Tom Roberts, Head of Digital Communications at Barratt Redrow, discusses how monitoring AI assistants reveals the sources shaping brand reputation, enables communicators to replace assumptions with actionable evidence, and shows why owned content, consumer platforms and forums may influence AI-generated answers more than earned media.
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?
My highlight this year was building something rather than launching something. Since the spring I have put together a monitoring programme that tracks how AI assistants describe our brands and our sector, running a large set of questions across ten of the main models on a repeating cycle. It now sits on tens of thousands of answers.
I expected a scoreboard. Are we visible, are we described fairly, how do we compare, and so on. What we got instead was a list of things I could go and fix, not in a quarter and not in a strategy paper, but that week. Some of the citations and patterns were uncomfortable. Some of it was just strange. There are sources shaping what people are told about us that I would never have thought to look at, and would not have found by any other route.
Half the value has been in learning how these systems respond to different questions. Ask something broad and you can receive a diplomatic answer that reveals very little. Put two options side by side, require a choice and then test the pattern across a large dataset, and you begin to see distinctions that a single open question can obscure. Working out how to get the best results turned out to be as useful as the answers.
The bigger prize has been internal. Communications and Corporate Affairs teams spend a lot of time arguing from judgement. Turning up with a dataset the business didn’t have, on a subject everyone is already curious about, changes that conversation. It has opened up conversations that were not happening before, and it means I have answers where I used to have a view.
For a fraction of the cost of a campaign, it has changed what I can see and what I can act on. I would not want to go back to assumptions.
2. What might surprise comms leaders in the next two years?
That AI is not the rescue of earned media, however comforting that idea may be to those of us who have built our careers in PR.
The line I keep reading is that because assistants read the press, PR matters more than ever, local titles matter more than ever, and the press release is back. I would certainly like that to be true. I have spent my career in and around PR and I am a huge believer in its value. Quality coverage still does what it has always done. It shapes what people think and it sticks in the mind, and will continue to have a vital role to play.
This framing is just not what shows up in the data, however. When I look at what actually feeds the answers people are given about our sector, earned coverage is not the engine. In our sample, our own pages are cited more often than the national, regional and trade press put together, on six of the eight assistants that cite their sources at all. Ahead of both sit consumer advice sites and forums, with review platforms close behind along with a good deal of material nobody would ever think to monitor. Within our data there is a single post in a public online group, for example, that has been cited as a source by six different assistants, across nearly a hundred different questions, on nearly every day we have sampled. Previously I would have had no way of knowing or tracking that.
Looking at this from another perspective does reveal better news. There is far more you can do to improve the material these answers are built from than most communicators assume. What you publish, how you word it, where you host it and how it is structured can all affect whether it makes it into AI’s canon, by which I mean the pool of material these systems keep returning to when someone asks about you. I have watched our own wording travel into answers almost intact. This enables us to make sure the accurate, useful version of the information is there to be found.
So the opportunity is not more announcements. It is treating what you already control as source material for machines as well as copy for people.
3. What is something you believe about AI in the communications industry that some communication professionals probably would disagree with?
That AI is not the rescue of earned media, however comforting that idea may be to those of us who have built our careers in PR.
The line I keep reading is that because assistants read the press, PR matters more than ever, local titles matter more than ever, and the press release is back. I would certainly like that to be true. I have spent my career in and around PR and I am a huge believer in its value. Quality coverage still does what it has always done. It shapes what people think and it sticks in the mind, and will continue to have a vital role to play.
This framing is just not what shows up in the data, however. When I look at what actually feeds the answers people are given about our sector, earned coverage is not the engine. Our own pages are cited more often than the national, regional and trade press put together. Ahead of both sit consumer advice sites, review platforms and forums, along with a good deal of material nobody would ever think to monitor. Within our data there is a single post in a public Facebook group, for example, that has been cited as a source by five different assistants, across nearly a hundred different questions, on every single day we have sampled. Previously I would have had no way of knowing or tracking that.
Looking at this from another perspective does reveal better news. This is far more influenceable than most communicators assume. What you publish, how you word it, where you host it and how it is structured all affect whether it makes it into AI’s canon, by which I mean the pool of material these systems keep returning to when someone asks about you. I have watched our own wording travel into answers almost intact.
So the opportunity is not more announcements. It is treating what you already control as source material for machines as well as copy for people.
4. What is the biggest benefit of using the Meltwater platform for your team?
I have been a Meltwater client for the best part of eight years, first for media monitoring and then also for social listening. The platform I use now is a long way from the one I started on.
GenAI Lens is the part that changed what I could do. The value is volume and frequency: a large question set across ten models, refreshed on a regular cycle, and exportable so I can interrogate it properly. Scale is what turns an interesting idea into evidence, and evidence is what gets you a hearing internally.
The biggest benefit is not any single view, it is being able to ask what AI assistants are saying about our brands and then, in the same place, ask why. When something moves, I can look across at what the press has been doing, or a spike on social, or a Reddit thread gathering pace, and see whether they line up.
If I had to quantify it, it would not be hours saved. It would be that I now have answers to questions I could previously only have an opinion about.
About Tom Roberts
Tom Roberts is Head of Digital Communications at Barratt Redrow, with responsibility spanning digital communications strategy, corporate channels and online reputation. Before joining Redrow in 2017 as the first hire into its newly established communications team, he held marketing roles across the education, professional certification, sports and leisure sectors. Tom holds an MBA from Aston Business School, where his research examined how online reviews influence purchasing decisions in UK housebuilding. His current focus includes understanding how media, digital platforms and AI-generated answers shape corporate reputation and customer decision-making.
