AI didn’t replace the thinking in PR. It replaced the wait.
For almost two decades, I’ve built both brand and digital PR campaigns the slow way: hours of research, dozens of discarded angles, endless rounds of “what if we tried this instead?” But hey, that’s PR, right? Now with AI, the classic process hasn’t disappeared. It’s just faster, and that speed is changing what a good PR or comms team can actually do in a day.
The temptation is to frame AI as a threat to creativity in this industry. I don’t see it that way. When “Google it” replaced trips to the local library for research and email replaced the fax machine for issuing press releases and statements, the industry adapted. I’d argue that in many ways it got stronger and definitely got faster. I see the same from AI.
I view AI as a tool that clears the runway so the real work, the human work, can happen sooner and with more options on the table.
Where AI earns its place
Ideation: a first draft of ten angles used to take an afternoon. Now it takes minutes, which means the afternoon can be spent stress-testing the three angles actually worth pursuing.
Research and pattern spotting: journalist’s most recent stories, coverage/link gaps, competitor analysis and trend data. AI pulls that raw material together fast, and a fast start means more time for the part that needs a human: deciding what matters and why.
Production at scale: once a concept is approved, turning it into multiple formats and channel variants without losing the original spark is exactly the kind of repetitive, high-volume task AI is built for.
A good example of this in practice is that I built an AI-assisted production model at Chemist4U with editorial and clinical approval gates in place. The model didn’t decide what content should say. Instead, it helped the team produce more, faster, after humans had already made the call on direction and accuracy.
Creativity isn’t the bit AI does for you
There’s a lazy assumption that creativity in PR means the eureka moment, the single clever line that lands the campaign. In reality, creativity in this job can be a numbers game. It’s generating far more ideas than you’ll ever use, then having the time, taste and tenacity to know which ones are worth developing and fighting for.
AI is great at the volume part. Ask it for fifty headline angles on a campaign, and it will give you fifty, some flat, some strange, most missing the mark but maybe a handful worth a second look. That’s not creativity replacing you; that’s the raw material arriving faster than it used to.
What AI can’t do is the part that actually makes an idea land or even the part that sparks an emotional connection to an idea. Knowing which of those fifty angles or the human insight-driven campaign fits this brand, this moment, this journo’s inbox. That judgement comes from having spoken to enough journalists, agency reviews and client meetings to know what actually cuts through versus what just sounds good in a deck. Creativity in PR was never about having ideas that nobody else has thought of (no idea’s a new idea, after all). It’s about recognising the right idea when it turns up, and having the craft to shape it into something a busy journalist wants to run. AI can widen the pool, get resources to you quicker to help spark an idea, but it can’t do the choosing.
Take the Eat Less Move More campaign (thought up by the genius brains of Steve Strickland and Rebecca Holmes), that I briefed, helped develop and led on the delivery. The line itself is simple, four words that anyone could have written down in a minute. But a line isn’t a campaign. The creative heavy lifting was everything that came after it: working out what the line meant in practice, building a content and messaging framework around it, finding the right voice to carry it across formats and channels, and shaping it into something that felt credible coming from a health brand.. That’s the work AI still can’t touch. It might help you land on a version of a thought quicker, but it won’t do the months of thinking that turn four words into a campaign people actually connect with and trust.
Where it still comes down to instinct
None of the above replaces the parts of this job that took me years to learn:
Knowing the idea a journalist will actually run, not just which idea sounds clever in a brainstorm
Reading the room on tone and timing; especially when a story is moving fast, or when a brand needs to say nothing at all
Building the relationship that gets a pitch opened in the first place, which still happens person to person, not through a prompt
Spotting the difference between an idea that’s genuinely sharp and one that’s just risky dressed up as brave
These are all judgment calls. AI has no lived experience of a journalist’s inbox, no memory of how a brand’s last campaign landed (or how hard it was to land it), no instinct for when a “yes and” needs to become a “no, not like this.” That’s still entirely a human job.
Delivery is where the speed really shows
Ideation gets most attention in this conversation, but delivery is where AI has changed my day-to-day work the most.
At RVU, running a three-site Digital PR operation across a large in-house and agency team, the bottleneck was rarely the ideas. It was capacity. AI closes that gap. A tone of voice document or analysis of a huge data pull used to take weeks to deliver. AI reduces that significantly.
Delivery at scale used to mean you make multiple compromises just to get a project across the line. AI means more of both the volume and the quality can now survive the deadline.
None of that removes the need for a human to check and edit the work, apply instinct, creative thinking and problem solving. Every piece that AI has assitsted me and my teams on at Chemist4U still passed through human hands, both editorial and clinical, before it went live, because speed with accuracy checks isn’t an advantage; it’s a liability. The gain isn’t skipping the checks. It’s having more time to do them properly because the production itself takes less time.
The teams getting real value
The comms and PR people I see getting the most out of AI right now aren’t asking it to have ideas for them. They’re using it to generate more raw material, test more angles and move through the unglamourous groundwork faster, so their own time goes on the ideas worth fighting for.
That’s the shift. Not human versus machine but human judgment applied to a much larger set of options in a much shorter time.
Great work still starts with a spark. AI just helps you strike more matches so you can find the one that catches.
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