Eleven years ago, Aaron Zamost wrote a blog called What's Your Hour in 'Silicon Valley Time'? It was one of those pieces that travelled well beyond its original audience because it gave people working in communications a language for something they already instinctively understood.
Zamost mapped the public life of a tech startup onto a clock. A company begins in obscurity, becomes the shiny new thing, grows into an industry disruptor and, eventually, reaches the point where admiration gives way to scrutiny. The questions become harder, the narrative turns and, for those that survive it, the cycle begins again with reinvention and rebirth. It drew on the hero's journey: the narrative pattern popularised by Joseph Campbell under the term "monomyth", a word he borrowed from my fellow Irishman James Joyce.
The piece stayed with me because it was never really just about Silicon Valley. It described the journey of almost every ambitious company and the communications challenge that comes with it. Success creates attention. Attention creates expectations. Expectations eventually create scrutiny. The job is not simply to enjoy the positive hours and panic when the clock turns. It is to understand where a company is, anticipate what comes next and help it communicate with discipline through every part of the cycle.
A journey of my own
Around that time, I was beginning a journey of my own. Over the following years, I had the unusual experience of being the first employee at two globally focused corporate communications consultancies. I saw both businesses being built from the inside, helped scale teams and worked with companies at almost every point on Zamost's clock: launch, rapid growth, international expansion, scrutiny, crisis and reinvention.
A few things consistently separated our best work from everything else.
- Dedication: hard work and strategy, not merely managing an account.
- A desire to secure the right results: not coverage for coverage's sake.
- International in scope: thinking globally from the outset.
Technology is not a niche
The world has moved on since then, and so has my view of communications. Every company is now shaped by technology, whether it considers itself a technology company or not. Treating technology as a niche is a road to nowhere. So too is assuming that reputation, regulation or competition can be understood through a purely local lens. Any ambitious organisation now operates in an international, interconnected environment, even when its customers or operations appear close to home.
One architecture, not a collection of disciplines
Communications can therefore no longer be treated as a collection of separate disciplines. Media relations, policy, product, analyst relations, public affairs, community engagement, employee communications and executive positioning all shape the same reputation. They need to work as one joined-up architecture rather than as isolated functions. Siloing corporate communications from an organisation's wider external activities and goals is like covering one hand of a watch: you can see movement, but you cannot accurately tell the time.
- A major funding round can disappear from view within a day if it is treated as a press release rather than an opportunity to define the company's next phase, strengthen its category position and create commercial momentum.
- A policy consultation can open and close before a business has assembled the evidence, relationships and communications strategy needed to influence the outcome.
- An analyst report or competitor announcement can shape how buyers, investors and partners understand an entire market before your organisation has properly made its case.
- A company can secure strong traditional media coverage and still lose the wider narrative because the audiences that matter are increasingly forming their views through podcasts, newsletters, creators, specialist communities, search and AI-generated answers where the company has little or no presence.
In each case, the challenge is not simply to produce a response. It is to understand how the audiences, channels and consequences connect and to make sure the organisation acts accordingly.
The clock has sped up
The clock Zamost described has also sped up. There are more channels, more stakeholders, more scrutiny and far more information shaping each stage of a company's life. Narratives form faster, travel further and can change direction without warning. That does not make expert judgment less important; it makes it indispensable. Companies need people who can interpret the noise, understand where they are in the cycle and make the right decision before the next hour arrives.
The challenge is no longer a shortage of information, but making sense of what is already there. Companies now generate signals across media, policy, customers, employees, markets and their own internal knowledge. AI can surface patterns and connect those inputs at a speed that was previously impossible. But the value still comes from experienced people who know which signals matter, what they mean and how to shape them into a story that others will understand.
The model behind Inference
That is the model behind Inference. We bring together strategists and storytellers who understand business, technology and the modern communications landscape, and equip them with AI to interrogate information, connect channels and move with greater speed. This is not a matter of giving a junior colleague access to ChatGPT and calling it transformation. It is about placing more powerful tools in the hands of people with the judgment and craft to use them well.
In that sense, the age of AI is also a return to craftsmanship. As Jeremy Kahn argues in Mastering AI, many roles may begin to resemble those of master craftspeople: experienced practitioners using new tools while passing on the strategy and judgment that no tool can supply. The craft of storytelling has not changed, but the canvas has expanded and the instruments have become more precise. Zamost's clock is no longer analogue; it is atomic, registering every movement in a world where narratives can shift by the second. AI can help us read the time. It still takes human experience to understand what the hour means, and what story must be told before it passes.
What the name means
That is the thinking behind Inference. The name reflects what good communications strategy increasingly requires: the ability to draw the right conclusion from a growing number of signals. We are multichannel by design, international in outlook and led by experienced strategists. We use AI to see more, connect information and move faster, but always informed by human expertise, judgment and an understanding of what actually matters.
The ambition is simple: to help organisations understand the moment they are in, decide what matters and communicate with enough clarity and speed to shape what comes next. Zamost's clock may now be atomic, but communications remains a deeply human craft. The advantage will not belong to those who produce the most content or adopt the most tools. It will belong to those who can make the best inference, and turn it into the right story, for the right audience, at the right time.
Working out which hour you are in? Talk to us.