Rimmi Harindran is the Senior Director, Corporate Affairs, AMEA at Mars
The Next Era of PR: Fast, Intuitive, and Human-Centric
The future of PR demands professionals who blend technological fluency with intuitive human judgement—who can act quickly when crises emerge, align deeply with stakeholder values, and lead with empathy.
A continuous learning imperative
Technology has been reshaping PR for years. But the world practitioners operate in now is a different beast entirely, where real-time social media crises, algorithm-driven news cycles, and global stakeholder scrutiny demand fundamentally different approaches.
The most successful communications leaders and grounded in high levels of understanding and empathy, and show relentless adaptability, constantly unlearning outdated playbooks and relearning emerging capabilities. Whether mastering sentiment analysis tools, leveraging predictive communication platforms, or deploying immersive content technologies, it is key that tomorrow’s practitioners become comfortable with discomfort. They must move from “this is how we’ve always done it” to “what’s the smartest approach given today’s tools and tomorrow’s challenges?”. They must be ready to lean into the ambiguity while delivering high impact results.
This requires intellectual humility, compassion and voracious curiosity. The leaders who succeed will be those who can sit with technical experts, absorb complex information outside their original expertise, and translate it into compelling narratives that drive business outcomes. But storytelling alone isn’t enough. They need to bring in the heart too.
Learning the business you’re actually in
Perhaps the most critical evolution facing our profession is that practitioners must become business leaders who specialize in communications, not communicators who dabble in business.
From a corporate relations perspective, this represents the shift that matters most. The pathway to influence and strategic decision-making lies in demonstrating that communications is a business driver and enabler, not a support function.
Forward-thinking practitioners are developing sophisticated frameworks that quantify reputation as a business asset. Think customer acquisition costs reduced through earned trust, crisis costs avoided through proactive stakeholder management, and market opportunities accelerated through strategic narrative building.
This demands fluency in corporate finance, governance structures, and the language of shareholders. When a practitioner can demonstrate that reputation protection prevented a 15% share price drop, or that strategic communications accelerated market entry by two quarters, they’re no longer presenting “soft” value—they’re speaking the CFO’s language.
The practitioners who earn seats in strategic decision-making aren’t there because they serve as “spin doctors”. They’re there because they understand how communications drives enterprise value, protects market position, and creates competitive advantage. They understand the culture deeply and business priorities equally.
The “Glocal” advantage…what AI cannot replicate (for now)
While AI grows increasingly sophisticated, it cannot replicate the nuanced understanding that comes from lived global experience. In our interconnected world, communications leaders must navigate geopolitical complexities, cultural sensitivities, and regional market dynamics with sophistication no algorithm can match.
True global intelligence isn’t superficial awareness, but rather deep contextual understanding built through relationships, immersion in diverse markets, and cultural humility, It’s knowing that a campaign resonating in Mumbai might not work in Singapore and may fall flat in Australia, understanding stakeholder expectations across different governance frameworks, and anticipating how global events ripple differently through local markets.
This human intelligence, earned through experience spanning continents and understanding people and cultural nuances, represents an enduring competitive advantage in an increasingly automated world.
The multi-faceted leader
The future of communications demands leaders who are simultaneously technologists, business strategists, and global citizens. They lead with empathy, are agile, adaptable and live the people and business first philosophy. Those who develop this won’t just survive the transformation and ever- changing dynamics, but they’ll define it, elevating how corporations view the entire function from tactical necessity to strategic imperative, enabling rightful ownership of the seat at the table.
Read more about her journey and thoughts in the book ASPIRE