For all the momentum around artificial intelligence, the industry’s narrative still feels underdeveloped. Taryn Langer, founder and president of Moxie Communications Group, reflects on her time at HumanX, exploring the gap between innovation and articulation—and what it signals for PR as AI moves from hype to implementation.

Last week at HumanX, I had a real eye-opener. 

What I wanted was a true dialectic, but I felt like an outlier, left to my own devices to explore the more negative side of the coin.

I attribute this all to perspective. Silicon Valley is the epicenter of everything happening in AI, which certainly shaped the tone (unbridled enthusiasm) of the conference. But I can't escape my own perspective as a comms strategist of 20 years, working in NYC, who receives a lot of feedback and questions from "non-tech" industry folks in my everyday life. I love that I still get startup sector diversity in NY. But for three days at an AI conference in SF, I had that willing suspension of disbelief that nothing else was happening in the world.  It feels like I get to see what happens behind the closed doors of builders, and then see what makes its way to the masses.

Here's my honest POV:

• The early stage enterprise AI cohort is missing the importance of storytelling, and being effective narrators of their companies. Walking past a hundred booths, every logo/company/tag line is interchangeable with the booth next door. The sterile milquetoast of the written message doesn’t match with the word-of-mouth and ideas permeating amongst the audience.
• AI is coming for everything, and the answer, apparently, is to become more human. While we debate jobs, UX, and governance, the real focus was on mastering humanity itself. The hope: become human enough to hold onto a job through retirement.
• Everyone buzzing about Anthropic gallantly keeping Mythos out of the public’s hands and Facebook launching Muse Spark (finally! and it’s pretty damn good).  It was all anyone could talk about, even though the news wasn’t broken at the event.
• How to crack the code of practical enterprise adoption, not just shiny models.
• FOMO is back big time – if you aren’t already building/implementing/testing you are already too far behind. Despite still being in the hype cycle, I walked away feeling pretty convinced it might be over and it’s time to deploy.

So now that I’m back in an unusually hot NYC, it’s time to go heads down and figure out what all of this innovation means for companies, how to address concerns of humans (workers and customers), and energy to disrupt (yup, I said it) myself and settle on what PR means in this new world. I always like to challenge myself by asking, what would a PR agency launching today look like? Clearly it’s very different from launching Moxie 15 years ago. The good news: there’s even more work to be done to determine how information gets shared, received and adopted in the AI age.