“We’re three years into this AI explosion in the communications industry,” Cayce Myers, Ph.D., LL.M., J.D., APR, said. “What should we expect next year, or over the next five years, and how do we as the PR industry prepare for those changes?”
Myers, professor of public relations and director of graduate studies at Virginia Tech’s School of Communication, moderated the Nov. 7 session “Reimagining PR and Communications in the Age of AI,” during PRSA’s FutureCon summit.
Panelist Amanda Carl Pratt is director of communications at Google DeepMind, the company’s AI research lab. “We’re going to move from chatbot Q&As to [AI] agents who can help us complete complex tasks,” she said. “We need to prepare to manage AI systems that not only draft the plan for us, but also potentially help us execute part of that plan.”
Carl Pratt said she encourages communications executives “to start building AI-first skills now.” When hiring future leaders, “look for something that I like to call ‘AQ,’ the adaptability quotient,” she said.
Panelist Natan Edelsburg is chief partnerships officer at PR software company Muck Rack.
This year, “enterprises embraced all these [AI] tools in safe and secure ways,” he said. At the same time, consumers’ search patterns are starting to change. “Whether you’re using Google or Gemini or other models, people want answer-first search engines,” Edelsburg said. “That massive shift from traditional search, where you get a list of links, to LLM [large-language model] answer engines has created a new industry of generative-engine optimization, or GEO.”
According to Muck Rack’s research, “earned media, what we do as PR professionals, is being cited 95% of the time across the major [AI] models,” Edelsburg said. “This is a big moment for the PR industry. We’re going to influence what information the robots are reading and using.”
Avoid being blindsided.
As Myers pointed out, many PR professionals now use AI to generate content and predict trends. He asked what communicators are not discussing when it comes to AI, but should be, to avoid being blindsided in the near future.
“We all worry about trusting what comes out of these [AI] models,” Carl Pratt said. “Traditionally, communicators have been seen as storytellers and advisers. I don’t think that’s going away. But I think we also have to become verifiers” of AI content.
As artificial intelligence ascends, PR professionals “are the custodians of organizational truth,” she said. “We have to establish clear provenance for authentic content.”
Carl Pratt said PR professionals can now use AI to model crisis scenarios, analyze stakeholder sentiment and predict narrative trends.
Trust in AI tools has grown over the past two years, Edelsburg said. Accordingly, AI models that cite sources for the answers or content they generate have become more important.
“We’re moving toward a more transparent world of large-language models,” he said.
With AI now embedded in PR work, it may no longer be possible to always disclose its use, Myers said. However, the industry is also experiencing a surge of low-quality “AI work-slop,” which results from communications professionals over-relying on the technology.
Carl Pratt said that while using AI to both conceive and execute ideas will eventually become the norm, she is “not at all concerned” about losing her job to artificial intelligence.
AI hallucinations, or the fictions that it sometimes presents as fact, “underscore why you need senior communications professionals, and why we’re more vital than ever,” she said.
“The more that we use AI, the higher the premium [becomes] on deep subject-matter expertise… to spot the subtle things that a junior staff member might think are right, because AI seems very confident in its answer,” she said. The need for human experience and expertise “underlines why we’re still so valuable to the organization.”
Illustration credit: isma01
