AI, Agility, and the Blurred Lines: A Look to the Future and Our Time at the 2025 PRovoke Global Summit

The PRovoke Global Summit has always been where senior communications leaders gather to confront the profession’s most pressing challenges. This year’s Chicago event—centered on “Why Relationships Matter More Than Ever”—revealed an industry in the midst of fundamental transformation.

Citizen Relations took to the Windy City to experience the conference first hand, even walking away with a Global Sabre for a top campaign of the year recognition for its Undone campaign. Beyond the accolades, the Summit’s conversations exposed three critical shifts reshaping how PR operates in 2025 and beyond. Here’s what our Citizens learned:

1. AI Has Redefined What “Agility” Actually Means

AI dominated every conversation. Mary Kate McCarthy, Associate Director, PR, observed this year’s event was “much more AI & crisis management heavy” than previous gatherings, with Josh Budd, Chief Creative Officer, noting “every third conversation touched on AI in some capacity.”

The reason? PR owns a brand’s reputation, risk, and credibility, making our discipline central to how brands navigate this era of experimentation.

The impact on speed has been seismic. AI tools now outpace traditional cultural and social listening platforms “within months,” delivering faster insights for clients. But speed without strategy is dangerous.

The non-negotiables:

• Human oversight remains critical. Firms must maintain a “human in the loop” approach, ensuring experienced professionals can still execute without AI when systems fail.
• Balance your talent. Teams need AI-native skills and seasoned judgment to quality-check outputs.
• Define your goal first. As McCarthy warned: “You don’t want to be caught just doing something to do it.”

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2. The Line Between “Promote” and “Protect” Has Disappeared

The most striking shift? The collapse of traditional PR boundaries. The clear separation between proactive promotion and reactive crisis response is gone.

McCarthy captured it perfectly: 2025 is the year where “two things can be true” in strategy. The political landscape and post-COVID blurring of work and life have made the old “promote and protect” binary obsolete. Crisis management now “feels like a branch of overall PR strategy as opposed to a separate approach, agency, or team.”

What this means: Every campaign requires risk assessment. Every crisis response needs brand positioning. Agencies must build predictive work into everything.

For creatives, this ambiguity is opportunity. Budd declared “PR’s definition is officially undefined. And that’s a great thing for creativity in the discipline”—a philosophy Katie Skinner, Vice President, PR, echoed when discussing the award-winning TurboTax work: “There’s creativity anywhere—even in the most corporate work, creativity can live in the most unexpected places.”

3. EDI and Purpose Aren’t Optional—They’re Innovation Engines

McCarthy delivered one of the Summit’s most powerful takeaways: “There is no innovation without EDI.” The logic is simple: groupthink kills creativity. EDI isn’t just about culture—it’s a competitive advantage.

Skinner reinforced this thinking with her own perspective on creative problem-solving: “Look beyond your borders. Someone in a different market with different experiences can still spark your imagination.” This global, inclusive approach to ideation isn’t just good ethics—it’s smart business.

On corporate purpose, the message was clear: it still matters. While some have tried to course-correct from perceived over-emphasis, Budd noted that in spaces like the SABREs, “purpose still wins a jury room over.”

Younger generations continue driving accountability, with millennial and Gen Z cohorts praised for pushing corporations to align actions with stated objectives.

The Takeaway: The Future Belongs to the Adaptive

The 2025 PRovoke Global Summit painted a picture of an industry that’s simultaneously more complex and more exciting than ever. The practitioners who will thrive are those who can:

• Harness AI without losing the human judgment that makes great communications possible
• Navigate blurred lines between promotion and protection with strategic foresight
• Embed EDI and purpose into innovation processes, not just mission statements
• Find creativity in unexpected places and look beyond traditional borders for inspiration

As relationships become more critical and the landscape grows more volatile, one thing is certain: the old playbook won’t work anymore. The question isn’t whether to evolve—it’s how fast you can do it.

Citizen Relations is demonstrably operating as a tomorrow-first agency, not just observing these shifts, but actively implementing modern practices that align with the future of communications highlighted at the 2025 PRovoke Global Summit. The agency’s strategic philosophies and recent successes illustrate how they are embracing agility, integrating promotion and protection, and using diversity as an engine for innovation.