Blogs, Insights

The AI revolution presents a gear shift for PR

By Katie Herbert, Director

Like many other sectors, the rise of AI means PR is experiencing one of the biggest transformation periods in its history. But despite what some headlines may suggest, the reality is far more nuanced: PR professionals aren’t going to be taken over by AI any time soon.

Instead, its ability to take on the burden of administrative and repetitive tasks creates a significant opportunity for our profession. Communications professionals have always had to manage multiple channels and operate in a 24/7 news environment. Using AI to take on the burden of the right tasks can help free up our ability to do the work which requires genuinely creative and original ideas, or person-to-person interaction. Not to mention, the headspace for critical thinking and professional development.

The ability to step back, analyse a situation, understand context, and develop genuinely original ideas with clarity is what sits at the heart of a truly good PR professional. That’s the core of what helps develop strong relationships with journalists, brand teams, and each other. Talent retention for an agency is often directly linked to this too, where a culture of learning and collaboration with humans, not AI, is the heart and soul of a business.  

What is the right role for AI in PR?

One of the most positive impacts of AI could be on early careers. To date, entry-level and early career roles often involved a large amount of administrative work, such as manual recording of media coverage.

Now, AI can start to take on more of the heavy lifting, such as collating quantitative data reporting. This doesn’t mean that there’s no longer any manual oversight of these tasks; rather, AI can just take on the more time-intensive aspects of them.

This in turn means that PR careers can be focused earlier on developing the genuinely essential PR skills, like picking up the phone, networking, thinking creatively and effectively managing stakeholders. After all, these are the skills that make someone an outstanding communications professional.

Treading with care

With all that said, any use of AI should be within specific guardrails and in complete transparency.

There are things humans do better, and arguably always will – and writing is one of them. AI cannot replicate genuine insight, sparky opinions, personal experience, relationships or an understanding of a client’s unique context. The joy of crafting original creative copy is a skill we must treasure and safeguard, much like the authenticity of journalism itself.   

The rise of AI has placed greater importance on trust in the media. Trust that PRs won’t feed them AI slop, and trust that the businesses and spokespeople that they quote are real, experienced, and unedited. Readers expect the newspapers they read to publish genuinely insightful stories – not something that has been pulled out of ChatGPT. We have seen this to the point where leading journalists have taken to LinkedIn to plead with big agencies to stop sending automated drivel or risk being blacklisted. Journalists are more frequently speaking to PRs they’ve known for years, opting face-to-face client meetings or discussions over the phone to probe actual opinions and insights. Trust is fast becoming the most valuable commodity in the communications landscape.

PR in the AI era

In this era of AI, where it can be increasingly difficult for consumers to discern reality from hallucination, brands and organisations need advisers who do more than just create visibility.

PR is not about chasing volume of media mentions or going viral on social media at the expense of quality. Our work has instead evolved to focus more on protecting reputation and building confidence with stakeholders. Ironically, as technology becomes more powerful, human judgement becomes more valuable.

The key to successful AI adoption in PR will be to ensure it is only used in the right way, and to reinvest those productivity gains into higher-value strategic work or personal development and training.

At Farrer Kane & Co, we’ve chosen to reinvest our productivity gains into people and purpose. That includes committing 120 days of agency time each year to pro bono work on issues that genuinely matter and make a difference. This means our team can use their expertise to make a tangible difference on work that develops them professionally while giving them something increasingly important in modern working life: a sense of meaning.

Once the dust has settled and a regulatory benchmark is in place, I have every confidence that PR will emerge stronger in the AI era. The right use of this technology can help us better measure the value and impact of our work, support genuine talent, and mitigate risk better through improved horizon scanning and greater capacity for critical thinking. Emotional intelligence will always serve a fundamental role in communications – and that is what will govern us for the foreseeable.