As we move into 2026, there are some clickbait-inspired prophets of doom talking as if the PR sector is operating in the shadow of a multiblade sword of Damocles.

In a world riven by geopolitical turbulence and broligarch-driven disruption, our industry is obviously one of many on a transformation journey. I’m pretty sure no one really knows at this point just where we’ll eventually end up.

The holding companies are consolidating but appear as torn as ever between the prospect of synergy-maximising integrated one-stop shops on the one hand and collections of specialist brands on the other. Same as it ever was.

And those holding companies continue to be run by other disciplines that still don’t understand PR. One of the most frustrating podcasts this year was an Uncensored CMO panel chat with Scott Galloway and Ogilvy’s Rory Sutherland talking about the integrated world and the only mention of PR was as a corporate block to brave creativity.

And yet. I end 2025 feeling more positive than ever that PR has amazingly high quality people ready to embrace the era-defining opportunities at hand and thrive.

As dean of the PRmoment Leaders programme, I’ve sat in on 20 masterclasses across the year from a carefully-selected bench of industry experts providing guidance for our cohort of senior agency pros who will lead their agencies over the next decade. It’s been a year focused on the unparalleled value of PR which has also given me a close-up view of the best agency-side talent around. Our programme is helping them prepare to smash the next decade.

But my confidence in the future of PR has most recently been massively reinforced by the experience of judging the first round of PRmoment’s new PR League competition in which two-person teams made up of young PR professionals with 4-8 years experience are competing to win the inaugural trophy.

The judging I’ve been involved with was looking at written answers teams had submitted in response to two questions: 1. What is the future of PR? And 2. What skills will the PR professionals of the future need?

The answers were brilliant. The quality of thinking and creativity within the responses (some of which were presented in really innovative ways) was consistently high.

The participants are all at the coal face of AI integration and all of them made sure to address the impacts of the technology on agency life, both already playing out and over the horizon, in response to both questions. They see a sector enhanced by improved AI tools in all sorts of ways.

But crucially they argue that PR can only fully seize greatly enhanced opportunities in a disrupted integrated world by leaning into focused human intelligence. Their arguments were both convincing and reassuring to me. We’re in a people business, after all, and they rightly identify emotional intelligence as a vital, enduring quality in PR and one that will be resistant to robotic overlords for a long time yet. The multigenerational future of PR looks bright to me precisely because it's held in such smart human hands.