reporting this month points out that you can’t just flip a switch. There’s no consistent model for whether content happens on the clock or off the clock. Or what happens when a store manager needs someone running the register instead of chasing down that viral shot? One marketing exec told Digiday, most employee content is unusable, and finding the ones who are actually good at it is like panning for diamonds. There’s precedent for how badly this can go too. Amazon’s FC ambassadors, which was launched in 2018, to put warehouse workers on social media during a labor conditions controversy. Drew accusations of astroturfing and questions about whether some accounts were even real employees. Then there’s the legal exposure. Employment attorney Mark Conkl said that the moment a company starts directing what employees post or ties compensation to participation, it’s no longer enthusiasm, it’s work. And every employment law that applies to work applies to that too. That includes the FLSA. Filming, editing, and monitoring comments at nine at night can be compensable time, voluntary label or not. It includes overtime math, if stipends or engagement bonuses aren’t folded into the regular rate correctly. It includes discrimination risk if creators get picked because they look good on camera rather than by documented objective criteria. And it includes labor law, a creator policy That reads as don’t say anything negative can legally chill employees’ protected right to discuss wages and working conditions.

Neville Hobson: Mm.

Shel Holtz: So here’s my advice, and it splits two ways depending on which hat you’re wearing. If marketing is building one of these programs, your job is to get legal HR and marketing in the same room before it launches, not after the first viral post. Sort out compensation, selection criteria, and IP ownership up front. If you’re the one being asked to sell this internally, be honest with employees about what they’re actually signing up for. Real hours, real tax and wage implications, and a real trade-off between building the brand’s audience and building their own. And if marketing pitches you a program without any of that groundwork done, that’s the time to push back loudly, before it launches, not after that first lawsuit.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, quite interesting, isn’t it, Shel? We’ve talked about this before, some time ago. And that example of the paint company is interesting. I think attitudes, strategies and so forth have will have changed quite a bit since then. I think the paint company was Sherwin-Williams, if I’m not wrong. Yeah. It could be.

Shel Holtz: Think so. Although that may have been the one he ended up going to. I could look it up. I don’t remember.

Neville Hobson: Could be. Yeah, could be. I it reading the story in one of the links you shared in Retail Dive that talks about Gap and David’s Bridal, it’s actually quite interesting. This is now, this is not a kind of a an aside, like a little aside project. This is a this is a significant aspect to their to their brand management and general marketing, where employees are part of the process that rewards them for their actions. It makes sense. I don’t have any critiques on this at all, even. I can understand some concerns certainly surrounding people saying we do authentic storytelling. You know you can say that, but you need to convince people that is the case, authentic storytelling. I think there’s a difference between people with passion who happen to be employees of your company. Talking about your brands out in the marketplace, as opposed to people with passion or employees, you’re now gonna pay to do this. So that’s kind of losing something in the picture, it seems to me. So there’s a fine line to walk, I think, in how you communicate authentic storytelling. Because is it authentic because you’re paying them? Because When they’re doing this before and now they’re being rewarded. So I’m not saying that’s not a not a good thing. You need to be clear in how this is perceived.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, sure. This is not an employee advocacy program. To be clear,

Neville Hobson: No.

Shel Holtz: This is not an opportunity for employees to share content and to put their own spin on it in their networks. Employee advocacy programs have been around a long time. They can be very effective. We have one. We use one of the tools that’s available out there to manage it. But nobody gets paid for these. I mean, some of them, you know, y you have leaderboards and you may have campaigns with prizes for who’s on top of the leaderboard each week during the campaign. That’s not the same thing. The creator programs

Neville Hobson: No, it’s not.

Shel Holtz: That we’re talking about grew out of the whole influencer movement where these people get paid to promote the product. And basically what they’re doing is saying, hey, we’re gonna give our employees the same opportunity we’re giving the creator community out there. And it just doesn’t shake out that way because of employment law and because of everything else that I mentioned. And by the way, that was Tony Piloseno. He was an Ohio college student and a Sherwin-Williams employee, so good memory. He built a huge TikTok following posting paint mixing videos using Sherwin-Williams products. And in 2020 they fired him, citing misuse of company materials and creating content on company time. And he was hired by Florida Paints, which embraced his social media creativity and gave him a role producing content for the brand. So that was that story.

Neville Hobson: Show and Williams loss, without question. They missed the point entirely. But to be fair, that was back then and that was probably a common view. You’re wasting time on our dime and we’re gonna fire you. But you know, I was reading the retail dive piece that I mentioned on Gap as well. And interestingly, the VP of marketing, his comments about why they’re doing this. Our employees know our brands, our products and customers better than anyone. Absolutely. By expanding the program to eligible employees across our offices, we’re giving them a way to become influencers, earning commission and product while sharing what they love and bringing our brands to life through authentic storytelling. That doesn’t gel with me at all, that description, I have to say. It’s it’s forced this is a marketing activity basically. So y the word authentic doesn’t work well there, I think. Anyway, they have had some success without doubt. They talk about the program has now reached nearly hundred and fifty-four million consumers across thirty thousand posts, according to the press release that the GAP issued. I mean, that’s no small beer, without doubt. So it’s a good result. So I guess the answer is to for me, I’d want to take a look at this in six months’ time to see what it’s looking like.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, but in the meantime, I think the advice stands. There are labor, legal, and HR implications in doing this. And if you just let marketing launch it without having looked into that and addressed it and invited HR legal and y any labor relations specialists

Neville Hobson: Presume they did all that.

Shel Holtz: Into the room, I don’t know. Could have just been marketing. God knows we’ve seen plenty of examples of that. Where marketing just releases

Neville Hobson: It’s true, yeah.

Shel Holtz: Something to the wild, right? Like snatch up these bargains faster than a gator can snatch up a child, you know?

Neville Hobson: Extreme example. That was amazing, wasn’t it? Well, I think it I think it’s interseeing.

Shel Holtz: Yep. That’s stuck in my mind.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. It’s good seeing all this, I have to say. And as long as they’re doing it in a way that isn’t gonna bite back at them, as it were, all to the good, but need to see more evidence of success and that word authentic being used properly.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I’d be very interested if any listeners work for organizations or have clients that are have embarked on this kind of a program. I’d love to know what kind of safeguards were applied to that, what kind of conversations were held with HR and Legal and how it’s going. So let us know. So our next monthly episode of FIR, our long-form monthly episode for September, will drop on September twenty-eighth. Monday, September twenty-eighth, which means Neville, you and I will record it on Saturday, September twenty-sixth. We will be here with our

Neville Hobson: Yep.

Shel Holtz: Short form midweek episodes beginning not this Monday, but next Monday. In between those monthly episodes. So we hope that you will all watch for those announcements and or just subscribe to the podcast and they’ll show up in your podcast player. And until we see you on our next episode, that will be a 30 for immediate release.

The post FIR #527: Delegating Hiring Decisions to AI appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.