The PR account executive will survive 2027. The legacy agency model built around them might not

A commentator for PRMoment recently suggested that the PR Account Executive won't survive 2027. Having spent two decades building agencies, I’ve hired my fair share of execs along the way. I'm here to politely disagree.

Let's kick off with a question: when entrepreneurs get access to technology that makes their teams significantly more productive, what's the natural response? Cut headcount, or raise ambition? Do more. Take on more. Build more. I'd argue that in the comms agency world it's the latter. We're an ambitious bunch.

Historically, productivity gains and wage growth tend to go hand in hand. The agencies currently asking "how do we do the same with fewer people" are solving the wrong problem. "What can we now do that we couldn't before?" is by far the smarter outlook.

The real pressure point

Look at the job shifts happening industry-wide right now. The redundancies landing across agency networks and in-house comms teams aren't happening at the junior end. They're hitting the middle and senior layers, the process-heavy coordination roles, management structures built largely around managing other managers. That's where the pressure is. The AE most certainly has a future. A better one, actually, than this industry has historically given them.

It was argued that admin-heavy, pressure-loaded early years are a rite of passage. Don't get me wrong, grit matters. Resilience is a real thing, and it develops through mastering the stresses and strains of a business-as-usual workplace. But the generation we're talking about didn't arrive short of it. They came of age through a pandemic that cancelled the beginning of their adult lives. They're entering a housing market that has, for most practical purposes, closed its doors to them. They're carrying student debt for degrees partly delivered over Zoom. And the ones with real ambition, the ones this industry actually wants, already understand that nothing worth having comes easily. They don't need that lesson delivered via spreadsheet maintenance.

The original piece raises a fair point about skills gaps: if you've never written a bad pitch, how do you recognise when AI has produced one? But, look honestly at what the traditional model actually delivered. What it gave this industry, with its total obsession with layered structures, was a quality-dilution machine we collectively dressed up as a “development pathway”. Twenty-odd layers of people reviewing each other's work with roughly twelve months of seniority separating them. A 24-year-old signing off the work of a 23-year-old, reviewed by a 25-year-old who got their last promotion six months ago. 

People with limited experience were (and still are) regularly editing and redirecting client strategy they didn't yet have the context to judge. Be honest – that structure was never really an engine for better work was it? It was a retention mechanism. Titles and incremental progression designed to keep ambitious people in their seats long enough to keep clients happy on the old team consistency metric

AI vs the Account Exec

AI is exposing that gap. And in the right hands, it's doing something far more interesting than replacing the work. It's supercharging it. An AE who might have spent three days manually auditing five years of coverage from a target publication can now do it in an afternoon, with pattern recognition that's illuminating. Or digest 300 pages of HFSS guidance to extract the angles that matter. Or cross-reference competitor press releases against media uptake to find the whitespace. These aren't tasks AI does instead of the AE. They're tasks AI does with the AE, and that combination turns a capable junior into someone who can hold a sophisticated client conversation years earlier than the old model ever allowed.

So what should the AE actually be doing with the time AI returns to them? At Knock Three Times, Account Executives spend as close to 100% of their time as possible on work that actually adds value. Visiting client sites, doing the factory tour (now that's a rite of passage). They sit in on every client meeting, not just taking coffee orders. They learn to understanding how organisations make money and where they feel exposed. Meeting journalists, editors and forward planners in person, regularly enough means they hear what's becoming a trend before it's a headline. Proximity beats process. You genuinely cannot develop editorial instinct from a coverage tracker, no matter your Excel prowess.

AI produces competent output at volume. Copy, structures, research, insights… the production layer is largely automated and honestly, fine. What it can't manufacture is judgement. The read of a high-stakes meeting room. Knowing what's genuinely interesting versus what merely sounds interesting. Clocking when a client is nervous but masking it. Hearing the question behind the question a journalist is actually asking. The future AE is someone who looks at the world and spots angles and opportunity around every corner, because they have the bandwidth to do so. That comes from time spent in the real world, not eyeballs deep in an inbox eight hours a day on repeat.

The agencies that will win the next decade are the ones redesigning what development looks like entirely. This, by combining the analytical horsepower of AI with proper real-world exposure, and producing people who can think originally, move quickly, and bring a point of view that no LLM can generate. 

The Account Executive has a future. The question for agency leaders right now is whether they have the imagination to build a business to harness their evolving superpowers.