On the second Monday of every month, PRSA offers “AI Pulse,” a briefing hosted by Ray Day, APR, PRSA’s 2026 immediate past chair, that provides timely insights into the latest AI trends, tools, and developments. Learn how to stay ahead of an ever-evolving digital landscape here.
When it comes to using AI in public relations, “Some of the solutions that I am most excited about are things that we couldn’t otherwise do, that fuel insights and get us to market faster with more smarts behind us,” said Heidi Modarelli-Frank, APR.
One way to gain insights from AI is through “synthetic research,” said Modarelli-Frank, chief relationship officer at Marcus Thomas, a Cleveland PR and advertising agency.
Synthetic research lets an organization take existing primary research—preferably its own—and ask AI to act like a virtual focus group trained on that data, so the technology can glean insights and fill in gaps.
Modarelli-Frank and her colleague Pato Sapir joined “AI Pulse,” PRSA’s monthly livestream that helps members stay informed about how artificial intelligence is changing the PR profession, on Oct. 12.
Sapir, senior vice president of product information at Marcus Thomas, has spent 20 years developing software.
“What we’re trying to solve day-to-day with our customers and within Marcus Thomas is [to determine] when AI is a proper use-case, and how to do it in a responsible and sustainable way,” he said. “There are a lot of intricate nuances to take into account.”
Sapir and Modarelli-Frank will speak during a noon breakout session at PRSA’s ICON 2026 on Oct. 19 in Orlando, Fla.
Understanding AI agents
Host Ray Day, APR, vice chair of Stagwell, executive chair of Allison Worldwide, and PRSA’s 2026 immediate past chair, asked how PR professionals can integrate artificial intelligence into their work and make the technology a strategic partner, rather than an afterthought.
Unlike generative AI such as ChatGPT, which generates text, images, and video in response to user prompts, agentic AI can plan, make decisions, and take action on its own, with little or no human involvement. By entering specific prompts into tools such as Microsoft’s Copilot, users can create custom-made AI agents to perform tasks.
In a Muck Rack survey earlier this year, “The overwhelming majority — 90% of PR pros — said they were not comfortable allowing an AI agent to take actions on their behalf without human review,” Modarelli-Frank said.
Her firm uses AI agents for research, including something they call “cultural pulse.”
“Imagine you’re working on behalf of a brand, doing social media, and you want to be on-trend,” she said. “There are always trends that evolve. Every brand jumps on it, and the later you jump on it, the more irrelevant you seem. How can you make sure you’re on the front end of those trends?”
The agency’s cultural-pulse AI agent looks at “social signals, however you define them, for specific patterns that are happening, TikTok trends,” and the like, she said. “You’re trying to identify those trends as they’re just starting to bubble up … certain types of terms being used more often.”
Similarly, an AI agent can watch for crisis trends.
As PR professionals, “We all do social media monitoring, editorial monitoring, but being able to look at patterns to see that something is bubbling up faster than you think” or raising a red flag is another way to use an AI agent, Modarelli-Frank said.
One of her younger team members created a “precision-pitch tool” that helps the firm’s media relations professionals reach beyond their established circles of press contacts when needed.
“The tool will assess, 12, 20 potential pitch targets with information that I give it,” Modarelli-Frank said. “I’ve written the pitch, it’s my study or whatever I’m trying to promote, and it will give me the best target or targets for that pitch.”
Using agentic AI this way lets communicators “do a whole heck of a lot of research in a very limited amount of time, in ways that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to do realistically,” she said.
Day asked where professional communicators are stumbling when trying to use AI as a strategic tool. Modarelli-Frank said problems arise when people don’t write smart prompts.
“You have to make sure that you are moving past the superficial answers,” she said. “If you’re not probing and asking the right kinds of questions, or setting limitations, or going deep enough, then the information you get served up is not going to be as helpful or relevant to you.”
Illustration credit: Looker_Studio
