What AI can (and can’t) do in digital PR

There are two conversations happening about AI in digital PR right now, and both of them are slightly missing the point. One treats it as a threat: the thing that’s going to replace PR teams, devalue editorial coverage, and make everything worse. The other treats it as a silver bullet: the thing that finally makes PR scalable, measurable, and efficient at a level that wasn’t possible before.

The reality is considerably less dramatic in both directions. AI is a genuinely useful set of tools for certain parts of the digital PR process. It’s also not capable of doing the parts that actually determine whether a campaign succeeds or fails. Understanding the difference is what separates the teams using it well from the ones either ignoring it or over-relying on it.

What AI is genuinely useful for

Research and trend identification

Pulling together background research, identifying relevant journalists and publications, spotting trending topics and search patterns, summarising large volumes of existing data – AI tools handle all of this faster than any human can, and with reasonable accuracy. For the research phase of a campaign, they’re a significant time saver.

The caveat is that faster research is only valuable if it’s feeding into better ideas. AI can tell you what people are searching for and what publications are covering in a given space. It can’t tell you which of those trends is worth building a campaign around, or which angle is genuinely interesting versus superficially relevant.

Drafting and structuring

First drafts of press releases, pitches, and supporting content are something AI tools can produce quickly and competently. Not publish-ready, in most cases – but a solid structural starting point that a good writer can shape and improve is often more useful than a blank page.

This is probably where AI saves PR teams the most time in practice. The structural and editorial work that turns a first draft into something worth sending is still a human job. The mechanical act of producing a first draft doesn’t need to be.

Ideation and brainstorming

AI is useful for generating volume – lots of potential angles, lots of possible hooks, lots of variations on a theme. It’s a reasonable brainstorming partner when the brief is clear. It is not a replacement for the kind of creative judgment that knows which of those ideas is actually good and which are technically plausible but not worth pursuing. That distinction is entirely a human call.

Monitoring and reporting

Tracking coverage, pulling together performance data, identifying mentions across publications and platforms – AI-assisted monitoring tools are more comprehensive and less labour-intensive than manual alternatives. The analysis of what that data means, and what it implies for the next campaign, is still a human task.

What AI can’t do

Build relationships with journalists

This is the most significant limitation, and it’s a fundamental one. Digital PR runs on relationships: with journalists, editors, and producers who have learned to trust a particular source or agency over time. That trust is built through consistent, reliable, genuinely useful contact over months and years. It cannot be replicated by an AI tool, and it cannot be shortcut by sending more emails faster.

The brands and agencies with the best media relationships get coverage that others don’t, in publications that aren’t accessible through pure outreach volume. AI makes outreach more efficient. It doesn’t make relationships stronger.

Generate original insight

AI can synthesise existing information well. It cannot produce original insight, proprietary data, or a genuine point of view that didn’t exist in its training data. The things that make a digital PR campaign worth covering – a surprising research finding, a credible expert perspective, a genuinely new angle on a well-worn topic – all require human input that AI cannot substitute.

This is actually the argument for investing more in original research and genuine thought leadership in an AI-saturated world, not less. When everyone has access to the same AI tools for content production, the content that stands out is the content that has something to say that those tools couldn’t have generated.

Make editorial judgements

Knowing what a good story is, understanding why a particular journalist will or won’t be interested in a specific angle, recognising when a campaign idea is genuinely interesting versus superficially clever – these are editorial judgements built on experience, taste, and a deep understanding of how media works. AI doesn’t have any of those things. It can pattern-match against what has worked before, but that’s a very different capability, and it’s not reliable enough to build a campaign strategy on.

Handle nuance and reputation risk

Any campaign that involves sensitive subjects, brand reputation considerations, or content that needs careful handling requires human judgement at every stage. AI tools are not equipped to identify when a campaign idea that looks fine on the surface has the potential to land badly in context, or to navigate the kind of nuanced stakeholder conversations that come with those situations.

How to actually use it

The practical answer is to use AI tools to do the things that don’t require human judgement – the research, the first drafts, the monitoring, the administrative work – and to spend the time saved on the things that do. Building better relationships with journalists. Developing more original and more genuinely interesting campaign ideas. Doing the strategic and creative work that determines whether a campaign lands.

The teams that are getting this right aren’t using AI to replace the human parts of digital PR. They’re using it to remove enough of the mechanical work that the human parts get more time and attention. That’s a meaningful efficiency gain, but it only pays off if the time saved actually goes into the work that matters.

AI will continue to get better, and the list of things it can do competently will grow. The list of things that require genuine human judgement, creative thinking, and relationship capital is going to remain largely intact. The digital PR agencies that understand where that line sits will keep delivering results that the tool-dependent ones can’t.

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