PRSA ICON 2026 opened with a keynote from Savannah Bananas Head Coach Tyler Gillum, and a people-first conference theme began. Gillum built his talk around mentors, risk-taking and putting fans first, right down to greeting every fan with a handshake, high five or hug.
"You have to have the courage to be misunderstood to do things that have never been done before," Gillum said.
That thread ran through the rest of the conference, held Oct. 18-20 at the Orlando World Center Marriott in Florida. Across sessions on AI, measurement, crisis and careers and others, speakers kept coming back to one idea: The faster technology moves, the more the human side of communications sets teams apart. That's good news, but it comes with some homework. Following are five takeaways from the sessions PRNEWS attended, plus how to put each to work. (For last year's recap, see Truth, Trust and Tech: Key Takeaways from PRSA ICON 2025.)
1. Humanity is the edge in the AI era.
If one line summed up the conference, it came from Hannah Vazzana, EVP, Chief Brand and Communications Officer at Hilton Grand Vacations, during a trends panel.
"I think humanity is trending," Vazzana said.
She made the case that creativity and empathy matter more as AI spreads.
"Originality doesn't come from a large language model," she said. "It's trust, it's empathy, it's caring, it's reading the room. Consumers can spot the slop a mile away."
Her advice?
"You still need to be a really good writer, a really good editor."
Damon Jones, Chief Communications Officer at Procter & Gamble, offered a simple habit for using AI without losing your edge: Ask it to explain the assumptions behind its answer, which sharpens your own thinking.
"Everyone can type in some stuff and get an output," Jones said. He believes the value comes from the why and the how behind it.
Jones also said he's hopeful about pushback on AI-written content, noting that LinkedIn and major publications can now flag it.
The same goes for personal brands.
"You should be doing as much work as you're talking about the work," said Fatou Berry, Founder of PR Girl Manifesto, urging communicators to back up their online expertise with real-world practice.
The next move: Let AI take the busywork (Universal Destinations' SVP of Corporate Communications, Erica Ettori, uses it to surface the five emails she most needs to read) and protect your time for judgment, originality and real work.
2. Prove value in business terms, not impressions.
Impressions didn't get much love in Orlando. Jones put it plainly: "My CEO doesn't care about impressions. He doesn't get paid in impressions, and neither do I." P&G builds a "body of evidence" that ties communications to trust and, ultimately, sales.
Ettori said, "Communications is an important bridge between a company's ambition to do something and it actually getting done." She gave an example of planning the company's first U.K. park launch, set to open in 2031. Coverage was never the goal.
"It wasn't to generate media coverage," she said. It was about how do we get the public to say yes to our plans."
The team's measure was 80% public favorability.
Vazzana said Hilton Grand Vacations didn't invent a new metric after two major acquisitions. Instead, it layered communications into its regular team member engagement survey.
Anthony Farina, Chief Communications Officer of Fujifilm, said what gets measured gets done. His team is building a real-time dashboard because "nobody wants to read a report that's a month old."
The next move: Pick one business metric your leaders already track (favorability, sales or engagement) and report your results alongside it.
3. Listen first, then act.
Before the plan, the statement or the pitch comes the questions. Farina's five-step approach to transforming a comms team starts with listening, then strategy, structure, execution and measurement.
"Listening to learn and not respond is so critical," he said. "I have never met a business leader who has turned me down for a 30-minute conversation on coffee or lunch."
His advice on skeptics: "Do not run from them; run toward them, because they will tell you and share with you insights that no one else will."
Jones suggested building a bench of inside sources at your company.
"You should all have two or three people in your market research or your consumer research department that are on speed dial," he said, adding customer service and investor relations to the list.
Ettori's version: "Be an outdoor cat. Go explore your organization, whatever it is." She also recalled a former boss's advice: "You're going to be really good if you can listen between the words."
The next move: Before drafting your next statement, spend five minutes writing questions garnered from conversations, then answer the top three.
4. Relationships are your crisis plan.
When a crisis hits, the relationships you've already built do a lot of the work. On the "Ethics Under Pressure" panel, Brooke DeWalt, a retired captain and former Deputy Chief of Information for the U.S. Navy, recalled running press operations at the Pentagon during a fast-moving 2020 military crisis. His advice: "Make sure you have built relationships with the media beforehand."
"If you have a relationship with them, they will be more inclined to listen to what you're saying," he said. That trust lets you be honest when you don't have answers. "Don't be afraid to say I don't have that. What have you heard?"
DeWalt also addressed recent changes to Pentagon press access. Longtime relationships still work by phone and text, he said, but correcting the record quickly is harder.
Katie Weldon, Manager of Integrated Communications and Strategic Marketing at Ingalls Shipbuilding, described how her team created internal communications influencers called culture connectors. About 600 of them helped during union negotiations with the shipyard's roughly 12,000 workers. A weekly call helps her team tell whether a rumor is one person's narrative or a trend. On working with legal: "If legal squinches (their face) like this, that's how I know I'm saying something important."
"I talk to our team a lot about your personality credit score," Weldon said, describing how consistent, strategic counsel builds influence over time. For newer PR pros, she passed along advice from the yard's master shipbuilders: "If you say you're going to do something, do it." And when concerns arise, DeWalt recommended a calm follow-up email: "Make a digital record of it. Always keep your receipts because they will come back up."
The next move: Build relationships with reporters and internal listeners before a crisis, and document concerns with just the facts.
5. Write for people AND the machines.
AI came up at the conference numerous times—but with a practical twist: It's another audience.
Ettori urged communicators to go back to basics on the PESO model (paid, earned, shared, owned).
"Don't count out your own platform, and particularly your own platforms that can serve as an editorial machine for you to feed an LLM with information that you want the LLM to know about the product," she said. Her example: When making a supply chain change, publish a corporate blog post on your commitment to quality, and pair it with a Wall Street Journal story.
And traditional media still matters.
"We've declared, for example, that the LLMs are a target audience for news," Jones said. "Earned media provides certain credibility only when it's validated in a number of different ways." What drives AI answers also varies by category, he said.
Ettori's advice for the year ahead: "Abandon reading or consuming information in one way." Read a topic as a long-form article, a podcast, an AI summary and a post, she said, so you understand how audiences take in what you write.
The next move: Pair every earned story with fact-rich owned content, and test your key messages in the formats your audiences (and AI tools) actually use.
Nicole Schuman is Managing Editor at PRNEWS.