By Ben Gerow, Director at Pinkston
When I started my communications career, an understanding of social media was the key to getting hired. As the first generation to grow up with platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, our understanding of these tools was our main selling point. Today, those skills are considered table stakes and the next major workforce shift, the age of AI, is here.
For our clients, that shift is already here. At Pinkston, we are working to equip every member of our team to help clients navigate this new environment, starting with our junior staff.
We’ve moved beyond a Google search-dominated environment. Clients are asking how their brand appears in ChatGPT, Gemini, and other LLMs. If we’re not proactively thinking about how AI is shaping our clients’ reputation and discoverability, someone else is. And that “someone” might be their in-house team, or their next agency.
To prepare our new employees for the age of AI, Pinkston is developing an AI certification to launch in 2026 so that every team member, from day one, has a baseline fluency in the tools that will define this next chapter. That fluency is built on three levels:
- Basic Fluency means knowing how to use tools like ChatGPT or NotebookLM for brainstorming, summarizing, and drafting, while understanding ethical use and protecting client confidentiality. It also involves writing clear, specific prompts that guide AI tools to produce valuable results for client work.
- Applied Fluency builds on this by using AI to enhance client service. This includes preparing for meetings with deeper insights, researching media targets more effectively, and helping develop pitches or op-ed ideas that align with a client’s strategy. It also means understanding prompt engineering and how to nail the input to maximize the output.
- Strategic Fluency is where skill and judgment combine to create real competitive advantage. At this level, our staff can pitch stronger story angles, identify whitespace opportunities, and design campaigns that boost both traditional visibility and discoverability within generative search engines like ChatGPT and Gemini. In a post–Google search world, this fluency helps ensure our clients are found and chosen.
One of our core principles at Pinkston is that “people matter most,” and our focus on AI training reflects that. We’re not looking to replace people with AI; instead, we’re using it to empower them and better serve our clients. That requires agency, giving every team member the opportunity to shape how we use AI.
We’ve already seen this strategy in action. One junior team member recently worked with ChatGPT to understand the prompts that were most commonly associated with our client and developed blog content that would increase the chances of our client’s website being cited the next time someone used those relevant prompts.
The communications industry has always evolved alongside technology. Years ago, PR teams were cutting articles out of magazines and mailing them to clients. Search engines changed that work. Now, generative AI is transforming it again. Embodying another one of our core principles, to “write the next chapter, ” our job is to ensure that our clients are not only keeping up but leading.
We are training our junior staff to think strategically about AI from the start of their careers. AI is rewriting what it takes to be discovered and trusted. We are making sure our clients have a team that knows how to play and win in this new game.
