Both sides of the argument
Victoria Ross has spent her career in public relations and communications, and most recently moved into workplace education. When generative AI arrived she did not form a view about it. She went and read.
“I come from a background where to have an opinion on something, you need to understand both sides of the argument.”
That instinct sent her somewhere most communications professionals did not go. Instead of learning the tools, she went into research — systems change, ecosystems change, and how people relate to one another.
The product management came afterwards. She describes the result as a full-picture view: the human question first, the technology second.
So when AI first started to proliferate in the early 2020s, I actually went into research in systems change, ecosystems change, and human relational skills.
A tool you pick up and put down
The reframe that came out of that research is the thing she now teaches, and it starts by rejecting the most common description of AI.
“A lot of people see AI as a tool. A tool is something that we pick up and put down with clear intentions.”
Her argument is that the description is too small, and that her own profession already has a better one. Communications people have never treated media as a tool. They treat it as an environment they operate inside.
How we really should be looking at it is much the way that PR and communications people have looked at media for a long time.
The fourth audience
From there the model is simple enough to say in one line, which is why it works. A communicator has always had audiences. She argues there is now one more.
“So we've got people, media, stakeholders, and AI.”
Treating AI as an audience changes what you do about it. An audience is something you address deliberately, in language it can use — and Victoria's work is helping people and organisations do that, building the AI ecosystems and knowledge bases that give a machine something coherent to read.
The consequence, she says, is not confined to work.
So once we stop thinking of it as a tool that we can pick up and put down, and more as an all-encompassing meta-medium, everything that we see and touch in our daily life has an AI layer attached to it. And we have the choice to interact with that positively or negatively, but that's ultimately our choice.
Second on the list
Victoria is direct about why her own industry cannot sit this out. She cites a Microsoft report from late 2024 ranking the industries most disrupted by AI: translation first, public relations second.
“As public relations and communications people, we are orators of the written word, so we sit closer to AI in more ways than any other industry combined.”
Her read is that the discipline is about to move house — away from marketing, where it has always sat, and towards the parts of an organisation that handle systems and risk.
“In the next five years, public relations and communications is going to sit closer to IT and cyber than it ever has before.”
Which leads to the sharpest thing she says, and the one aimed squarely at the people who run AI programs.
If your AI plan or your centre of excellence model does not have a communications or a PR person at the table, you're going in the wrong direction.
Not all builders
What the AI Pathfinder program gave her was not a technology. It was a position she could occupy without pretending to be something she is not.
“SMEC and the government's AI Adopt program has been extraordinary in helping me believe in myself. So we are not all builders.”
She is precise about this. The AI experts, she notes, mostly live somewhere else.
I don't claim to be an AI expert, but the SMEC AI team have allowed people like me to create change within a very specific niche industry — mine being PR and communications — and help navigate that with an AI lens.
Pick a lane
The most useful thing she took from the program was a correction, and it came from Amir Nissen. She had watched the same pattern repeat across her cohort.
“There's been a lot of people in the program that have started with a smart technology or platform, but they don't know who their audience is.”
The advice was to stop building outward and start narrowing.
“So what Amir really helped us to do is go: okay, pick a lane. Pick a very specific audience, specifically tied to the industry you were in before you started this work, and zone in on them. It's not about being something for everybody.”
Paired with it was an honesty she keeps returning to — that not every founder gets the funding they want, and not every system in a founder's head gets built.
But what we can do is stick to what we know and really hone in and own our industry.
Where that leaves the work
Victoria now works the lane she came from. She also runs the model on herself: with a three-year-old and a five-year-old at home, agents handle the household so her working attention goes where it is scarce.
“So having AI agents working in the background on all of our home affairs is really important so that I can focus on things like cutting-edge research.”
And she is clear about what adoption at national scale actually looks like — not one platform for everybody, but many people doing something exact for a few.
It's being really impactful to a small group of people, and that's what's really going to drive AI adoption in Australia.
