The Comms Person Is the New First Hire

TLDR: AI made it easy for anyone to produce words, but it didn't give anyone the judgment to know if those words are any good. That's why the smartest startups are hiring comms people first, and the comms people who are ready will define what this industry looks like next.

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In August 2025, a company with 247 employees offered to buy Google Chrome for $34.5 billion.

Perplexity AI, founded in 2022 and valued at $20 billion by September 2025, built a search engine to compete with Google and made a public bid to buy one of Google’s own products.

This is happening everywhere now. Cursor, built by four MIT grads frustrated with how slow Microsoft was moving, went from zero to a $29 billion valuation and over a billion in annual recurring revenue, eating directly into GitHub Copilot’s market share with a fraction of the headcount. Attio, a 25-person CRM startup out of London, is pulling customers away from Salesforce with a story about the category being “stuck in the past” and are on track to quadruple their revenue this year.

These lean teams are putting giants under siege, and in every case the weapon was a tighter story told at the right moment to the right people. They understand that story is the product and this signals that there is going to be a power shift coming for comms and the way we operate as comms people is about to change entirely.

By the end of this year, it’s likely that successful startups won’t have traditional marketing or comms departments. They’ll have one comms person, embedded from the early days, running storytelling the way product teams run product: iterating, testing, shipping.

These roles won’t go to comms people who still think in campaigns and coverage reports. They’re going to go to operators and super-connectors who happen to have comms instincts. These will be people who earned a seat at the table because they have sharp judgment, a sharper tongue, and can move as fast as the founders they work alongside.

The startups that figure out this new type of comms hire early will outpace everyone else. And the comms people who step into this role will define what our industry looks like for the next decade.

And here’s why…

We’ve heard this a million times, but AI has made it too easy to produce words. A founder can generate a pitch deck, a landing page, and a week’s worth of LinkedIn posts before lunch. But despite all these new shiny words, AI hasn’t given most people the knowledge of whether any of it is actually good.

I’m not making this up. Today, Harvard Business Review published findings from an eight-month study of a 200-person tech company that revealed that AI didn’t free up people’s time, it made them do more. Workers expanded into tasks outside their expertise, blurred the line between working and not working, and juggled more threads simultaneously. Everyone felt more productive and nobody felt less busy. 

The researchers found that this output surge can mask what they called “silent workload creep and growing cognitive strain” — the kind that impairs judgment over time.

Now imagine that dynamic inside a startup with no one whose job it is to say “OK stop, this isn’t landing.” This judgement gap will widen fast because when everyone can generate polished copy, the ability to pressure-test it — to know whether it actually lands — becomes a scarce skill.

The researchers also found that when AI makes every task feel accessible, people don’t do fewer things better, they do more things at a surface level. Product managers started writing code, researchers took on engineering tasks, and everyone absorbed work they used to hand off to specialists and other teams. 

The comms equivalent to this is a founder who decides they can handle messaging themselves because ChatGPT gave them something that looks polished. Ya, it looks polished, but looking polished and actually landing are two different things, and without someone in the room who knows the difference, you end up with more content and less clarity.

Good companies are going to get passed up on funding, miss key hires, and struggle to find customers. Not because their product isn’t good, but because nobody on the team can tell the difference between a story that sounds right and a story that makes people care.

Startups need someone in the room early who can look at a message and say, with confidence, “this isn’t it” and then fix it. That’s a comms person.

The tricky part about knowing what good comms looks like is that it changes every day. 

Good comms is fluid. It’s knowing which story to tell to which audience at which moment. Doing good comms is like being a composer, who can write songs from a mixture of instruments: moments, ideas, messaging, people, data, and experiences.

Good comms results in the relationships that get you in the room before the pitch. It’s understanding that the media landscape shifted (again) and the strategy that worked six months ago is already stale. It’s the difference between being loud and creating meaning in a busy market.

In a nutshell, the rules of ‘good comms’ are constantly changing and non-comms people likely don’t have time to keep track of it all. Companies are desperately looking for comms people who have the best judgement and instincts, because we’re all feeling our way through the dark at speed.

“She knows what good looks like” and “She just gets it” will become the highest praise and the type of feedback that gets you work.

You can reach anyone online now and to a founder, that feels like infinite opportunity. To a comms person, it’s a trap.

“Speak to everyone and speak to no one.” We’ve all heard it. It’s always been true, but it’s cutting deeper now that it has in the past. When every platform gives you access to millions of eyeballs, the temptation to go wide is almost irresistible. But far and wide turns into yelling into an open field. ‘If a tree falls in the forrest and no one is around’ type of shit. Your message gets thinner every time you stretch it to fit one more audience.

A comms person’s job is to help resist that ‘far and wide’ temptation. To focus the message on the audience that matters most.

If you’re a consultant nodding along, remember that the way we work has to evolve too. Three years ago, niches were the answer — pick a specialization and own it. But clients don’t wake up thinking “I need a B2B SaaS comms specialist.” They wake up thinking “why is nobody paying attention to what we’re building?” or “how do I get in front of the investors who matter?”

Sharp judgement and the ability to speak their language is our only hope. Honestly I think niches are dead. The future is for the ones who can position offerings around the problems they solve, not services they offer. Consultants that make it are Swiss Army Knives in execution because that’s how small teams work. And how we talk about ourselves has to match that reality.

Perplexity didn’t need 10,000 employees to make Google sweat. Cursor didn’t need Microsoft’s budget to steal their developers. Attio didn’t need Salesforce’s brand recognition to win their customers. They needed tight teams, sharp instincts, and stories that made the right people pay attention at the right time.

AI has made words cheap and it’s also made it dangerously easy to confuse doing more with doing better. That’s exactly why the people who have the good judgement to know how to make words mean something are more valuable than they’ve ever been. The startups that hire a comms person early will be able to build companies that people actually care about. And the comms professionals who are ready for this moment will shape what this industry becomes.