Most inventions are born from frustration. Two of mine shaped this practice

I started my career on the agency side, at Ogilvy and then Edelman, leading communications for global brands including Sony, adidas, Airbnb and Rolls-Royce, and new business.

Then I moved in-house, to something few careers ever offer: the formation of a multibillion-pound global business. At pladis, the global snacking company, I was senior strategic lead through its creation. I led the global launch, built the corporate communications function, and hired and managed our agency partners.

I have been the agency pitching the work and the client buying it, so I know what the work needs to be and how it gets valued and bought.

In-house work is where the first frustration took hold. Communications has always struggled to prove its value. You prevent a crisis, so your KPI is essentially zero. You achieve it, then you walk into the CEO's office with nothing to show for it, because the absence of something has no natural metric.

So I built a better way to measure what we were doing. At the time, communications teams focused on media and social media for reputation management, and had a Google-sized hole in their strategy.

Google's first page was where most people made up their minds about a company, yet very few teams were actively managing what came back. While the attention went to paid search, I built a programme around organic search: what people were asking about the company and its brands, read as consumer insight, and what Google returned, managed as reputation. It was an early version of what we now call generative engine optimisation (GEO).

That appetite for measuring reputation took me to the other side of the table. At RepTrak, the global reputation intelligence company, I advised CCOs and boards on stakeholder perception and reputation risk.

As AI arrived, I also became lead advisor on AI as a Stakeholder™, RepTrak's AI reputation solution, shaping product positioning alongside the product team, establishing advisory delivery models and training our advisors. A decade earlier, I had managed what Google's first page said about a company. Now, the reputational shorthand was forming inside AI engines, and that was the place to manage.

Then came frustration number two. Everyone was talking about AI adoption. Enterprise-level frameworks on how organisations should think about AI started to appear. I went looking for one built for communications, and I could not find it. The advice on offer was almost entirely tactical: tools, prompts, workflows.

No framework addressed what AI was structurally changing in the work itself, and what the function needed to become. So I decided to create one myself. The result is The Two Clocks: a framework, and the practice I have built around it.

AI is not just a new technology. It is changing how we find information, perceive companies and make decisions. Bolting it onto how communications works today won't hold, because the environment that work was built for is changing. And will keep on changing.

Today I work with communications leaders, in-house and agency side, on what AI is changing, and often breaking, in their work, and how to reposition before it gets defined by someone else’s logic

If that is the conversation you are interested in having, let's talk