AI in PR: Embracing Opportunities and Addressing Concerns

Adrian McIntyre: 00:00:04

For the past eight years, PR Week and Cision have teamed up to produce a report based on a comprehensive survey of the PR & comms industry. It's a sort of state of the industry, if you will, and it tells a bit about the story behind the people telling the story.

And what are people talking about in 20 25? Well, a lot of things. But as you might imagine, the big one is AI. It's infecting, or affecting, depending on your point of view, how we do the work that we do. And there's a lot of positives, but there's also some concerns. Abbie, what's on your mind?

Abbie Fink: 00:00:40

Yeah, AI. I've heard a lot of my colleagues say that their newest employee is AI. And I'm like, well, we all have one of those on our staff now.

I was actually in a meeting with a client the other day. We were brainstorming. We wanted to name a new program and we were just getting stuck. We couldn't come past certain words. I'm like, well, give me just a second. Let me check in with my teammate, ChatGPT. And all of a sudden the wheels were spinning. We had great ideas and all with a couple correct prompts to get some new ideas.

And I think for a lot of us that are using it, we're using it from a brainstorming perspective. We're using it for research to some extent, we're using it to create content. But an overwhelming amount of conversations around AI are also, "but it scares me a little bit, and I'm afraid that it might take my job."

And so I think, like any technology, this one maybe we've learned some lessons about technology and the role that it can play within our, our businesses and maybe apply some of those learnings to how we're going to use AI and how it's going to be incorporated into really everything we're doing.

But we shouldn't shy away for some of the concerns and worries maybe about what it's doing or what it may do, certainly to those of us in the communications industry, but how it's being used across businesses in general.

Adrian McIntyre: 00:02:17

It certainly seems as if some of the initial exuberance has cooled, while at the same time the large language models keep getting better and better. Many of the tools are just light years ahead of where they were even a year ago.

And as folks begin to upskill, if you will, really learn how to incorporate some of the new technology into their workflow, there's definitely areas where it's been easier to embrace, like the brainstorming that you talked about a second ago. I have this thing, let me just throw it into ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini or whatever your tool of choice is.

But there are some interesting emerging applications that some PR and comms firms are beginning to explore. Not all, by a long shot. But there's a note in here about whether or not a firm has developed their own proprietary tools, which I found quite fascinating. And 37% of the firm said yes, they had.

Of course, that means 63% said no. But we're seeing a trend towards less off-the-shelf, you know, ready-to wear type applications and more bespoke, like, let's create something, let's pull in a developer or get some folks to build us a tool that we can use.

And one of them is something very similar to how I have used a lot of AI, and that is Retrieval Augmented Generation or RAG. In other words, instead of just searching the LLM to come up with something meaningful on its own, you give it a set of documents or data and you say, work with that, not just pulling things out of the air.

And that's certainly a place where there's a lot of analysis, a lot of insight that can, I think be very helpful and a lot less hallucination where it's just making stuff up and saying a lot of nonsense.

Abbie Fink: 00:04:08

You know, HMA Public Relations is part of the Public Relations Global Network, which is a network of independently owned agencies around the world. And our network partner in Washington D.C., Xenophon, has created their own proprietary tool called Précis AI.

And it really was in response to just what you're talking about, that there are plenty of quality programs that are accessible and free for beginners. And obviously you pay if you want a little bit more in depth and more resources. But they were finding that they really wanted to create one that honed in on the specific needs of communications professionals in particular. Right. So a lot of these are, anyone can use them, they're there for any level of expertise. But they really wanted to create one that was very specific to the industry.

But my feeling about AI in general, and it can apply really to any of the tools that communications professionals use to do our jobs, is that it is a tool. And to be an effective tool, we need to understand it, we need to recognize its value to what we are doing and embrace it so that it is not an either or hire, you know, use AI or hire a communications professional. It is hire a communications professional that is using AI, right? So we have to kind of embrace this idea that it's here and it's a incredibly powerful tool for us.

You know, I haven't had the question in a while, but in the early days of AI, well, 18 months ago, but in the earlier days of AI, you know, there were a couple conversations with some new business prospects that honestly were asking the question, "can I just do this with AI? Do I have to hire you?" And you know, obviously I'm going to always answer, you need to hire me. And I can say that confidently because no matter how good these tools are, there still has to be a human element that is looking at what is being delivered. Starting with what is being asked, right? And then what is being delivered and creating that personalized approach to it.

I mean, you don't want your marketing strategy to look like everyone else's marketing strategy who plugged into AI a prompt that said write a marketing strategy with six tactics and you know, for deliverables, that's, we'll all end up with the exact same cookie cutter scenario.

So there's benefit in what this is when the human element is there and that those of us that embrace it, understand it, learn to use it correctly, take it as a starting point, as a research tool, as a place to provide analysis, give us another outlook onto something. That's what you're being paid to do, right? That's what your clients are asking you to do. That's what, if you're an in-house team, what your organization is asking you to do.

And this is an opportunity for you to be smarter, work more efficiently, have access to a much larger data set, but nothing will replace the human component of this is. And what I'm finding interesting, we do a lot of work with schools, education environments, and the conversations with curriculum developers are around introducing AI into the classroom and teaching students how to use it -- I'm going to date myself a little bit -- the same way that we learned how to use the Dewey Decimal System. We had to go to the library and go to the card catalog and find a topic, but we couldn't find that topic if we didn't know what we were looking for, right?

We had to understand what we needed and then we could go to that little box and pull it out and find the right card to find the right book on the shelf. Well, this is that in a much quicker, more efficient, technology driven way. But students are learning how to use this to do research and to write their term papers and not to replace their own words, but to guide them and to help them. Well, is that really any different than us looking things up again in an encyclopedia or magazine articles that we went to the shelves to find? The "shelf" now is a well-written prompt into one of these AI programs to help us find that information.

Adrian McIntyre: 00:09:21

And of course, it's putting Oxford, who makes the 3x5 cards, out of business because that was essential. We had to hand copy quotes out of the books and journals that we found and then spread them out all over the dining room table to try to write a high school research paper.

Abbie Fink: 00:09:37

I loved that. I so loved that.

Adrian McIntyre: 00:09:40

One of the things that strikes me about this whole thing is we're going to see some interesting problems emerge that we may not have thought about ahead of time when it was so exciting, when it was so new. But the fact that you can produce so many words with just a few keystrokes and a, you know, short prompt, or the fact that you can use a proprietary tool to generate a strategy like you mentioned, is likely to get us to a point where there's just too many things being output.

It's so easy to make long documents and long reports and things of that nature that there's an additional skill which is drilling down to find what really matters. I mean, you can get carried away in a ChatGPT thread and however many thousands of words later, you forget which part of what you were doing is going to be the most important.

We tend to think of generative AI as giving us more. But of course it's also important to think about having it give us less. Find the nugget, reduce the complex document to a three-point summary, et cetera. So it goes both directions, making things longer and making things shorter.

And with the summaries, you know, it's fascinating, I don't know, have you played around at all with NotebookLM? It's a tool that's been developed at Google. It's not their Gemini AI, but it is somewhat adjacent to it. It's a separate project, but basically this was designed with students or writers in mind. And what you do is you create notebooks, essentially folders, and you can dump whatever you want in the folder. So if this was a research paper today, it would be that you put all your sources, you find your journal articles, your links, your MP3 files if you recorded the professor lecturing or you recorded an interview with somebody. You just dump it all in there and then you start to query that folder, and it can summarize things. And it's always citing the specific thing it got out of the folder.

I did a little experiment a couple of weeks ago. I took all the transcripts of speeches I've given, workshops that I've led, podcast interviews I've done where I was the featured guest, and I just dumped it all in a folder. NotebookLM has a feature now where with a push of a button -- and then you wait about five minutes, it has to actually process this -- it will produce a podcast episode with two AI generated voices talking about the stuff in the folder. So I made a podcast of these robots talking about me. It was actually really quite weird. It was really quite unsettling. And they're like, "you know, this Dr. McIntyre guy has some really interesting ideas about the role of storytelling," you know, and it just kind of ...

Abbie Fink: 00:12:22

So it was a big ego boost for you is what it was.

Adrian McIntyre: 00:12:25

No, it wasn't. It was just odd. Because, I mean, what they said was kind of right. But also as I was listening to them talk about what I had fed it, I thought, well, I would actually say that differently. And it kind of spurred my thinking.

Anyway, I don't want to go down that rabbit hole, but the applications are really getting quite diverse. A lot of different ways that you can use these things. Not everybody's feeling good about it, however. You wanted to talk about some of the concerns people have as well. So what's happening there?

Abbie Fink: 00:12:53

So the survey, right, that Cision and PR Week compiled, they talked to 310 communications professionals. And on the topic of AI, there's a fair amount of individuals that are still concerned that it will eliminate the communications jobs. About 28% of the respondents were worried that their job was at risk as a result of AI.

And again, my thinking, I don't say we shouldn't be concerned, but I think the concern needs to be on learning this skill, understanding it and embracing it. And that becomes how you continue to add value to your team, to your organization.

If you are a job seeker, this is going to be a skill set that we are all going to look for is what is your experience with AI? What do you know? How have you used it? What success? What changes would you make, whatever that might be.

There's always the question of budgeting, right? Is AI going to ... because it is available and to some extent there are no costs associated with using it, does that mean our budgets are going to start to shrink? If AI can write the brochure, I can stop ... I don't have to pay you to do that. Well, sure, 26% of people say it's going to impact our budgets.

I'll make a similar argument again that says, well, of course AI can create a brochure for you, and it will create the same brochure for you that it's creating for everyone else. Because there's only so many ways you can say so many things unless you add the human element to it. So, you know, I'm not saying we should not be concerned. We should. Anything that changes how we do what we do is worthy of a conversation.

However, I think where, for me, the takeaway really needs to be is if we say, okay, AI and all of what it does is going to be part of the work, the work that communications professionals are doing. It is going to be in our world, what does that mean for my organization? And how do I, as someone who wants to be successful, someone who wants to lead in my organization, someone who wants to be a responsible and participatory member of my team, how do I look at this and say, what can I learn about it? And bring that to the table? And what information can I share about this powerful tool that makes my colleagues, my clients, my organization smarter because we have access to that?

And we regularly talk that communications professionals need to have a seat at the table. And so if the seat at the table is being replaced by technology, the person sitting next to that technology needs to be the one that can manage what this is. And so don't ignore.

And I certainly don't want to minimize concerns, but I really feel like there is an opportunity to embrace and be the one on the team, be the one that brings forth the power and the value of what this is, and not run away from it, but embrace it in such a way that it becomes an important part of what all of us need to know how to do, because it is not going to be going away.

Adrian McIntyre: 00:16:26

I will just say I could reframe these four concerns as opportunities. Maybe that's what folks were also thinking, because the way the survey worked, these four common concerns were listed, and then people had to say whether or not they shared those concerns. And none of them got more than a third of respondents saying they thought it was a problem.

It's interesting that the top one is "the daunting challenge of communicating to stakeholders the many changes that AI is bringing about to the company or to the brand." Well, that's a communications opportunity. Let's communicate to the people who care about these things exactly how AI is changing some things for the company or for the product or for whatever.

The middle two, "communication jobs will be eliminated" and "communication budgets will shrink" ... I have to say if AI can replace a job or do something cheaper, it should. It should do both of those things. That's my personal point of view.

Now I don't think it should replace the people doing the work, but if you have people doing menial tasks that could be done by an AI, you should have the AI do those things, and you should then pass that cost savings on to the client or find other ways to add value to the engagement.

Gone are the days -- and again, this might be very controversial for some folks and this is my opinion, not the opinion of this show -- but if you are getting comfortable collecting a monthly retainer and assuming that the value is self evident, then you're going to be in trouble no matter what. And if AI is bringing costs down, either find ways to increase the value you add or accept the fact that you have to charge less for what you provide. One man's point of view.

And then the final one, "do comms pros have a seat at the table? Is AI undermining that?" Only 14% of people said they were concerned about that. People are very solidly confident that C-suite executives at their client organizations are relying on their insights and on their knowledge. I think this is all very positive.

Abbie Fink: 00:18:26

Yeah, I don't disagree. And to your point about budget shrinking and showing value, that is a rallying cry and should be for every individual that is servicing an organization and responsible for communications.

The survey does talk about a little bit about measuring the impact of what communications is doing. And this has been and will always be an ongoing conversation that what we do as communications professionals must be tied to the business goals and objectives. And our value proposition is how we impact those business objectives.

And it is not a 14-inch clip book of "look at all the mentions that we've got" unless those mentions drive the business goals. And so, you know, we've long gotten rid of some of the outdated ways of measuring our impact or our success. I should say not even our impact but our success. And to your point, a AI has an opportunity to help us do that. Here's what we set out to do. Here is our intent with this type of information. Did we accomplish this? Where were we? What's the sentiment? What's the share of voice? Some of those other things that are often looked at and with those quite with those types of parameters around it.

You know, while we let AI do these manual types of analysis, we are shifting our time to that strategy and that way of make, you know, impacting your business objectives and your goals. And we now have a tool that allows us to be more efficient in certain areas, freeing up our human time on the strategy.

And again, maybe I've got a bit of rose colored glasses, but I gotta believe that smart communications professionals with this type of open dialogue with their organizations, their clients, their in-house report-ups to CEOs and such have to have these conversations and you know, create the path that the we bring to the table things that a machine cannot bring. But let's let the machines do the things that the humans shouldn't be doing because there's a more efficient way to do it.

And we've seen that over time with other industries. This isn't the first to have something take over a job that was once done by a human. But look, you're right. Looking at the concerns, if you flip them all around, there is a significant amount of opportunity there for us to position ourselves and what this can do and bring this information forward and be the leader in our organization that capitalizes on what AI and its tools can do for us and ultimately what its impact will be on the businesses that we represent.

Adrian McIntyre: 00:21:44

Thanks for listening to this episode of Copper State of Mind. If you enjoyed the conversation, please share it with a colleague who might also find this podcast valuable. It's easy to do, just click the "Share" button in the app you're listening to now to pass it along. You can also follow Copper State of Mind in Apple Podcasts, Spotify or any other podcast app. We publish new episodes every other Friday.

Copper State of Mind is brought to you by HMA Public Relations, the oldest continuously operating PR firm in Arizona. The show is recorded and produced by the team at Speed of Story, a B2B communications firm in Phoenix, and distributed by PHX.fm, the leading independent B2B podcast network in Arizona.

For all of us here at Speed of Story and PHX.fm, I'm Adrian McIntyre. Thanks for listening and for sharing the show with others if you choose to do so. We hope you'll join us again for another episode of Copper State of Mind.