The PR Firm That Learned to Speak Machine Before the Machines Could Listen

In February 1999, Laura Borgstede made a choice that sounded like a limitation. Her new Atlanta public-relations firm would focus on telecom. Not technology in general. Not whatever category had the largest marketing budget that quarter. Telecom - the land of network diagrams, spectrum policy, billing platforms and product names that seemed to have been assigned by a committee of routers.

The cleverness of the choice only became obvious later. Telecom did not remain one market. It threw off mobile, cloud communications, machine-to-machine systems, the Internet of Things, private wireless networks, connected vehicles, satellite services and, most recently, AI infrastructure. Calysto Communications stayed in roughly the same neighborhood while the neighborhood built whole new streets.

Today the firm sells positioning and messaging, content, media and analyst relations, social strategy, vertical-market programs and trade-show support. Its clients are technical B2B companies, from startups to Fortune 100 businesses. The useful distinction is that Calysto does not merely distribute technical news. It first decides what the news means, who should care and which proof will survive contact with a skeptical editor.

The first failure is usually a sentence

Calysto's case files repeatedly begin with the same quiet malfunction: the market has put a company in the wrong mental drawer. Inmarsat was known for satellites, not as an IoT connectivity option. Globecomm was understood as a satellite company rather than an industrial IoT integrator. One Tech needed to move the market's perception from IoT toward AI. Other clients had the inverse problem: a launch date but little that an editor would recognize as news.

This is why Calysto begins upstream, with a positioning document that forces agreement on the value proposition, differentiators, key messages and proof points. It is less glamorous than pitching a national reporter. It is also the part most likely to expose the real problem. If sales calls describe one company, the website describes another, and the CEO invents a third during interviews, more publicity simply distributes the confusion.

“It starts with Positioning and Messaging.”A Calysto operating maxim

The product, then, is a chain of translation. Engineers explain what the system does. Calysto turns that into a market position. Writers turn the position into articles, white papers, case studies and presentations. Media specialists carry it to editors. Analyst-relations practitioners repeat it in briefings. Social posts and trade shows keep the phrase in circulation long enough for it to become familiar.

The receipts are better than the adjectives

Agency websites are natural habitats for words like strategic, integrated and results-driven. Calysto is more interesting when it gets specific. For RacoWireless, its Mobile World Congress campaign coincided with a 500 percent jump in website traffic. The agency says media coverage became a significant source of sales leads, and inbound requests from reporters eventually accounted for more than half of interview activity. RacoWireless was acquired by KORE Wireless for $160 million in 2015 after four years of work with Calysto.

The Everstream campaign is an even cleaner demonstration. Calysto pitched a new B2B broadband service market by market, placing more than 32 articles and interviews, including local public-radio coverage. The client reported an 87 percent increase in inbound leads over the prior year. With Quuppa, co-marketing with partners, PR and content accompanied a tripling of sales in one year and an 85 percent expansion of the partner network.

These figures do not prove that publicity alone caused every sale or acquisition. They show something more practical: Calysto chooses measures that can be discussed with a commercial leader. Leads, traffic, partner growth, analyst inclusion and acquisition readiness are closer to the business than a folder of flattering clips.

A senior bench instead of an agency pyramid

The firm's competitive argument is partly organizational. Calysto describes its practitioners as senior specialists with 15 to 30-plus years in content, PR, analyst relations, events and the industries they cover. Its current team page lists leaders for strategy, commercial work, operations, client programs, content and media relations. Borgstede says the extended network includes more than 50 VP-level professionals and gives clients local presence in more than 80 countries.

That arrangement is meant to reduce the expensive opening weeks in which a generalist agency learns the difference between a carrier, a channel partner and a connectivity platform. Calysto's alternative is accumulated context: knowing which analyst covers which layer of the stack, which trade show matters for which buyer and when an apparently minor standards development contains an actual story.

The customer buys judgment by the project or through an ongoing relationship. Calysto does not own media inventory, sell software seats or publish a standard rate card. It competes with specialist technology agencies, large integrated firms, independent consultants and in-house teams. The narrow focus is its filter: excellent for a cellular IoT platform or private-network vendor, much less obviously useful for a fashion label seeking consumer buzz.

The old playbook acquires a new reader

Calysto now describes its approach as earned-first. The phrase reflects a change in B2B discovery. Buyers still ask colleagues, read trade publications and inspect analyst research. They also ask AI systems to explain a category, compare vendors and assemble a shortlist. Those systems tend to reward clear, consistent information corroborated beyond a company's own website.

This development changed the packaging, not the core conviction. Third-party credibility has always helped a buyer trust an unfamiliar vendor. Now the same article may also become evidence for a machine answering the buyer's question. Calysto has added generative and answer-engine optimization to the vocabulary, but its deeper bet remains stubbornly analog: credible people and institutions create signals worth repeating.

There is a charming tension here. In a 2025 interview, Borgstede criticized agencies that use AI to write pitches and articles, arguing for experienced human writers. By 2026, the firm was also advising clients on how to become visible inside AI-assisted discovery. Calysto is not selling machine-made authority. It is selling human-made material designed to remain intelligible when machines enter the distribution chain.

The useful theft

A smaller company can copy the logic without hiring a global program. Start by choosing one commercial result. Then write the single sentence that explains the buyer, the problem and the difference. Attach proof to every claim. List the handful of editors, analysts, customers and partners whose recognition would actually change a sales conversation. Build one substantial piece of content, then adapt it for the channels those people use.

1. 1Define the business outcome before selecting the communications tactic.
2. 2Make positioning a shared operating document, not a slogan owned by marketing.
3. 3Pair every message with proof that a skeptical outsider can check.
4. 4Repurpose one strong idea across earned, owned and social channels.
5. 5Measure what happens after attention: qualified visits, leads, partners and shortlist inclusion.

The method needs three conditions. The product must solve a real problem. Executives must tolerate repetition and make time for interviews. And the company must be able to substantiate its claims. Without those, positioning becomes decoration and earned media becomes a brief spike. It is also a poor fit when the primary task is mass consumer entertainment, pure paid acquisition or emergency reputation repair with no operational change behind it.

Calysto's most transferable achievement is not one award or traffic chart. It is the discipline of remaining in a difficult category long enough for expertise to compound. Borgstede's narrow decision in 1999 created a peculiar advantage in 2026: the firm knows how technical markets learn a name. First the sentence. Then the proof. Then the people. Now, occasionally, the machine.