Hey bestie,
Just me or wild sales on iceberg lettuce this week? Huh. Anyway, here’s what made the group chat. Three quick hits and then a new segment I’m calling a Bestie Lesson. 👇
🔖 Quick Hits
📫 BLUFF it up: Penske Media’s Tim Chan isn’t arguing against rapport building in your media pitches… but he says they should go last. He wants you to BLUFF, or bottom line up front first. So say the thing, and save the meet-cute rhetoric for the bottom of your email.
🍿 When the CCO is the story: Grab the popcorn for this Succession-style exposé of Silicon Valley’s most influential comms pro you’ve never heard of (who may be the next First Lady of California).
🌴 The best job ever? Travel + Leisure Co. (the time share people, not the mag, but still) is hiring a comms director. Must be willing to work remotely and travel. UMMM BRB APPLYING IMMEDIATELY.
🤓 Bestie Lesson
Welcome to a new segment where I give you the download on something bubbling that you need to know about as a comms pro.
🥊 Today’s edition: Open Source v. Frontier Models and the fight for the future of AI (and democracy… maybe?).
What’s happening: There are two ways to get AI. Rent it from a frontier lab (Anthropic, OpenAI), or run an open source model yourself on your own servers. Yes, on-prem is entering the chat after being made basically obsolete by cloud and SaaS c. 2010. Open source got good this year, and got cheap. Now it’s a fight.
Why the battle: It boils down to cost, control and security. Open source is cheaper (no frontier-API markup, and every company is sweating their spend) and offers more control on weights and models. And security cuts both ways: the frontier labs want you worried about open source, and open source wants you worried about handing your data to a vendor who might ship a competitor to your product.
Why you, a comms person, should care. I’ll give you five reasons 🖐:
You will be the one asked to explain your company’s model choice. Whatever IT picks (frontier API or self-hosted open source), a reporter, employee, customer, or regulator eventually asks "what AI are you using and where does our data go?" Time to be sure you have the messaging in your comms (crisis?) plan.
It’s political. But even the administration is flip-flopping on whether open-source models are a competitive savior or a covert Chinese spy op. Frontier AI companies are already in the mix, with OpenAI’s Dean Ball warning that an open-source-dominant world ends in “full AI communism.” Your company’s tech stack now just became a values statement. We’re just not sure what the virtue signal is… yet.
Data governance is a comms problem. Think about what your team pastes into a chat window: embargoed announcements, crisis statements, layoff messaging, exec quotes that haven’t been approved, M&A holding statements. And that’s just the comms team. Now think about HR and finance. Eek. Even if the company’s policy says no, my guess is everyone is pasting MNPI and PII anyway.
Cost pressure. Everyone is freaking out about their AI spend. Many companies may consider open source to bring down costs (and take back control).
Platform risk. If you build your entire workflow on one frontier model, you’re exposed when that vendor changes pricing, changes policy, gets in a fight with the president, or ships a product that competes with your business.
So if “open source” isn’t already in your mind as the word (words?) of 2026, let this be your first cue.
Chat soon,
Gab Ferree
Founder & Your Comms BFF, Off the Record
PS: Last week’s most-clicked was Fortune Success editor Orianna Rosa Royle’s how to pitch her guide.
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