Reid Hoffman recently made the provocative claim on X that in the age of AI, Malcolm Gladwell’s famous “10,000 hours” rule has been replaced by “10,000 prompts.” No doubt AI is changing the game in communications, but Gladwell had it right the first time.
The most valued commodity in communications today isn’t your ability to prompt — it’s your ability to be in the room, shoulder-to-shoulder with decision-makers, advising them on high-pressure judgment calls that shape companies, careers, and reputations.
I’ve built my career in those conversations: the late-night war rooms, the IPO prep sessions, the moments when leaders are staring at incomplete facts, conflicting advice, and no roadmap. When you’re in these rooms, you survive on instinct and the hard-to-quantify skill of applying pattern recognition from past experience to wholly new fact sets.
I use AI every day. By now, I’m probably close to my own 10,000 prompts. But I don’t use it to do the hard part for me. I use it to sharpen my own thinking. I ask it to challenge my assumptions, poke holes, surface questions I haven’t thought of.
At its current capabilities, AI is the world’s smartest intern: invaluable when directed well, but not qualified to run the show.
This brings professional communicators to an inflection point. Traditionally, communicators could make a living on strategy or execution. You could be the wise counselor in a crisis, or you could be the one following directions and implementing a plan by writing press statements, managing media contacts, and polishing talking points.
Now there’s only one path.
If you are the person brought in after the meeting to execute the strategy that “the grownups in the room” developed, your value is collapsing by the day. AI can already do much of that work faster, cheaper, and “good enough.”
But here’s the flipside: If you are in the room — helping shape strategy, mapping stakeholders, weighing risks, pressure-testing decisions — your value has never been higher. As AI enables a rising tide of “good enough” execution, the value of trust and judgment is multiplying.
It’s gut-check time, whether you are in-house or a consultant, junior or senior. Are you in the room, or waiting outside the door? If it’s the latter, you’re on borrowed time. If it’s the former, you’re building a moat in your career that AI won’t cross any time soon.
For agencies, this means building teams and cultures that prize judgment, creativity, and pattern recognition over volume and velocity. The first thing I look for in a senior hire is whether they’ve done their 10,000 hours and have the judgment to show for it. The days of acting like a vendor are done. The future is all about trusted partnerships.
For in-house comms leaders, the bright line is proximity to the C-suite, which you can only earn if you have a command of the business that rivals your peers in finance, operations, and product.
For early career professionals, it means resisting the temptation to play it safe. If you’re only ever handed execution tasks, push for more. Ask the “why” behind the “what.” Stretch for assignments that test your judgment, not just your output.
Gladwell’s original thesis still stands. Mastery doesn’t come from repetition or prompts. It comes from immersion — from spending 10,000 hours in the arena where the stakes are high and the outcomes uncertain.
AI will change our industry, but it won’t change this: The future belongs to the communicators who fight their way into the room, and prove they belong there.
— David Meadvin is CEO of One Strategy Group, a corporate and CEO advisory firm.
