Holtz Communications + Technology

In multiple ways, Artificial Intelligence is redefining the role of the public relations professional. Some of that change is the result of new tools that automate processes that once consumed copious amounts of time. One such tool reviews services that solicit expert commentary at journalists’ requests, then crafts responses. The marketing of this tool, dubbed Synapse by its Lithuanian founders, has…

In the mid-1980s, the toy company Mattel held a quarterly town hall for managers and above. Those employees below the manager level were excluded for purely logistical reasons: the largest room at the Mattel headquarters campus wasn’t large enough to accommodate all local employees, and there was no appetite to spend the money on a hotel ballroom.

As communications director, I knew that…

A growing body of research suggests employees are more disconnected than ever. What are internal communication teams getting wrong? Also in this long-form monthly episode for June 2025:

• Buzzstream interviewed over 150 digital PR pros to assess the state of digital PR. It looks a lot like it did five years ago.
• Social media has overtaken television as Americans’ primary source of…

Not only are AI chatbots still hallucinating; by some accounts, it’s getting worse. Moreover, despite abundant coverage of the tendency of LLMs to make stuff up, people are still not fact-checking, leading to some embarrassing consequences. Even the legal team from Anthropic (the company behind the Claude frontier LLM) got caught.

Also in this episode:

• Google has a new tool just for…

A Columbia University student was expelled for developing an AI-driven tool to help applicants to software coding jobs cheat on the tests employers require them to take. You can call such a tool deplorable or agree with the student that it’s a legit resource. It’s hard to argue with the $5 million in seed funding the student and his partner have raised.…

Ask coders how they spend their time these days, and they’re likely to tell you they mostly oversee generative AI tools that craft most of the code. The quality of the code LLMs produce has improved dramatically. People who used to craft code from scratch now review and adjust AI chatbot outputs. For all practical purposes, they have become AI managers.

To some…