, the PRCA, a trade body for UK public relations, debated the following motion: "The workforce in public relations will considerably reduce as a result of Artificial Intelligence and automation". The lecture theatre was small, but full. The audience was invited to vote on the motion before the debate began: 9 for, 29 against. The proposing team used hard facts and figures to sound a warning over job losses. The opposing team cheered on Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a bright future filled with opportunity. The audience voted again after the debate: but the numbers scarcely moved. As the audience filed out of the lecture theatre, a senior in-house practitioner confided in me that despite agreeing with the sober tone of the moot, he had still voted against it. I asked why. He replied that he felt a duty to be optimistic about the future of the public relations (PR) profession. A similar collective confidence drives much of the industry discourse about AI in Public Relations; in particular, the rose-tinted dream that AI will free-up PR practitioners to focus on strategic counsel, even if this means the loss of many junior and technical PR roles, once they are delegated to robots. PR's professional habitus: optimism and futurity PR's professional habitus is defined by a relentless focus on optimism and futurity (Bourne, 2017). This professional habitus renders PR indispensable to the corporate 169). Such reinvigorated neoliberal sensemaking has, in turn, given companies new motive to put PR on speed-dial. This paper combines scholarship on PR and neoliberalism (e.g. Roper, 2005; Surma and Demetrious, 2018), with recent interrogations of neoliberalism in the political economy (e.g. Davies, 2014; Mirowski and Nik-Khah, 2017) to explore PR's latest efforts to legitimise neoliberal discourses. The discussion is further interwoven with recent communications and PR scholarship on AI and automation (e.g. Collister, 2016; Guzman, 2019; Moore, 2018; Noble, 2018) to consider how PR's own efforts to normalise AI into everyday life could, in turn, change the shape of everyday PR practice. PR on behalf of AI is understood here to be a form of discourse work (Pieczka 2013), encompassing public affairs and political communication by government ministries and departments, political lobbying, corporate communications by global technology firms, Business-to-Business communication by global management consultancies, as well as Business-to-Consumer communications by tech start-ups. As part of discourse work; PR, in its different forms, is expected to privilege certain voices over others in order to legitimise AI technologies. However, unlike some of the discourses PR has been called on to legitimise in the paste .g. free trade, financialisation, outsourcing or extractive technologies-naturalising Artificial Intelligence as a way of life has direct implications for society, for democracy, and for the future of public relations itself.

According to Bucher et al. (2016: 499), boundaries "demarcate professions from other professions and subprofessions with distinctive status and centrality in the field. However, these boundaries are not fixed." This observation holds true when applied to PR's professional project, which is ever-changing-encompassing boundary-work with adjacent fields such as journalism, advertising, marketing, human resources, management consultancy, accountancy and data management. PR's boundary-work has also led to fragmentation into other communication specialisms, including corporate communications, investor relations (IR), marketing communications and reputation management. Several studies have looked at contestation between PR and adjacent fields (Bourne, 2015a; Christensen et al., 2008; Hutton, 2010; Johansen & Anderson, 2012). However, the wider literature on professionalisation lacks a systematic account of how professions discursively construct their boundaries, or how differences in field position can influence a profession's use of discursive strategies to defend or contest its boundaries (Bucher et al., 2016). This matters for the deepening of PR's scholarship, since an effective exploration of the PR profession must account for professions as socially-constructed, and include studies of PR's jurisdictional disputes (Abbott, 1988; Bourne, 2015a; Zorn, 2002).

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Online communities are popular sites for collective sensemaking. This study explores sensemaking in one such community following the closure of Olint Corp, a highlysuccessful Jamaican investment club. After Olint's disbanding, Jamaicans reconnected through online communities to make sense of their financial losses; to make sense of Olint-seen variously as an altruistic endeavour, a global currency trader, or Ponzi scheme-and to make sense of themselves as enterprising investors. This narrative inquiry unveils their rich, multi-voiced, fragmented storying of Olint and its founder, once praised as a 'financial messiah'.