How PR Should Approach AI … and How it Shouldn't

Curtis Sparrer

An epiphany struck me during an unusual meeting. I was hosting a Zoom call, not as the Principal of my PR agency, but as the San Francisco Press Club President. In one box, the top reporter from VentureBeat. In another, the head of communications from one of Silicon Valley’s most important AI companies.

Also on the call: his PR person.

As we started making introductions, I felt giddy with anticipation; I was about to hear another PR person introduce herself! And as she did so, I discovered that she led her agency’s center of AI excellence. It was quite a litany of accomplishments.

But the VentureBeat reporter bottom-lined it: “Does that PR ‘Jedi mind trick’ stuff work?” he asked me. “She talked about AI, but did she really know what she was talking about? If you took out ‘AI,’ it could be any other tech she was going on about.”

The epiphany struck me! Cue the trumpets!

If PR merely talks about AI like any other technology, we’re not genuinely credible about it. Going further, if we treat AI like any other technology, we’re cheating ourselves and our clients from truly transforming.

But there’s a challenge.

Tech PR people are inundated with companies promising disruptive tech all the time. That’s what we sell. So, when we’re genuinely confronted with something that can change our lives, our muscle memory is to treat this innovative technology like other offerings we’ve used before. Think SaaS, the cloud, data lakes, etc. They may have changed our lives, but they haven’t changed how we work, think, ideate or perform, from the very tactical to the very strategic.

However, AI has that potential.

This was a eureka moment to seize AI and change how I approached doing PR around it. While I had written pieces on LinkedIn about my experiments, I had not rolled up my metaphorical sleeves enough. I looked to other PR people for inspiration.

Media company Golin impressed me with its efforts to embrace AI in its campaign for Grubhub. The food delivery service offered new moms their first post-delivery meal during August, which is the peak month for births in the U.S. Golin’s PR team members were encouraged to keep an AI diary to chronicle how they used this new technology to improve this PR campaign. For example, one person revealed they used AI to vet influencers over the course of 10 years.

During a PRWeek panel discussion featuring Unilever, Pernod and Samsung, I asked the marketing and PR teams about their favorite AI tools. I jotted down an alphabet of recommendations, which included AppleKart, Blackbird AI, ChatGPT, CoPilot, Gemini and Google Image Search. However, the more the team talked, the more they zeroed in on Google’s NotebookLM. Google claims you can upload a variety of content, from websites to videos, and NotebookLM will “summarize them and make interesting connections between topics.”

I’ll let you in on a trade secret of my own: NotebookLM was transformative in regards to how I approached award entries. NotebookLM ingested all of my agency’s activities from last year and helped me condense our accomplishments into a 320-word digest. From a person-power aspect, that was revolutionary. What had taken me weeks—really, hours—to write was served up in moments.

The only challenge was the writing. It was written in that AI style of prose that’s meandering and passive, which tools like ZeroGPT can identify instantly.

“It’s like AI is going through puberty,” I later complained to Doug Simon, CEO of D S Simon Media, in a webcast interview this past August. “What you get might look polished, but it lacks the depth that human input provides.”

Doug then turned to my client, Tomás Puig, Founder and CEO of Alembic, asking, “Can we trust AI content to be truthful?”

Tomás was the perfect person to answer this question. Companies like Nvidia are trusting Tomás and Alembic to use AI to uncover “never-before-seen insights” with PR and other marketing material that can have demonstrable ROI. The challenge is many AI tools are prone to hallucination, where they extrapolate information that doesn’t exist.

“The term we use in AI and the technical world is ‘extrapolation’—when you try to predict something that you don’t know yet,” Tomás said about AI’s potential to hallucinate. “It doesn’t actually reason and think. When you actually ask it to extrapolate, everything falls to the wayside.”

Tomás’ point about the “wayside” made me realize we needed to better acquaint ourselves with the pratfalls AI posed. As PR pros, we—and every tech communicator—need to do more than simply use AI tools. We need to build them.

Many agencies had already carved out a space for building internal AI tools. So, if our AI offering was going to matter, we would need to do something different.

We noticed that no one was offering an external AI solution surrounding PR. While this would be an industry first, it could’ve also been an industry worst if we didn’t solve AI’s tendency to hallucinate.

After listening to our clients’ most technical explanations on hallucinations, we had a plan of attack: We would limit prompts to strictly PR and marketing questions, while only letting our AI tool source from Bospar’s award entries, case studies and published work.

In September, O’Dwyer’s reported on our new AI offering, Push*E, saying, “Push*E is intended to bridge the gap between PR, CMOs and CEOs by providing tailored, instant answers to urgent questions about PR and marketing.”

So, what should you take away? I asked ChatGPT to summarize my article for PR and marketing professionals, and then I edited it for further clarity:

Don’t treat AI like any other technology. If PR professionals treat AI like SaaS or cloud technology, they miss out on its deeper potential to revolutionize how they work and strategize.

Understand and use AI tools strategically. PR teams should embrace AI tools that enhance efficiency while remaining aware of the limitations of AI-generated content.

Build AI tools tailored to your specific needs. Rather than only relying on generic AI tools, agencies should consider developing AI tools customized to their industries.

Maintain human oversight for quality. While AI can help produce content quickly, human oversight ensures that AI-generated content is polished and meaningful.

Innovate by integrating AI into campaigns. Successful PR teams—like those working on campaigns for Grubhub—used AI to vet influencers and enhance their PR strategies.

And I’ll leave you with one last tip: Always disclose when you use AI!

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Curtis Sparrer is Principal of Bospar.