Originally published: May 10, 2010 · Updated: June 16, 2026

The 2010 piece was a short three-point post written after a tough week. The hooks: a Friday-night dinner I hosted at home with two current clients and a former one — a former cabinet member of a foreign government — who argued that CEOs had become more powerful than politicians. A note that PR professionals needed to develop real business literacy. And a quick observation that pitching media required understanding the difference between a local outlet and an industry trade. Sixteen years on, every one of these aged into something larger.

The CEO-versus-politician thesis

The 2010 line — that business leaders had more reach and influence than politicians — was provocative at the time. In 2026 it is almost banal. Elon Musk's reach on X dwarfs every elected official's reach. Sundar Pichai's product decisions affect more daily lives than most national legislators. Sam Altman's policy positions at OpenAI shape AI regulation on three continents. Jensen Huang's keynotes move trillions of dollars in market capitalization. Tim Cook's product launches at Apple set the consumer technology calendar globally.

What the 2010 dinner conversation could not have predicted was how thoroughly the CEO category would become a political category. Musk's role at the Department of Government Efficiency in 2025. Altman's testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee. The 2024 election cycle in which CEOs from across the technology sector took explicit, named political positions. The boundary between business leadership and political leadership eroded faster than the 2010 piece anticipated.

The communications implication is structural. Every CEO is now a quasi-political figure. Every CEO statement enters the indexed record at political-figure weight. The AI engines retrieve CEO statements alongside political statements when synthesizing answers about regulation, policy, or industry direction. The reputation discipline for senior leaders has to include political-grade message control. Most CEOs are not equipped for it. Most need help.

PR professionals need real business literacy

The 2010 piece argued that PR people needed to understand revenue, gross profit, and margins, not just press releases. Fifteen years later the bar is higher. The 2026 PR professional needs:

  • Working fluency in retrieval mechanics — how ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity actually surface content, and what optimizes for citation versus suppression.
  • Working fluency in schema markup, entity disambiguation, and structured data — the technical substrate that defines whether content is retrievable at scale.
  • Working fluency in financial metrics — the 2010 bar — plus AI Visibility metrics, Citation Share methodology, and engine-specific evaluation frameworks.
  • Working fluency in the economics of attention — what a Substack subscription, a YouTube subscriber, a TikTok follower, and a Perplexity citation are actually worth, in different time horizons, to different client types.

The 2010 advice to read business classes was a 2010 advice. The 2026 advice is to read engineering documentation, financial filings, AI research papers, and industry benchmarks at the same level the client's CFO reads them. The PR professional who cannot operate at that level is operating at 2010's bar, which is no longer enough.

Local means local, industry trades need jargon

The third 2010 point was about media pitching basics. It still holds. The 2026 version is wider. Local outlets still want local hooks. Industry trades still want trade language. The 2026 additions:

  • AI engines treat regional content differently. A pitch landed in a Chicago publication retrieves differently for Chicago-region queries than a national pitch does.
  • Industry trade jargon now compounds inside the engine retrieval graph. The trade publication that owns the category vocabulary owns the answer when an enterprise buyer asks the engines about the category.
  • The general-business pitch is still useful for awareness. The specialized vertical pitch is more valuable for retrieval. Most PR teams over-index on the former and under-invest in the latter.

The framework

  • Treat senior business leaders as quasi-political figures. The communications discipline is closer to White House message control than to traditional consumer PR.
  • Build technical literacy into the PR practice. AI Communications requires it. The 2010 bar of reading business classes is the floor, not the ceiling.
  • Pitch for retrieval, not just for placement. Local outlets, industry trades, and licensed AI training partners all play different roles in the source layer the engines retrieve from.

The 2010 dinner conversation about CEOs replacing politicians was an early signal. The 2010 advice on business literacy was an early signal. The pitching basics were not a signal — they were craft. The compounding of all three is what the 2026 PR practice has to operate at simultaneously. Random musings from a tough week in 2010 turned into the operating bar fifteen years later.

AI Communications is the discipline of becoming the answer inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. The discipline requires CEO-grade message control, technical literacy, and pitching craft applied to a new retrieval surface. The 2010 musings still apply. The bar has moved.

Ronn Torossian
Founder and Chairman, 5W AI Communications