If you work in PR and are fearful about the impact of AI on your job, you might have good reason to be. A recent Microsoft study lists public relations professions in a ‘Top 40’ list of jobs most at risk from AI. So, should we be as worried as the tech giant thinks we should?
One of our clients, Morgan Davies of Prime Accountants, had a very perceptive take on the matter. To paraphrase Morgan – people working in manual roles have had to respond to threats to their jobs from automation for decades, and now it’s the turn of professional services business to adapt in the same way.
So, perhaps the discussion should always be about how to use AI in public relations, rather than worrying about it replacing us.
It’s a valid perspective to think that AI won’t take your job in PR – but a PR professional who knows to use it efficiently might. Like in many industries, AI in public relations isn’t going anywhere – so it’s up to us to adapt.
the issue of trust
Arguably the biggest threat to PR from AI is the potential for the erosion of trust. Take this fascinating City AM investigation on the proliferation of fake, AI generated stories being pitched to journalists – and how their reporter went to extreme lengths to track down the person pitching the fake article to them.
A bedrock of many of our PR campaigns at R&Co is thought leadership – putting forward experts from our clients to comment on topical news issues, creating brand awareness and building trust.
But for every real, human expert being pitched by PR agencies to comment like this, there’s an AI PR campaign trying to steal a piece of your real estate. Fake, AI-generated commentators are routinely being pitched to journalists – who can be stretched and time-poor at the best of times, without adding in the need for them to check if their source is trustworthy or even real.
This makes it increasingly important for PR agencies to build trust signals into their SEO strategies – such as creating biography pages for thought leaders and building a bank of by-lined articles on clients’ websites. This way, a journalist can quickly identify whether the person in front of them is credible.
how to use ai in public relations
Not all AI is a threat to your job. There are many AI tools for public relations and communications professions which are extremely useful time-savers.
Just a few examples which are popular at R&Co include:
- InTheMix.ai, a very smart PR review AI tool from the people behind CoverageBook. It enables you to discover the media sources Google AI uses as citations when people ask questions about a topic
- This smart tool from I Love IMG, which means poor quality submitted images can be transformed by using AI to upscale them and instantly make them better quality
- Canva and many other platforms offer a free audio to text platform, which takes all the heavy lifting out of transcribing video dialogue for use in social media captions and press releases
HEAR MORE FROM US ON AI IN PUBLIC RELATIONS
The kind people at Macildowie Recruitment and Retention have invited us to take part in their latest webinar, looking at all things SEO and how AI is changing the landscape.
Some of the topics we’ll cover include…
- What’s still working in SEO – and what’s no longer effective
- How AI is transforming both search engines and user behaviour
- Whether we’re seeing the decline of traditional SEO
It’s on September 17 at 11am, and you can sign up here.
