Editorial
The Gist
- Increase efficiency quickly. AI in public relations streamlines tasks like media monitoring and content drafting, allowing PR teams to work more effectively.
- Improve personalization easily. AI tools help PR professionals tailor messages using real-time customer data, which enhances audience engagement and communication.
- Balance AI with human Insight. While AI aids routine tasks, human creativity, strategy and relationship-building remain key to successful public relations.
As a seasoned marketer with years of experience navigating the world of public relations (PR), I’ve seen firsthand how new tools can impact our craft. One of the most transformative tools has been generative AI.
Platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude offer new creative capabilities, greatly enhancing the potential for making PR more efficient and impactful. But as is true with any powerful tool, there are nuances and risks involved in generative AI’s application to the PR domain.
Here’s how AI can enhance the PR process and how to avoid over-reliance on it. Generative AI and public relations can be powerful allies, but great PR is still a delicate balance between art and science that requires human expertise and intuition.
AI and Public Relations: Enhancing Efficiency and Scalability
AI’s most immediate benefits for PR revolve around its ability to drive efficiency and scalability. Here are a few ways generative AI can help.
Monitor the Media Landscape
AI tools can scan the web, social media and even competitive environments in real time. This enables PR teams to stay on top of the latest trends and conversations, without having to dedicate untold hours to scanning and shifting through countless media publications. With AI, you can monitor reporters’ stories, get flags on relevant content and track competitors’ activities to adjust your pitching strategy as you go.
Generate Content Ideas
AI is no replacement for human creativity — not yet, anyway. However, it can serve as a powerful tool for facilitating the creative process, helping teams spark new ideas for compelling story angles. By using approved messaging, these tools can suggest content topics that align with emerging trends, and they can even help identify the right reporters, influencers or channels for publishing your content.
Speed up Routine Tasks
AI particularly excels at speeding up the execution of routine tasks. Generative AI tools can assist in the actual drafting of content — such as press releases or social media updates — by providing outlines and other forms of raw creative material. From here, professionals can refine and expand on these ideas. In this way, AI is able to speed up the processes that would otherwise take significant human effort.
Remember, while AI-generated content is rarely perfect out of the box, it can provide a great head start for creatives who would otherwise be faced with the always-daunting blank page.
Expedite Real-Time Adaptability
AI allows PR professionals to pivot quickly based on current events, ensuring that pitch hooks and angles remain timely and relevant. By tracking the latest emerging media trends, AI tools can help PR professionals ensure they are always operating at the edge of what’s topical.
In today’s fast-paced media environment, real-time adaptability is crucial to remain timely, topical and relevant. As has always been the case, PR campaigns need to be both proactive and reactive, and AI tools are invaluable in helping PR professionals do both with speed and efficiency.
Enable Quick Personalization
Finally, by analyzing real customer data and communications, AI can help PR professionals tailor their messages to resonate with specific audiences. This personalization builds stronger connections with one’s target audience and enhances overall engagement, making your communications more compelling and impactful.
Related Article: How AI and Data Analytics Drive Personalization Strategies
Why AI in Public Relations Needs Human Expertise
Here are areas in which human expertise in PR remains key.
Strategic Thinking and Narrative Building
AI cannot create your brand’s vision, values or positioning. These are fundamental aspects of marketing and PR that require a deep understanding of the space, the players and your organization’s place in the market. They also require plenty of trained intuition and creativity. Keep this in your human realm.
Original Content Creation
While AI can assist with the content development process, it cannot replace human creativity or outperform professional writers with unique voices, styles and insights. AI won’t have conversations with your customers, understand your company culture or craft an original story that resonates deeply with your audience. It doesn’t understand any of these things.
AI can help with structure and creative ideation, but at the end of the day, the heart of the story must come from sharp human insight.
Relationship Building
PR is rooted in human relationships. It should go without saying that AI cannot build rapport with journalists or influencers, nor can it navigate the subtleties of a conversation to foster trust. While AI can monitor media outlets and help you keep abreast of what’s grabbing headlines, it won’t pitch stories to the right people in the right way. It fundamentally lacks the kind of human intuition and emotional intelligence required to do so effectively. This is where experienced PR professionals excel and will continue to outperform AI for some time to come.
Ethical Considerations and Bias
Finally, AI tools are not without their flaws. They can sometimes perpetuate biases present in their training data, and over-reliance on them may lead to tone-deaf messaging. Additionally, AI is prone to “hallucinations,” or the generation of inaccurate, misleading or outright false information. To this end, oversight is essential.
Finally, transparency is crucial. If AI-generated content is used, it's essential to disclose that information to avoid misleading your audience.
Related Article: Decision-Making Bias & AI: Does Data Dependency Dull You?
4 Practical AI and Public Relations Tips for Success
1. Start With AI but Finish With Human Insight
Use AI for inspiration, initial drafts and data analysis only. You should never ship deliverables without a round of human oversight and refinement to add a human touch to the final output.
2. Monitor and Adapt
Regularly evaluate the effectiveness of your AI-powered strategies. Remember that AI is rarely static. It is regularly being trained, retrained and tuned in ways that can affect its output in meaningful ways. With this in mind, make sure you’re continuously fine-tuning your approach based on both AI data and human feedback.
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3. Stay Ethical
As mentioned earlier, it’s imperative that you always disclose when AI-generated content is used and that you be transparent with your audience to maintain trust and integrity.
4. Blend AI With Human Creativity
You should leverage AI primarily to handle repetitive tasks and for enablement purposes, but you should always rely on humans for strategic thinking, storytelling and relationship-building.
In today’s fast-paced landscape, AI and public relations must work together to ensure PR professionals stay relevant and adaptable. As you explore how to use AI in PR, don’t forget to be human.
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