Tom Hunt, Managing Director at Antidote, explains how client-facing AI tools, real-time measurement and Meltwater’s customisable analytics enable small communications teams to compete at scale, while strategic judgement, storytelling instinct and knowing when to stay quiet remain the true differentiators.
1. What was your personal PR highlight of 2026?
2. What might surprise comms leaders in the next two years?
3. What is something you believe about AI in the communications industry that some communication professionals probably would disagree with?
4. What is the biggest benefit of using the Meltwater platform for your team?
1. What was your personal PR highlight of 2026?
Getting our AI tool stack into the hands of clients rather than keeping it behind the scenes. We spent the year turning capabilities we'd built for internal use into things clients can actually see and use, including live dashboards that pull earned, social and search data into one place, accessible whenever they want rather than waiting for a monthly report. We closed the fiscal year with double-digit revenue growth on 24/25, which suggests the appetite for this approach is real. The best part has been how much sharper the conversations with clients have become when everyone is looking at the same data.
2. What might surprise comms leaders in the next two years?
How much clients start expecting from a small team. The tooling that used to require scale is getting cheap enough that headcount is no longer a proxy for capability, and I think clients will work that out faster than the industry expects. What that rewards is the consultancy and the instinct.
Knowing how to build a story and why, who will care, and when to stay quiet. Judgement has always been the hardest thing to put a price on, and I think clients are about to start paying for it directly rather than as something bundled into the hours.
3. What is something you believe about AI in the communications industry that some communication professionals probably would disagree with?
I think AI's most valuable contribution to comms is measurement rather than content creation, and I don't think the industry behaves as though that's true despite everyone jumping on the GEO bandwagon.
Attribution in PR is still difficult, and for some clients it doesn't work at all, because the audiences are so niche and the buying cycles run for months (or years). Thanks to AI, we have far more visibility.
We can properly map the journey, understand who engaged with which piece of content and where they went next, and then test the arguments that landed against those that didn't. That analysis shapes the strategy, and the strategy then shapes everything we do externally (and so on and so forth).
Most of the industry still treats measurement as the thing you present at the end of the month or during the quarterly in-person with the client. I'd rather it was informing where to go next.
4. What is the biggest benefit of using the Meltwater platform for your team?
How customisable the platform has become. The ability to spin up live dashboards to share with clients from day dot, combined with new integrations like MCP that we're keen to build on, has changed what we can credibly offer. We're a six-person agency pitching against groups many times our size, and insights and analytics that would once have needed a dedicated resource now run continuously in the background. Having AI-powered analysis to riff with on top of that has made the whole platform genuinely powerful. What interests me most is where it goes next: the more open platforms like Meltwater become, the less our size has anything to do with what we can deliver.
About Tom Hunt
I've spent the last fifteen years spearheading communications programmes for technology companies - from hyper-growth trailblazers like Unity and Quantinuum, to Silicon Valley behemoths like Google and Intel. I'm obsessed with the intersection between human ingenuity, data and technology.
I have been agency-side for my entire career - holding senior positions at We. Communications and most recently, Cognito where I was Director, Head of Fintech and Head of Insights & Analytics.
