There are trade shows. Then there is COMPUTEX. 

Every year, Taipei becomes the center of the technology world for one intense, fast-moving week of announcements, meetings, demos, keynotes, dinners, shuttle rides, and hurried coffees between halls. By the end of day one, first-time attendees usually realize the same thing: 

COMPUTEX is not a sprint. It is a marathon.

The people who get the most out of it are not the ones who move fastest but the ones who prepare properly. If this is your first COMPUTEX — or even your second — here is the practical survival guide we wish someone had handed us years ago. 

Know your race plan before you arrive

One of the biggest mistakes at COMPUTEX is assuming you can improvise your schedule once you land. 

You can’t. 

The show moves too quickly, the venues are too spread out, and the number of simultaneous events becomes overwhelming surprisingly fast. Decide your priorities before you board the plane. 

Start by separating your schedule into three categories: 

• must-do meetings and sessions
• important but flexible stops 
• “nice if there’s time” opportunities 

Without this discipline, your week can easily devolve into an exhausting blur of zig-zagging across Taipei. 

Route planning matters more than people expect. COMPUTEX is not confined to a single neat exhibition hall. Events spill across multiple venues, hotels, meeting spaces, private demo rooms, and off-site locations throughout the city. 

And during peak hours, even short journeys can become logistical traps. A route that looks like a comfortable 20-minute transfer on Google Maps can easily stretch to 35 minutes or more once shuttle queues, escalators, crowds, and Taipei traffic enter the equation. 

Calm at COMPUTEX comes from knowing exactly where you’re going next. 

The biggest moments come early

Another rookie mistake is assuming the energy builds gradually through the week. In reality, many of the biggest announcements and executive appearances happen in the first 48 hours. 

Officially, COMPUTEX 2026 runs from June 2–5. In practice, the week effectively begins before the exhibition floor even opens. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote and the global press conference are both scheduled for June 1, alongside major executive appearances from companies including Qualcomm. Additional keynote and forum activity is concentrated heavily across June 2–3. 

In other words: if you care about the headline moments, the beginning of the week is where the action is. That also means the first two days tend to be the most physically demanding. Expect packed schedules, packed halls, packed transport, and very little downtime. Plan your stamina accordingly. 

Sort your access before the starting gun

Do not assume you can casually wander into everything. 

At major sessions — especially executive keynotes, media events, and high-profile launches — access procedures can become surprisingly strict. Some require advance registration. Others need QR confirmations or media accreditation checks. Popular sessions may also hit capacity quickly. 

If there is a registration process, complete it before the day starts. 

If there is a QR code, screenshot it before leaving the hotel. 

If there is a confirmation email, keep it accessible offline. 

This sounds obvious right up until you are standing outside a keynote venue at 8:10am trying to reload an email on overloaded Wi-Fi while 400 other people do exactly the same thing. 

And if you are attending major keynote sessions as media, arriving early is not optional. The best photo positions and seating disappear quickly. 

Dress and pack for the task at hand

The most important item at COMPUTEX is not your laptop. It is your shoes.

You will likely spend eight to ten hours on your feet every day, walking between halls, standing through demos, navigating crowds, and moving between meetings. Comfortable footwear is completely non-negotiable. 

Veterans often bring a second pair to swap into midway through the week. Your future self will thank you.

The rest of your bag should be built for endurance:

• Chargers and battery packs
• Hotspot or local SIM 
• Laptop if needed for filing or editing 
• Water bottle 
• Painkillers, vitamins, hydration tablets or vitamin C 
• Business cards if your industry still insists on them 
• A light outer layer because the air conditioning can feel arctic even when it is 35°C outside 
• A compact umbrella, because Taipei in June can be hot and humid with a serious chance of rain  

The key principle is simple: carry everything you need to survive the entire day. Once things start moving, there is rarely time to return to the hotel and reset.

Breakfast is strategy

At CES, people talk about surviving Las Vegas. At COMPUTEX, survival often comes down to energy management. 

Start with breakfast. Eat at the hotel before leaving if you can. Venue cafés get packed quickly, especially in the mornings between keynote sessions, and during COMPUTEX week, convenience stores become your best friend — part fuel stop, part hydration station, part emergency response unit. 

Hydration matters more than many people realize. Taipei in June is hot and humid, and a full exhibition day can become surprisingly draining. 

The smartest attendees also build small recovery windows into their day: 
a coffee stop between halls, a quiet lounge to reset emails, or even ten minutes somewhere with decent air conditioning and reliable seating. 

Because seating can become its own challenge. During busy periods, actual places to sit on the show floor are limited. Knowing where the media lounges, larger booths, cafés, and quieter corners are located becomes an underrated survival skill. 

And while venue Wi-Fi exists, relying on it completely is optimistic. A hotspot or local SIM card is one of the best investments you can make during the week. 

Taipei survival tips beyond the show floor

Restaurants fill up quickly, especially for larger groups and business dinners. If there is somewhere specific you want to eat, book ahead. 

A few additional practical reminders help: 

• Taiwan uses Type A and Type B plugs 

• June weather is typically hot and humid, with occasional rain 

• Lightweight clothing is your friend 

• MRT transit is excellent, but peak-hour congestion around key venues is real during the show 

And while attendees often spend the week sprinting between meetings, it is worth carving out at least a little time to enjoy the city itself. Taipei rewards curiosity, whether that means late-night street food, hidden-away cocktail bars, traditional breakfast spots, or simply wandering a neighborhood after the show ends. 

Most importantly: ask locals for advice. 

The best shortcuts, smartest routes, underrated restaurants, and genuinely useful COMPUTEX hacks usually come from people who have lived through the week many times before. 

That includes the Hoffman team. 

Whether you need guidance on the hottest booths, the most efficient route between meetings, or where to decompress after ten hours on the exhibition floor, we are always happy to help. And yes, that may include directions to the after-party. 

The post Your COMPUTEX Playbook: How to Navigate the Week Like a Pro appeared first on The Hoffman Agency.

When late May or early June rolls around in Taiwan, something funny starts to happen. Calendars go feral. Schedules get packed. Hotel prices climb. And offices that were busy a week earlier start looking suspiciously like ghost towns. That annual disappearance says a lot about COMPUTEX and the place it has long held in the global tech calendar. For years, the show has been associated with laptops, computers, hardware and the ecosystem behind them. But COMPUTEX now feels far bigger than that familiar image suggests. It has become one of the defining weeks in tech — a moment when the industry gathers, the spotlight sharpens, and the next wave of stories starts to come into view. 

That shift did not happen overnight. Established in 1981, COMPUTEX has spent 45 years evolving alongside the industries it helps bring together. For much of that time, what it represented sat slightly behind the scenes: hardware, semiconductors, infrastructure and supply chains — the systems quietly powering a world that was becoming more digital by the year. As technology became more embedded in how we live, work and do business, those layers only grew in importance. Global semiconductor sales alone rose from $335.2 billion in 2015 to $630.5 billion in 2024.  

And the rise of AI is making COMPUTEX and the machinery behind modern technology bigger, more visible and consequential than ever. What AI changed was not COMPUTEX’s relevance, but the world’s visibility into those systems. Suddenly, the parts of the industry that used to hum away in the background became the biggest story in technology: chips, servers, cooling, infrastructure, manufacturing capacity and supply chains. Global data center capex surged 51% to $455 billion in 2024 as companies raced to build the compute backbone for AI. That has made COMPUTEX feel bigger, more mainstream and more urgent — not because it was ever niche to the people who understood the industry, but because far more of the world is now paying attention to the systems it has long represented. Taiwan’s role in the semiconductor and compute story only sharpens that importance. 

That is also what makes COMPUTEX feel different from so many other major tech events. Plenty of shows now talk about AI, almost all of them do. But COMPUTEX sits much closer to the systems, suppliers and strategic relationships actually powering the AI era. This is not just where people discuss what AI might do. It is where the ecosystem behind it comes into view — the hardware, the infrastructure, the manufacturing backbone, the supply-chain partners, the buyers, the integrators and the companies making the whole thing possible. With 1,400 exhibitors, 4,800+ booths and more than 80,000 tech professionals, entrepreneurs, buyers and international media, this is one of the places where the future of compute becomes tangible at scale. And with the Edge AI market projected to reach US$80 billion by 2029, the commercial backdrop is only getting bigger — not just around cloud-scale training, but around inference, physical AI and the rise of NPUs as intelligence moves closer to devices, machines and the world around us.  

That scale creates real business gravity. For one intense stretch, the technology industry stops being scattered across countries, time zones, inboxes and conference calls and shows up in the same place at once. Platform leaders, PC brands, infrastructure players, suppliers, buyers, partners, media, analysts and decision-makers all pile into the same city trying to get things done. That is what gives the week its force. It is not just booths. It is meetings, briefings, demos, dinners, side conversations, executive visibility and quiet commercial conversations happening all around them. For the world’s largest tech companies especially, COMPUTEX is one of the best places to get closer to the supply-chain partners and ecosystem relationships that matter most. It is not simply a place to show products. It is a place to facilitate business, strengthen partnerships and move serious commercial conversations forward while the market gathers in one place. 

And because the market gathers in one place, the world watches too. Every year, COMPUTEX draws more than 500 international journalists and generates tens of thousands of pieces of coverage, while analysts, creators, commentators and investors all look to Taiwan for signals about where the industry is heading next. That attention only intensifies when some of the biggest names in AI and compute — from NVIDIA and Qualcomm to Foxconn, MediaTek and NXP — use COMPUTEX week to unveil major products, partnerships and strategic moves. Announcements do not just get made at COMPUTEX; they land in a week when the right people are already paying attention. 

That is what makes the show more than a commercial or operational moment. It is also a moment for brand storytelling and business storytelling — a chance for companies to show not just what they make, but why they matter in the bigger shifts reshaping the industry. For communications teams, that creates a major opportunity: to help leadership show up with a clear point of view, a sharper story and a stronger sense of how the brand wants to be seen while the market is watching. 

COMPUTEX has always mattered to the technology industry. What has changed is how visible, how central and how consequential that importance now feels. In an era defined by AI, compute and the race to build what comes next, this is one of the moments where the ecosystem comes fully into view. That is why COMPUTEX deserves to be seen not just as a trade show, but as a stage — for ideas, for business, for partnerships and for the stories that will shape what comes next. And for any brand thinking seriously about where it fits in the next chapter of technology, this is not just a moment worth paying attention to. It is a moment worth stepping into. 

The post How COMPUTEX became one of the most important weeks in tech  appeared first on The Hoffman Agency.

There was a time when influence in tech looked straightforward: secure headline coverage, put a charismatic CEO on stage, generate buzz, repeat. That model has not disappeared, but it is no longer enough.

Today, attention is easier to win yet harder to keep. Brands can trend for a day and be forgotten by the next news cycle. They can dominate headlines and still be misunderstood. They can be highly visible yet absent from the conversations that matter most.

There is now a new equation for influence in technology: Visibility + Meaning + Impact. And increasingly, it must work across both humans and machines, as the latter become new stakeholders in their own right.

Influence today is built through a clear point of view, signals of credibility, and messages strong enough to survive human debate and machine summarisation. Attention is cheap; trust and durability are what count, and are most difficult to earn.

Techfluence is how we define the kind of influence that technology brands now need. It goes beyond awareness or “getting coverage”. It is the ability to be discoverable, memorable, credible and consequential across both human and machine audiences.

When done well, Techfluence supports real business outcomes: stronger valuation confidence, more resilient share price narratives, improved product perception, talent attraction and market share growth. It is a practical lens for understanding how influence is created in a changed environment.

Why the equation has changed

Three shifts around attention, AI and trust are redefining influence for tech brands.

To begin with, attention has fragmented. Audiences no longer gather in one place. Influence is shaped across short-form video, newsletters, podcasts, niche communities, analyst circles, Reddit threads and private group chats. A single high-profile story does not carry the same weight it once did. Brands must show up across multiple surfaces, in different formats, with consistency.

Second, machines are now a legitimate part of the stakeholder map. AI tools and large language models do not replace human audiences, but they increasingly shape how people discover information and how narratives are interpreted. Gartner expects traditional search engine volume to decline 25% by 2026 as users shift toward AI chatbots and virtual agents. That means many first impressions will be formed through summarised answers rather than direct visits to websites or articles. If your story is vague, inconsistent or unsupported, AI systems may compress it into something simplistic or unhelpful.

Third, trust is on shakier ground everywhere. Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2025 found trust in news stable at around 40% globally, but still low overall. In this environment, audiences look for credibility cues: proof points, consistency, expertise, third-party validation and leaders who sound informed rather than over-rehearsed.

Taken together, these shifts mean communications now has more moving parts: more surfaces, more engines, more intermediaries and greater importance placed on clear sourcing, consistency and credibility.

Attention vs equity: a reality check

We live in an era where anyone can say almost anything, instantly, to a global audience. Outrage travels fast, exaggerated claims draw clicks, and sharp but often shallow takes outperform nuanced ones. But attention is not the same as influence.

Short-term attention can come from rage-bait, inflated promises or headline-friendly theatrics. It may create spikes in visibility, but little lasting value. Long-term equity is different. It is built through a repeatable point of view, credible signals, evidence, sustained presence and statements that actually shape decisions. That is the difference between being talked about and being trusted.

A useful test for any campaign or executive message might be:

• Will this earn attention?
• Will this build equity?
• What proof makes it believable?

Visibility is now the entry ticket

Visibility still matters, but it should no longer be the goal. Today, many tech brands are highly visible and strategically weak. They are everywhere, yet stand for little. They generate mentions, but not meaning.The brands that win pair visibility with clarity and consequence. They communicate a point of view people can repeat. They change perception. They influence choices made by investors, customers, policymakers and talent.This matters even more in a politically charged and geopolitically complex environment, where narratives move quickly and scrutiny is intense. A brand story can now be reduced to a single label by an AI system or a viral post. If that label is inaccurate, recovery is harder.The new equation remains simple: Influence = Visibility + Meaning + Impact. But in the era of humans and machines, each element must hold up under scrutiny, repetition and compression.

The Techfluence stack

We see five core drivers of influence. You might think of them as the Techfluence Stack, but more than that, they offer a playbook for action.

1. Opinion

Have a clear stance, not corporate wallpaper. Brands with conviction are easier to understand and easier to remember.

2. Reaction speed

Respond quickly when moments matter. Not with noise, but with relevance and context.

3. Soundbites + proof

Ideas need to travel. Soundbites are the unit of modern influence. They are what gets quoted, headlined and repeated. Proof is the guardrail. It is what ensures bold messaging does not collapse under scrutiny.

4. Presence

Be present where influence is formed: earned media, owned channels, communities, analysts, creators and AI discovery environments.

5. Consequence

Do your words or products move anything? Do they shift category narratives, investor confidence, customer preference or policy conversations? If not, visibility alone is not enough.

We have already seen aspects of this playbook in action repeatedly. Steve Jobs turned product launches into cultural moments because vision, language and consequence came together. Satya Nadella reshaped Microsoft’s narrative by pairing visibility with a clear philosophy around culture, cloud and transformation. Jensen Huang has helped make NVIDIA synonymous with the AI era through technical authority, consistency and repeated market-moving moments.

And many brands offer the opposite lesson: strong share of voice, little distinct meaning.

Ultimately, Techfluence is built, not declared. Over the coming months, we will unpack each driver in more detail: how opinion is formed, why soundbites matter, where influence shows up, how narratives travel, and what separates noise from durable market impact. In today’s market, being seen is only the beginning. The real question is whether you shape what happens next.

The post Be seen AND believed: A new equation for tech influence appeared first on The Hoffman Agency.

What leaders say – and choose not to say – now carries real consequences

Imagine a situation where two people on your team stop speaking.

Not because of any missed deadline, or a disagreement over strategy – but because of something they watched on the news the night before. Two ideologies clashing, two identities at threat, and so they sit waiting to hear what their leaders have to say.

This isn’t abstract.

The latest tensions in the Gulf region are just that — the latest.

Before that, it was Israel and Gaza.

Before that, Russia and Ukraine.

Add to that civil and societal tensions like #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, the cost of living crises in Europe, pandemic lockdowns and even generational divides.

Plus countless other conflicts that rarely make global headlines but are deeply felt by the people living through them.

Now, more than ever before, those tensions are showing up in your meetings, your team dynamics, your marketing and in the silence where collaboration used to be.

This is the new leadership reality

Leaders today are not just managing performance or P&Ls. They’re also being asked to manage emotions, history and belief systems that may not have started in the office – but don’t stay outside it either.

When cultural understanding – across national, ethnic, theological, generational lines or beyond – breaks down at the highest levels, the consequences don’t stay contained. They ripple outward — into markets, into communities and into the workplace.

And in a world where every statement can be screenshotted, shared and scrutinised in seconds, what a leader says can make or break a brand. Yet how that message is interpreted can vary dramatically depending on the audience.

Leaders may not have influence over geopolitics or global economics. But they are responsible for what happens in their teams, and with their customers, when those tensions walk through the door. So what do you do?

Neutrality is not the goal. Stability is.

The instinct, especially in volatile moments, is to stay neutral. Avoid the topic. Stick to the script. Keep things “professional.”

But in a fast-moving world of digital whispers, silence is not neutral. And reality doesn’t disappear just because it’s inconvenient.

This doesn’t mean companies should take a stance on every issue. Nor does it mean everyone will agree. The goal is not to force harmony.

But if you want to create an environment where people can exist – and work – without fracture, leaders cannot afford to pretend the tensions don’t exist.

It’s about navigating difference without letting it break the system.

Emotional intelligence isn’t enough

The challenge is you can have leaders who appear highly attuned to their team’s and customer’s needs in one context – and fall flat in another. That’s because emotional intelligence does not automatically translate across cultures.

Cultural intelligence requires the ability to read cues through a lens that may be completely different from your own.

It’s like asking someone who can drive a car whether they also know how to ride a motorcycle, drive a lorry and steer a horse-drawn carriage. With time and practice, probably. But instinctively? Not always.

Cultural intelligence is the ability to:

• Hold space without endorsing a side
• Acknowledge emotion without escalating conflict
• Stay fair, even when perspectives feel incompatible
• Read what is not being said — and understand why

And perhaps most importantly, it’s about ensuring that values do not default to a single cultural lens. In global, diverse teams, that’s one of the fastest ways to turn small fractures into lasting divides.

The leaders who will stand out

The leaders who will stand out in this environment are often not the loudest. They are the most deliberate.

They know when to open space — and when to contain it. They recognise that silence, tone and timing carry different meanings across cultures. They understand that fairness does not always look like sameness.

And most importantly, they don’t avoid the tough conversations.

Because avoiding the conversation doesn’t protect the team. It leaves them to navigate it alone.

Leadership today is no longer just about what happens inside the room. It’s about how what’s said in that room travels and is understood beyond it.

Cultural intelligence is what holds that line.

The post When the World Feels Fractured, Leadership Gets Measured appeared first on The Hoffman Agency.

“The point is not that comms work has suddenly changed species. It is that coverage now needs to function not only as persuasion for humans, but as a clear factual source that a machine can retrieve.” 

—Paul Fabretti 

For decades, communicators have always written with both audiences in mind. SEO, at its best, has long required a careful balance between human relevance and machine readability. What has changed in this new era of AI is the standard for information retrievability. 

Fabretti’s argument is not a eulogy for SEO. It is a reminder that SEO’s underlying principles still matter and that GEO practices pursued carelessly risk damaging the very SEO foundations that make AI visibility work in the first place. Weaken your authority in traditional search, and your presence in AI systems typically weakens with it. The two are not separate ecosystems; they rely on each other (at least at the present moment). 

SEO and GEO Must Be Tackled Together 

Our view is straightforward. SEO and GEO are two lanes of the same road, and a brand that commits to only one will find itself left behind. The question is not which discipline is winning; it is how to run them in parallel. 

SEO remains the fastest route for brands to get moving and cannot be skipped. Rankings, authority and structured web presence form the foundation that AI systems read from. 

Whereas GEO is the emerging highway. Generative and answer engines draw from a wider universe of sources, including forums, analyst commentary, owned media, Wikipedia, even YouTube videos (and their transcribed content) and earned coverage. 

What does translate to both disciplines? Presence in the right places, trusted by the right sources, packaged in formats that a model can retrieve. That is a communications challenge as much as a technical one.

Enter Earned Discovery

We call our approach at Hoffman “earned discovery.” It’s a form of Generative Engine Optimization and Answer Engine Optimization that prioritizes quality and placement over volume.  

While some GEO-only agencies are recommending high-volume content refreshes and forced FAQ generation, that is not the path forward. There is already too much AI slop or trash volume on the internet. It’s not helpful for you as a human reader, and it’s not going to get you the result your CMO wants.  

Quality content, landed in the right places, is the single greatest determinant of whether you appear in a generative AI response. Earned media will always matter, but strong coverage alone does not increase discoverability. Your website, owned content, online forums like Reddit, user-generated content, analyst points of view and Wikipedia all enter the equation. A winning strategy requires not a spike in output, but a deliberate construction of presence across every layer of the web that AI systems draw from. 

The skills that have always lived in strategic communications — source credibility, message clarity, placement strategy and narrative coherence — turn out to be exactly what AI engines reward. 

What Has Changed in the AI Era? 

Despite what GEO-only agencies may be peddling, much of the discoverability strategy has stayed the same. The main shifts are how we think about the sources that form the narrative, the formatting for machine retrieval and the recognition that GEO is a new highway lane running alongside SEO. 

What does not change is the commitment to valuable content and truthful journalism. In fact, there is a case to be made that the shift toward AI-driven search will ultimately reward these qualities more, not less. The next generation of AI search may move away from the Google index entirely toward knowledge graphs and trusted-source rankings that are not purely keyword-based. In that world, a piece of factual, authoritative coverage that currently sits on page 30 of a search result could surface at the top of a generative AI response. Trustworthy information, verified sources and credible journalism will matter more, not less. 

That is a world that communications is built for. 

Questions Answered 

Q: Does GEO reduce the impact of SEO? 

A: The simple answer is no. GEO does not render SEO irrelevant, but it does raise the stakes for doing SEO well. AI systems still draw heavily from indexed web content. If your organic authority declines, your visibility in generative AI systems tends to decline as well. The two disciplines must be run in parallel. 

Q: Why do you call it “earned discovery”? 

A: Discoverability in AI systems is not purchased or gamed into existence. Rather, it is earned through the quality and placement of content over time. The phrase captures two things simultaneously: the earned media heritage of the communications practice, and the idea that appearing in a generative AI response is a form of discovery, not just a ranking. Earned discovery is our term for a holistic approach to GEO and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) that prioritizes credible, well-placed content across your company’s full online profile, including owned media, forums, analyst commentary, Wikipedia and earned coverage. 

Q: Does The Hoffman Agency offer GEO services? 

A: Yes, through our earned discovery framework. We help clients build the kind of online profile that AI engines recognize and retrieve: well-structured owned content, strategic placement in high-authority third-party sources and narrative coherence across every source that generative models draw from. We do not offer high-volume synthetic content, programmatic FAQ generation or other tactics that trade short-term AI citations for long-term authority erosion.  

The post Two Lanes, One Road. Here’s Why SEO and GEO Must Coexist appeared first on The Hoffman Agency.

I was worried about choosing a career path defined by unfamiliarity and nervous about starting something new.

Yet my time at Hoffman and my introduction to the world of tech PR have been anything but unfamiliar. It’s been straightforward: a gradual slope that’s snowballed into an exciting career path.

Things Hoffman does well: PR, tech, tech PR and caring.

When I walked through the doors on my first day, there were balloons, streamers, breakfast, friendly people and warm smiles. That was not what I expected, nor had I ever seen that in a workplace before.

From the moment I opened my laptop for the first time, everything was taken care of: my schedule for the next few days, my internship curriculum, 1:1 meetings with everyone on my teams and an extremely long email thread with everyone welcoming me to Hoffman (cue a lot of emojis and GIFs).

Most importantly, the onboarding was gradual; it prepared me for both B2B tech PR and the working world in general. From taking the time to show me how not to “reply all” on a company-wide email to writing pitches and hosting briefings with executives and reporters, my team taught me every little detail I needed to excel in the PR world.

Everything at Hoffman is curated to set you up for success. For me, the pace of the weekly lessons and training sessions ensured I was able to sit back, learn and observe during my first few weeks. Eventually, I began to have a workload and a “plate.” I would take “first stabs” at tasks, and at first, they were usually far from perfect.

However, as time has gone by, the edits on my work have slimmed down, and there are fewer red markings and lines of text crossed out on my work than before.

I definitely still need my work reviewed, but I’m learning, and it’s a nice feeling to finally grasp something I’ve been so nervous about my whole life.

Because of this, combined with the people and the encouragement I receive from my teams, my experience here at Hoffman has been truly fulfilling. Learning as I go and embracing my intern journey are what helped me get to where I am now.

Three months in, and I’m by no means an expert in PR, but I can confidently say a lot of my question marks have turned into exclamation marks!

The post From ??? to !!! appeared first on The Hoffman Agency.

The time has come. In my last intern cohort meeting, Ellie and I reflected on the internship and who we were then compared to who we are now. These past couple of months have felt like a blip in time, it all blurs together. I’m still learning the rhythms of the work, the expectations, and the unspoken rules. In some ways, I’ve barely scratched the surface.

But taking time to reflect has shown me that growth won’t always be loud or obvious. It feels especially fitting to look back, as the New Year invites its own kind of reflection. Sometimes growth looks like understanding the nuance between attaching a document versus hyperlinking one. Other times, it’s having the courage to ask a question in the team’s Teams chat instead of pinging someone individually.

One of my favorite parts of Hoffman so far has been making a new friend during a season of change. Shoutout to Ellie H. This experience is so much fuller when you’re going through the same things at the same time with a buddy. It’s a lot like tag-teaming the social events with your roommate during the first week of college…except this is corporate America. I’ve gotten more out of this internship because of that shared experience. Learning alongside someone else, processing wins, frustrations, and everything in between has been incredibly valuable.

Professionally, I’ve learned how specific and niche the PR industry can be. I’ve seen how much thought, strategy, and revision goes into work long before it ever reaches a client’s eyes. I’ve gained a new respect for the process.

At the same time, I’m learning how to make the most of my time outside of work so that I can show up and give 110% while I’m clocked in. Rest and relaxation matter so much more now that I’m no longer a student.

While the classic advice to “ask questions” is absolutely true, I’m learning there’s more nuance to it. Sometimes questions aren’t met with immediate clarity—not because they’re misguided, but because I don’t yet have the context to fully understand the answer. You don’t know what you don’t know, and I’m realizing that’s part of the process. I’m trying to find the value in this stage, even when it feels uncomfortable or slow.

These two months may have flown by, but they’ve given me a foundation. In other words, I have gained a sliver of context, perspective, and confidence I didn’t have before. And for now, that feels like more than enough.

The post Welcome to PR; It’s Been Waiting for You appeared first on The Hoffman Agency.

In a previous piece, I argued that AI is now excellent at generating “dots” – fragments, drafts and patterns – while humans bring chaotic energy, judgement and consequence. We carry the messy context. We live with being wrong.

So if machines can generate almost infinite dots, what does that mean for how we actually structure work, teams and careers?

Rethinking delegation: what machines should do vs what humans must do

If we pretend nothing has changed, we end up with a brittle structure: a handful of senior people doing all the real connecting, with everyone else feeding prompts into tools and polishing outputs.

A more honest response is to redesign the division of labour:

• Machines get the repetitive pattern work.
  • Wherever the task is high volume, rule-bound, format-driven, the model should be your first instinct.
• Humans own the ambiguous decisions.
  • Anywhere the task touches ethics, politics, long-term positioning, or real-world fallout, humans stay in charge – and AI becomes a sparring partner, not the decision-maker.

Everyone moves into “connecting work” earlier.

Juniors shouldn’t spend three years doing tasks a model can now do in three minutes. They should be learning to ask better questions, build sharper narratives and argue for/defend their choices.

The differentiator then becomes how a person frames the problem and what connections they are willing or able to make that others can’t.

Turning chaos into a method: The Creative Codex

A few years ago, we started formalising how we do that at Hoffman. The result became a methodology I now call the Creative Codex – our internal logic engine for campaigns and platforms.

The Codex does two big things:

• It forces every creative idea to pass a logic check: does the narrative actually follow from the problem, or are we just jumping to a cool activation or slogan?
• It self-checks for contradictions: if the tension says one thing and the “big idea” quietly assumes another, the Codex will highlight that gap.

The way I think about it: the Codex treats creative development a bit like writing code. If the logic doesn’t compile, it doesn’t run – no matter how good the headline sounds.

More recently, we turned that methodology into a set of custom GPTs that sit inside our workflow. They don’t spit out random ideas; they behave more like a logic harness for creativity by:

• Running through a far more complete set of troubleshooting methods than a human usually has time for when an idea isn’t sharp or a creative route isn’t flowing
• Pushing us to tighten the logic before we start decorating it with headlines, visuals or taglines
• Flagging fuzzy leaps in the story so we can fix them while it’s still cheap to change
• Taking the strongest parts of a “broken” idea and walking the logic both forwards and backwards, then recompiling it – often revealing alternate ways to solve the brief that we wouldn’t have found on our own

In practice, that means we’ve learned to use AI to hone chaotic energy, not erase it. Humans bring the leaps of faith – the random connections that feel like they might belong together, the jump from one piece of logic to another without a safety net. Then we let the Codex and our custom GPTs do what they’re better at than any of us: run the logic. They try endless ways to rearrange the dots, adjust the order, and smooth the joins until the story actually flows.

But there’s a catch. When AI is done flowing the logic, it usually sands off the edges that made the idea interesting in the first place. That’s where human chaos kicks back in. A seasoned powerpointer creative looks at the neatly formulated answer and starts breaking it on purpose – eliminating the safe bits, adding back tension, reconnecting only the dots that make the words sing like poetry.

That is chaotic energy in session. That is what it means to design for productive chaos. It’s accepting that chaotic energy is a sacred asset in the work, and treating it with intention instead of leaving it to chance.

A few practical moves

• Plan for weirdness – and leave room for wandering.
  • Factor in unconventional thinking time where the goal is to think differently, not just think more – in unusual environments like walks, cafes, train rides or “slow meetings”. At the same time, protect pockets of the day that are deliberately unplanned. Creativity is rarely conventional. Your methods shouldn’t be either.
• Encourage cross-contamination.
  • Mix people from different markets, disciplines and seniority levels on the same brief. Chaos thrives on unfamiliar combinations.
• Use AI as a provocation engine, not a vending machine.
  • Instead of asking for “the answer”, use it to generate alternative framings, analogies, objections. Then switch it off and let humans fight it out.
• Make your frameworks visible.
  • Codify how your best people think – into playbooks, canvases, or AI assistants. The goal isn’t to make everyone identical; it’s to give more people access to your sharpest questions.
• Reward the connection, not just the output.
  • In reviews, spend time unpacking how the team arrived at an idea – which dots they chose to connect, and what chaos they embraced or ignored. The more you understand how the sausage was made, the easier it is to remember the ingredients and recipe next time.

Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.

AI will get better at connecting the dots. More compute, better models and richer feedback loops will keep pushing the frontier. Some of what feels distinctly “human” today will quietly become table stakes.

Right now though, in the actual budgets and tools that show up in comms and marketing teams, we are still in a world where:

• Machines are extraordinary at generating patterns and options
• Humans are still on the hook for framing, judgement and consequence

That in-between phase is where the risk and opportunity sit.

Leaders who treat AI purely as an efficiency play risk sanding off the very chaos that makes their stories, strategies and cultures resilient. Leaders who romanticise chaos and ignore the machines risk burning out their people doing work a model could handle in seconds.

The interesting path is in between: codify your best thinking into systems and tools; let AI handle the heavy lifting inside those guardrails; protect and train the human chaotic energy that decides which dots count.

At Hoffman, that’s the philosophy behind the Creative Codex and the custom GPTs we’ve built around it. We’re not trying to tame chaos out of existence. We’re trying to give it enough structure to do its best work.

If you want to explore how this approach might shape your next campaign, market entry or visibility push, get in touch with your local, very human, Hoffman team.

Machines can say anything – but only humans can say something.

The post Designing for productive chaos in the age of AI appeared first on The Hoffman Agency.

Generative AI can already generate ideas, patterns and even strategies that surprise us. What it still lacks is the chaotic energy of a human mind living in a messy world. The real task for leaders now is deciding which work belongs to machines, which to people, and how to harness that chaos instead of optimising it away.

The thing AI still doesn’t have

I remember listening to an interview with finance professor Aswath Damodaran on the Prof G Pod, where he said his best ideas came from a 30-minute walk with no phone and no agenda. Just him, walking, letting his mind wander. That line lodged itself in my head. When you give your brain half an hour of unstructured time, loose thoughts start bumping into each other until something clicks.

That story sticks because it captures something deeply human: we don’t just think; we drift (and sometimes we even fall asleep). We mix a half-remembered book, a client conversation, a childhood memory and an oddly specific TikTok into something that suddenly feels like an answer.

AI can generate thoughts too – oftentimes bland, sometimes, when you’re lucky, surprisingly sharp. Anyone who has asked a model for campaign ideas or market analysis knows it can produce a passable first pass and, when the stars align, an alarmingly strong one. The secret weapon, of course, is that AI is effectively an infinite machine: you can keep asking it for variations long after a human brain would have tapped out.

Even so, something is still missing.

Human brains (at least mine) run on what I define as chaotic energy: the entropy-driven way we move between emotions, memories, cultural references and lived experience. As long as we’re living organisms in a universe that tends towards disorder, that chaos is baked in. It’s the feature, not the bug.

Current AI systems are trained to do almost the opposite. They minimise surprise (unless they hallucinate). They reduce the world into probability distributions and stay inside the guardrails that AI companies set. Maybe one day AGI systems will have enough compute, feedback and sensory input to approximate that chaos and connect ideas like we do. Right now, we’re working with powerful pattern-matchers that still need humans to aim, judge and take responsibility.

For simplicity, let’s call all the fragments, drafts and options that AI produces “dots” – like stars scattered across a night sky. Each one is a small point of light; it only becomes a pattern when someone decides which ones to join.

That raises a practical question for every team using AI: what do we let the machines do, and what do we reserve for this thing I’ve started to call human chaos?

Right now, AI is very good at filling the sky with stars. The real work is that one deliberate line through the dots that turns stars into constellations, paragraphs into stories and different assets into a coherent campaign. And ladies and gents, stars are great, but we’re in the business of constellations.

It’s easy to spot stars, but hard to see constellations

In marketing, PR and comms, a lot of what we used to give juniors already looks like machine food:

• Turning transcripts into meeting notes
• Clipping articles from online sources and classifying them
• Generating first-draft copy and subject lines
• Compiling longlists of media, influencers or events
• Reformatting ideas into decks, FAQs and briefs

Generative AI devours this kind of work. It is tireless, fast and unburdened by boredom. Ask nicely and it will produce more options than any of us can seriously review in a sitting.

So we end up drowning in dots:

• Ten routes for a blog post
• Fifty headline options
• Pages of “insights” from the same dataset

The scarce resource is no longer ideas. It is attention and judgement – where to look, which dots to trust and how to combine them into something that matters.

Humans don’t just make dots; we choose which ones count

It’s tempting to frame this as “AI makes dots, humans connect them”. The truth is messier.

Models already connect patterns all the time. They summarise, cluster, analogise, recommend. Sometimes they do it better than a tired strategist at 11.47pm.

Where they still struggle:

• Value judgements: deciding what should happen, not just what is likely
• Context outside the training data: local politics, office dynamics, one client’s risk appetite
• Long-term narrative: holding a brand, a market and a set of stakeholders in mind over years, not prompts
• Accountability: carrying the emotional and professional cost of being wrong

Humans don’t win because our thoughts are always better. We win because we carry the messy context that the model can’t see and we live with the consequences.

So our job description shifts:

• AI: explore the possibility space, surface patterns, draft options
• Humans: frame the problem, decide what “good” means, and for those of us lucky enough to be powered by chaotic energy, channel it into ideas you’ll care enough to defend.

That split sounds simple. It is not how most organisations are set up.

Our systems trained people to be dot factories

For decades, formal education and corporate training have focused on skills and knowledge:

• Learn the frameworks
• Memorise the models
• Follow the process

Schools reward correct answers, not strange questions.

Corporate training mirrors that logic. You are valued for getting from A to B reliably, on time, and with as little deviation from the norm as possible.

Agencies are no different. Junior staff members are typically trained to produce clean work, fast:

• Correct clippings
• Clean copy
• Templated reports

Whether they ever learn to ask the uncomfortable question or reframe the brief is left to “talent” (and balls), chance mentors and late-night panic.

Now AI shows up and happily does a big chunk of that work. We’re left with a ladder that’s no longer fit for purpose: fewer traditional entry-level tasks, but the same expectation that people will somehow emerge as constellation-makers in a few years. Talent has to be fostered and balls need room to grow.

We’ve trained people to be excellent dot factories at the exact moment machines became even better at making dots. The real opportunity now is in that uncomfortable space in between – where humans decide which dots count, and why.

In a follow-up piece, I’ll get practical: how we can redesign delegation, frameworks and tools so that AI does the heavy lifting, and human chaotic energy does its best work instead of burning out or getting optimised away.

The post What AI needs… appeared first on The Hoffman Agency.

I’m no clairvoyant, but one prediction I can make with confidence is that in 2026, AI will continue to dominate conversations in PR and business. Another is that much of that talk will be hot air.

Consider the numbers. While 99% of PR agencies say they are using AI in some form, less than half have drawn up a proper policy on how to use it. In the broader business world, just 1% of CEOs seem to have defined an AI strategy.

This highlights the PR professional’s predicament. You know AI is unavoidable and can be useful, but you’re still some way off using it intentionally or deriving value from it. There is also an element of fear attached to it. Don’t use it enough and you will lose your job for failing to adapt; use it too much and you could make yourself redundant.

Given that few CEOs have figured out AI for themselves, it can be hard for them to judge whether the employee who claims to be all over AI really is or is simply practicing good old-fashioned self-preservation.

In 2026, we need to strike a decisive balance between a) using AI intelligently to liberate our potential and b) applying the skills, experience and, yes, intelligence, that only we as humans can bring to bear.

Quality matters more than optimization

This should be self-evident. But time constraints combined with management mania to adopt AI are leading to missteps in business.

In October, a court in Australia ruled that Deloitte had to refund the government for a report which it admitted it had used AI to create. The A$440,000 report was found to contain hallucinations and inaccuracies. A senator commented, “Perhaps instead of hiring a big consulting firm, procurers would be better off signing up for a ChatGPT subscription.”

This is not the direction any consultants should be moving in — including, obviously, PR consultants.

At the same time, brands like Coca-Cola are proudly using AI to create big advertising campaigns. For the past two years, Coke’s Christmas advertising has been AI-generated. As the FT notes, this has drawn outrage from reviewers and advertising creatives for its lack of craft, but the person on the street doesn’t seem to mind. The FT contrasted the work against a strikingly human advertisement by John Lewis and found that both have fared well in consumer testing.

This tells us there is a place for both AI and for human craft in creative fields. More will certainly follow Coke in experimenting with AI as an alternative to often expensive and time-consuming work by agencies. Meta has promised advertisers its own AI solutions.  

The results of all this will be mixed, but whether using AI or not, the goal for big advertisers should stay the same: to create great work that resonates with people, strengthens the brand and sells products. Not simply to drive down time and costs. 

Recognizing self-sabotage

PR will remain a people business to a greater degree than advertising. But it too needs to clarify when to use AI and when not to use it. This is a big issue for an industry that is always moaning about a talent shortage. If the new generation of PR professionals turns to AI for everything from writing a press release to forming a campaign strategy, they risk not developing core skills, not being able to connect the dots or distinguish good from bad and ultimately eroding the profession’s value.

In PR and comms, AI itself will be unlikely to make up for a skills gap. To be effective, it still requires people with experience, powers of judgement and skills including but not limited to writing good prompts. For experienced PR professionals, turning too heavily to AI carries the real risk of “brain rot”, or at the very least, disconnection from the work and its content. If your specialist expertise atrophies, good luck articulating your value. This applies to both agency and in-house professionals.

In the AI era, we must remain hyper-connected to the work that brings us satisfaction and is the reason we got into the business in the first place. We can use AI to help us with routine tasks, overcome obstacles and act as a tireless sparring partner — not a servant to do our thinking and campaigns for us.

No one wants the AI era to become the era of unmitigated spam. Not PR professionals, not brands, and certainly not audiences. Yet this is what will happen if we outsource our thinking in terms of strategy and content development to AI. A gimmicky AI-generated advertising campaign might be forgivable. A deluge of mindless PR pitches and thought-leadership content without human opinion is not.

Honoring the basics

There has always been good and bad thought leadership. One has a clear perspective and makes a strong argument. The other lacks actual thought and offers up a sales pitch. We already see companies issuing unattributed, most likely AI-generated “corporate thought pieces”, which by nature lack humanity. This could easily get worse, but I have faith that it won’t.

Experimentation with AI will — and absolutely should — continue. But there’s only so much inhuman content that humans can take. And the focus shouldn’t be on doing things cheaper or faster, but better. I see the pendulum swinging back towards work of greater substance and personality.

Picture this: business leaders standing proudly behind their thoughts and speaking with their authentic voice, offering insight and opinion backed by facts and data. Wouldn’t that be refreshing? It’s a simple ask, and in the age of AI, it’s likely to be a powerful differentiator.

In May, the inaugural Enhanced Games will take place in Las Vegas. Wherever you stand on athletes taking performance-enhancing substances, one thing is obvious: they are still going to have to work hard to win. The drugs alone won’t do it for them. The same is true of AI in comms. Used well, it can be a huge asset without overshadowing human uniqueness, expertise and ingenuity. We remain craftspeople with (hopefully still well-functioning) brains. We can’t afford to disown strategic thinking, execution and opinion. In 2026, let’s use AI wisely and intentionally to help us stay ahead in a ‘polycrisis’ world, while returning focus to the foundational qualities that make for excellent communications. Let’s not make it the year of content for the sake of content, volume for the sake of volume — but the year of depth, individuality and quality enhanced by technology.

To find out more about how we help innovative tech and B2B brands grow in Greater China and APAC, get in touch.

The post Comms in an AI world: A choice between enhancement and erosion appeared first on The Hoffman Agency.