'Humanity Is Trending': Five Lessons From PRSA ICON 2026

By Tom Whitfield

"I think humanity is trending." That line, from Hilton Grand Vacations EVP and Chief Brand and Communications Officer Hannah Vazzana, set the tone at PRSA ICON 2026, held Oct. 18-20 at the Orlando World Center Marriott in Florida.

Savannah Bananas Head Coach Tyler Gillum opened the conference with a keynote on mentors, risk-taking and putting fans first — 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.

Across sessions on AI, measurement, crisis and careers, speakers returned to one theme: the faster technology moves, the more the human side of communications sets teams apart. Five takeaways emerged.

Why does humanity matter in the AI era?

Vazzana argued 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 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. The value comes from the why and the how behind it. He also said he is hopeful about pushback on AI-written content, noting LinkedIn and major publications can now flag it.

Fatou Berry, founder of PR Girl Manifesto, pressed the same point on personal brands: "You should be doing as much work as you're talking about the work." 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 time for judgment and originality.

How should communicators prove value?

Impressions got little love in Orlando. "My CEO doesn't care about impressions. He doesn't get paid in impressions, and neither do I," Jones said. P&G builds a "body of evidence" tying communications to trust and, ultimately, sales.

Ettori described planning Universal's first U.K. park, set to open in 2031. "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: 80% public favorability.

"Communications is an important bridge between a company's ambition to do something and it actually getting done," Ettori said.

Vazzana said Hilton Grand Vacations layered communications into its regular team member engagement survey after two major acquisitions rather than inventing a new metric. Fujifilm Chief Communications Officer Anthony Farina is building a real-time dashboard because "nobody wants to read a report that's a month old." What gets measured gets done, he said.

Why listen before acting?

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."

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," Farina said. Jones advised keeping two or three people in market or consumer research — plus customer service and investor relations — on speed dial. Ettori's version: "Be an outdoor cat. Go explore your organization, whatever it is."

Can relationships be your crisis plan?

Brooke DeWalt, a retired captain and former Deputy Chief of Information for the U.S. Navy, ran press operations at the Pentagon during a fast-moving 2020 military crisis. "Make sure you have built relationships with the media beforehand," DeWalt said. Trust lets you be honest when you lack answers: "Don't be afraid to say I don't have that. What have you heard?" He noted recent changes to Pentagon press access: longtime relationships still work by phone and text, but correcting the record quickly is harder.

Katie Weldon of Ingalls Shipbuilding described 600 internal "culture connectors" who helped during union negotiations with the shipyard's roughly 12,000 workers. "I talk to our team a lot about your personality credit score," Weldon said, describing how consistent counsel builds influence. DeWalt's record-keeping advice: "Make a digital record of it. Always keep your receipts because they will come back up."

Should you write for people and machines?

Ettori urged a return to the PESO model — paid, earned, shared, owned — with owned platforms "serving as an editorial machine" to feed LLMs the information you want them to know. Her example: pair a corporate blog post on quality commitments during a supply chain change with a Wall Street Journal story.

"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." Ettori's advice for the year ahead: "Abandon reading or consuming information in one way." The practical next move — pair every earned story with fact-rich owned content, and test key messages in the formats audiences and AI tools actually use.