Malaysia’s PR leaders look to AI, trust and reputation as 2027 nears

Trust may be getting harder to earn even as technology makes it easier to create and distribute content.

Edelman’s 2026 Trust Barometer found that 65% of Malaysians showed an “insular trust” mindset, indicating a growing tendency to trust people who share similar values, backgrounds or sources of information.For public relations agencies, that makes the year ahead less about simply getting brands into the conversation and more about navigating who people listen to, where they get information and what it takes to make a message credible.

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At the same time, AI is moving rapidly from an emerging capability to an everyday communications tool, while agencies face growing expectations to deliver speed, predictive insight and measurable business impact. As 2027 approaches, A+M asked Malaysia’s PR leaders how they expect audience behaviour, technology and the role of communications to evolve in the year ahead.

Justin Then, CEO, Burson Malaysia

2027 will see marketeers migrate from traditional discovery search to autonomous agentic concierges. Consumers are no longer browsing pages but using large language models to replace the initial search bar. We need to recognise this behaviour and create content that would influence LLM visibility for brands so that they can appear on recommendations. 

Predictive technologies, long-term influencer partnerships, and AI as the new gatekeeper of reputation will gain significant traction in 2027. Together, these will enable brands to anticipate audiences’ needs more effectively, identify emerging issues before they escalate, test messages and creative approaches before they reach the market.

This will shift brand engagement from being largely reactive to increasingly predictive and personalised. At the same time, long-term creator partnerships will move brands away from one-off influencer campaigns towards more credible, sustained relationships with communities.

Ultimately, the brands that succeed will be those that use technology not simply to reach more people, but to understand audiences earlier, communicate more meaningfully, and build enduring reputations in an increasingly noisy environment.

Mazuin Zin, CEO Malaysia, SEA regional advisor, Edelman 

I've witnessed our industry transform over the past two decades, and every few years we're told that a new technology will change everything. Some do. But the fundamentals rarely change: people listen to people they trust, remember stories that mean something to them, and react when something doesn't feel right.

What's different in 2027 is the speed at which those human reactions can become powerful narratives. A complaint can become a conversation, a conversation can become news, and tomorrow it can become the answer an AI gives millions of people.

That's why I think the next big shift is from managing messages to understanding and managing meaning. AI can help us see what's forming much earlier.

We're entering an interesting contradiction: content is becoming cheaper to make at exactly the moment attention is becoming harder to earn. AI means almost anyone can produce more videos, images, copy, and variations, faster and cheaper. But nobody wakes up wishing brands would send them more content.

So I'd expect investment to move from simply making more towards knowing more — better audience intelligence, cultural understanding, creators and communities, smarter AI-enabled production, measurement and reputation.

After 20 years in communications, I've learned that technology changes much faster than people do. AI will transform how we listen, create, and predict, but it won't change why people trust, doubt, share, or care. 

The winners in 2027 will be the brands that combine machine intelligence with genuine human insight and are prepared enough to act before a conversation becomes a crisis.

Jo Yau, group CEO, Invictus Blue 

The biggest shift in 2027 will be the move from optimising media metrics to engineering measurable business outcomes.

Clients are no longer satisfied with the most efficient media buy, stronger reach or better engagement in isolation. Increasingly, the real measure of success is whether marketing can demonstrably influence growth, customer acquisition, revenue, retention or brand value.

This fundamentally challenges the traditional agency model. Media, creative, performance, data and technology can no longer operate as separate disciplines, each optimising its own KPI. 

My bigger bet for 2027 is not on any single media format or platform. It is on AI-optimised delivery across the entire media ecosystem. AI will increasingly determine how audiences are identified, how creative is adapted, where messages are served and how investment is optimised.

The advantage will therefore come less from simply adopting the newest platform, and more from how intelligently brands connect data, content, media and optimisation as one system.

Author Attribution

But as AI makes digital delivery more efficient and more automated, differentiation will increasingly come from the experiences technology cannot easily replicate. This is why I expect greater investment in experience-led media — events, retail, activations, experiential OOH and physical brand encounters — where brands can create deeper emotional connection, participation and memory.

Ann Chong, managing director, AI & client solutions, APAC, Team Lewis

2027 will see marketeers migrate from traditional discovery search to autonomous agentic concierges. Consumers are no longer browsing pages but using large language models to replace the initial search bar. We need to recognise this behaviour and create content that would influence LLM visibility for brands so that they can appear on recommendations. 

We should not forget the foundations of search, which is still based on keywords. Instead of keyword strings, we will move to a whole paragraph of instructions that is recognised by algorithmic gatekeepers via Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO). Brands that fail to anchor their positioning in clean, machine-readable structured data and earn authoritative citations from verified sources of information, will not get listed in the LLM recommendations. Brand owners will need to keep this aspect in mind. 

Consumers are currently overwhelmed and because of this, they are increasingly using AI summarisation tools and ad-blockers to filter out intrusive marketing. Personal data protection and scammer wariness is also impacting how consumers click on links and explore new brands. As a result, media consumption is sharply bifurcating into two extremes. The first being friction-free, utility-driven interactions that answer immediate needs within seconds. The second branch is deep, immersive escapism delivered through high-production narrative storytelling and long-form podcasts.

For brands and advertisers, occupying the mediocre middle is no longer viable and campaigns must either solve a practical problem with zero friction or deliver an experience compelling enough to hold voluntary attention. 

Dashwini Ravi, general manager, VX; digital lead, Vox Group

By 2027, AI will be less of a talking point and more of a default, sitting inside briefing, versioning and approvals rather than on the pitch slide. Search behaviour is evolving too: people are treating search engine like a personal assistant, taking the answer and skipping the source, which is exactly why generative engine optimisation is becoming a real discipline.

The budget picture is less comfortable to talk about. Our recent MYCreator Pulse study found product gifting accounts for 46% of Malaysian creator income sources, ahead of cash at 43%. As creators formalise, that converts to cash and creator work gets more expensive, not cheaper. Money’s still moving toward retail media and performance-led social. What’s getting cut isn’t brand, it's spend nobody can account for.

Short-form video isn't going anywhere. Production is getting faster and cheaper, and honestly that changes timelines and rate cards more than it changes the work itself.

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