PRGN Summit Deep Dive: We’re Training and Hiring for the Roles Brand Visibility Needs Now

This week at the Public Relations Global Network (PRGN) semi-annual summit in NYC, I hosted a roundtable for agency owners on the roles we need to hire as AI changes how brands are found. More than 40 independent agencies from around the world participated in the summit, and I chose the topic based on real insights from Greenough’s brand partners.  

Every year we ask them which services they want more of from us. This year, 100% of our respondents selected AEO and AI visibility, and this data was impossible to ignore. So this week, we posted a role we have never hired for before: an AEO and analytics specialist.

Why this can’t wait

Around the roundtable and across the summit’s sessions, the most useful conversations focused on how AI is changing the brands we represent.

May Lee Tan of Perspective Strategies in Malaysia noted that the content we build for a brand now feeds the AI platforms people use to research what to buy, which means our work shows up in purchase consideration, now making us accountable for business revenue for the first time.

In an AI SWOT workshop led by Terrie Ard of Moore, we named our industry's risk. Years ago, PR firms left the technical side of search to someone else, and a whole category of SEO agencies grew up between brands and their communications partners. We can’t let that happen again with AI visibility. Your brand’s story and how AI platforms tell it are the same job, and it belongs with the people who know your brand best.

The roles we’re building

For most of Greenough’s history, an agency team meant brand strategists who have built brands from startup to IPO and beyond, savvy, sector-specialized content writers, and media and influencer relations specialists with long relationships with the voices that matter most. These roles still matter, but we’re adding expertise around them that brand visibility now requires.

AI visibility has a leader. Our EVP also serves as our Head of AI Visibility, so AI visibility sits with someone who manages brand partner programs every day rather than in a separate technical silo. In partnership with the new AEO and analytics specialist, they will continue to advance our measurement reports across the agency to ensure every outcome and every metric serves AI visibility for our brand partners, since it is now the only metric that ultimately matters. As a result, I paired AEO with analytics on purpose. AI visibility on its own is one number. Connected to share of voice, message pull-through, and the rest of a program’s results, it tells a brand partner what is working and what to do next.

Brand marketing also has a seat at our table. Jessika Parry Amaral, our SVP and Head of Brand Marketing, presented at the summit on connecting earned media to paid support so strong placements reach the people a brand partner’s sales team is trying to reach.

Every role at the agency now includes AI as a key performance metric, both for understanding its impact on what we do and our outcomes, and for using AI in our workflows. As a result, our time stays focused on strategic work, judgment, and creativity. Over the past four years, we have invested heavily in AI training and development for the whole agency, and this fall every team member is completing a six-week, hands-on intensive with weekly labs and a certification at the end, supporting our charter of being AI-powered and human-led.

What it looks like in practice

We formalized this work as Marka+ AI, our AI visibility audits and measurement reports. Each one shows a brand partner how AI platforms describe them today, where the gaps are, and what we will do about them.

Ameresco is a good example. Together, we raised Ameresco’s AI visibility from the 40s to the 60s, measured as a percentage, in about a year. Business Insider recently covered how Ameresco built its AEO strategy, and our work is a finalist for a PR Daily award on AI Search & Answer Engine Visibility.

The tactics matter less than the order of operations. We start with what the brand needs to be known for, then make sure the places AI platforms learn from say it accurately and consistently.

Judgment stays human

More AI means more output, and output needs someone who can tell what’s good. At the summit, Terrie described this as cognitive debt: the gap between the work we produce and the understanding we build. As she put it, “Just because AI can think for us doesn’t mean that it should.”

Terrie also argued that the most valuable people on an agency team will be great people managers and phenomenal managers of AI agents, and how they work together. That matches our approach: the specialists (human and machine) handle the systems and the data. Our senior team turns what they find into counsel a brand can act on.

We’re also keeping the next generation in the room. If agencies let AI replace the work the next generation of talent used to learn on, no one will grow into senior strategists. We'll keep investing in the next generation, as they will soon be able to teach us how to use AI best, as natives, just as they did and do with social media, and we will spend our time giving them the context, experience, and judgment these tools can’t supply.

What this means for you

If you’re one of our brand partners, you’ll continue to see this in the work, with our Marka+ AI visibility reports informing the direction, insights, and ideas executed in your programs. If you’re considering an agency, ask how they’re staffing for AI visibility and who on the team will own it.

This field will keep changing, and so will we. Our brand partners told us clearly where they want us to go, and we’re building the team to take them there. I love this work, and I’ve always believed that if you love it, others will too.