A Look At Our Most Powerful AI Ingredient: People - FleishmanHillard

Article

September 2, 2025

By Ephraim Cohen

(Disclosure: Omni-based AI assistance in research and writing)

Amid the rush to brand every new dashboard, tracker or AI-powered package as a transformative solution, we’re making a different kind of bet. We’re betting boldly not on training people, but people as our transformative solution. It’s a bet we believe every communications professional should make.

To put a point on it: we can empower people with AI solutions for their clients. Or we can empower people to create the right AI solution for their client.

We’re going with the latter.

To be clear, people are the differentiated ingredient in data and AI powered solutions. We take communications professional—someone with expertise in communicating with stakeholders in various scenarios such as product launches or crisis situations – and add AI design skills. We then equip them with an industry leading audience and media data sets, institutional knowledge digitized into knowledge libraries, and the full range of AI models.

This philosophy drives our strategy behind FH Fusion, FleishmanHillard’s approach to enabling every single professional to architect and build intelligent, agentic AI solutions. The result: communications teams aren’t just using AI and data via Omnicom’s Omni platform, they are hands-on-keyboard designing the specific, outcome-oriented solution customized or created for each client.

Communications Subject Matter Expertise Remains the Difference Maker

There’s a crucial difference between communications expertise and subject matter expertise for communications. And for years, our industry has focused on communications expertise –reputation management, message development, narrative framing, media strategy and other areas. We’ve also long had teams with subject matter expertise in specific industries or stakeholder groups, not unsimilar to what a general industry or audience analyst might bring to the table.

Now, Communicators’ subject matter expertise can be the difference maker in developing effective solutions. Whether navigating healthcare regulations, global governance trends or financial disclosures, clients need more than storytelling. Combine that fluency with AI and data, and those very same counselors can create and continually improve powerful AI agents well versed in the knowledge and nuance of specific industries and scenarios. However, applying expertise to AI Agent development is only the start.

Pairing Expertise with Data Fluency (data sets and knowledge bases)

By adding data fluency and data resources, those same subject matter experts can greatly increase the precision and impact of their AI solutions. And what is data fluency?The ability to draw insights from diverse and often complex sources, including audience and media, corporate data sets, historical and best practice knowledge files, and synthetic data modeled from trends and behavior patterns.

Knowing how to find, interpret and apply these data types is no longer an additive skill, in the last few years we’ve made it core to being an effective counselor in the tomorrow world rapidly developing today. Now, we’re making it core to being an effective counselor and core to that counselor creating powerful AI agents and AI solutions.

Combining human expertise, AI and data fluency and data and AI tools into solutions.

The next evolution lies in knowing how to translate subject matter expertise and data fluency into intelligent systems, namely, agentic AI solutions. We’re not talking about programming or machine learning algorithms. We’re talking about training agents the same way we train teams: instilling expertise, data-driven insights, institutional knowledge, governance frameworks and strategic logic.

A few starting examples of what FH professionals are already building:

Replicate and scale their methods in risk and reputation management

Continuously learn from new inputs

Automate time-consuming workflows (while increasing quality)

Rapidly synthesize information to support better counsel and smarter decision-making in real-time

But these agents don’t come off a shelf. They’re built by people who understand what to teach them, understand the details, nuances and overall environments of the audiences and industries for which they are designing, and, as a result, how to deploy them in a way that ensures quality in the output of the AI solution.

Redefining Excellence in Communications

What was once considered top-tier communications expertise has evolved. Today’s standard is subject matter excellence for communications, paired with the fluency to interpret data and the capability to build AI-powered systems that scale our best thinking.

Because in a world moving faster every day, the value isn’t just in having expertise. It’s in knowing how to build with it.

And like any good movie, this is a bit of a post-credit teaser. What does this all mean for the next generation of communicators? In our upcoming posts, we’ll explore the emerging roles we believe agencies and clients alike will need—from solutions teams to knowledge librarians, cultural anthropologists and even art historians.