What AI is actually good for in PR

Nearly every industry is grappling with the question of artificial intelligence, or AI. How to implement it? Can it be trusted? Will it result in savings? Will it cause job losses?

The corporate communications and PR industry is no exception, with some key questions about the implications of AI within the profession. Yet, ask communications professionals what they think about AI and the first thing that usually comes to mind is using it to generate press releases and social media copy. Moreover, you'll end up with a lively debate and opinions on the matter tend to be split between those who espouse the benefits of drafting, editing and proofreading content more quickly, versus those who oppose AI on the grounds of quality, reliability and what has become known as AI slop.

Personally, I feel corporate and media writing on the internet was already abysmal well before generative AI arrived. This is primarily because online prose in recent years has first and foremost been geared toward satisfying SEO and search algorithms rather than offering readers quality content. AI cannot do any worse than text stuffed with unnecessary keywords and countless subheadings engineered for click-through.

However, that doesn't make the copywriting debate pointless. AI certainly has a role to play when it comes to content generation. In fact, it is already widely used. A 2026 survey by Muck Rack of 564 PR professionals found that generative AI use has plateaued at 76%, a level largely unchanged from the year before. This suggests adoption has largely stabilized, with those professionals in favor of using AI already doing so, while those who are dead set against it will be unlikely to change their position at this point.

Among those already using AI, 82% of the Muck Rack survey respondents say it has improved the quality of their work, while 93% say it's made them faster. The heaviest use is exactly where you'd expect, namely editing and refinement (86%), research (76%), writing and drafting (74%).

But treating that as the whole story misses where the real advantage sits. AI's usefulness was never really about content. It's about handling a lot of unstructured information at once and finding the pattern inside it.

Many communications functions sit on — or at least they should be gathering — large amounts of data in the form of stakeholder and customer surveys, social media feedback, comments from online reviews, media coverage, website analytics and more. This data is often looked at separately, and, as more and more of it becomes available, it tends to be overwhelming.

Such data and the insights it provides are what a communications plan should actually be built on. But it means someone has to not only digest and consolidate all that information, but also analyze it, spot the patterns, draw the conclusions and feed it into the planning process. That type of work is time-consuming, tedious, and it's also exactly the kind of task where a person, however experienced, starts missing patterns once the data is too large and varied. It also happens to be precisely the kind of work generative AI is built for. AI models can digest years of data and feeds from multiple sources, spotting patterns and trends that might otherwise be missed. Suddenly it's a completely different exercise, and a very different application of generative AI within the communications process.

This is where the PR profession is furthest behind. In the same Muck Rack survey, 68% of PR pros already use AI for strategy and planning — a healthy number — but only 25% say it's where they're actually saving time, well below the 59% who point to time savings for editing. This suggests people have started using AI for planning, but they're not yet getting much out of it.

Research published by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in March 2026 confirms there is a gap when it comes to adopting AI within corporate affairs and communications functions. Surveying more than 200 senior communications and corporate affairs leaders, BCG found that the function ranks among the top two areas within enterprises for potential AI-driven productivity gains, particularly across critical tasks and processes, where improvements may reach roughly one-third or more. Nevertheless, 68% of the Chief Communications Officers surveyed describe their own function as an AI laggard. More than 70% say they haven't captured even the basic task-level gains that would be a precondition for broader AI usage. Investment is following that caution, with over 60% planning to commit less than a tenth of their functional budget to AI. This comes despite nearly 75% of the BCG survey respondents believing in AI's potential.

There are many areas beyond content generation where AI can play a role within corporate communications and corporate affairs: tracking reputation and sentiment, warning of potential crises, stakeholder segmentation and engagement, and message testing, among others. But for this to happen, communications functions must first take a step back and review how they can bring their data and planning processes into a single, smooth workflow that can be connected to AI.

The lesson is simple. Communications functions that get the most from AI won't be the ones producing the most content — they'll be the ones using it to process large volumes of information to detect patterns and trends, then relying on experienced people to judge what those patterns mean and decide what to do next. AI can carry more of the workload. For now, it can't carry the accountability — and that's the harder thing to hand over.

A note on process: this piece drew on AI for research synthesis and early drafting, working through several rounds of edits before I finalised the argument and the copy myself. Given the subject, that seemed worth being specific about.

Fares Ghneim
Stratetic Communications & Corporate Affairs

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