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| Laura Borgstede |
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has gone mainstream in marketing and PR. As of January 2025, 75% of public relations professionals use GenAI – versus only 28% in March 2023, according to Muck Rack’s State of AI in PR report. AI has become an invaluable tool that helps PR and marketing professionals streamline the behind-the-scenes tasks that eat up hours of the day.
But AI has a dark side too – media and other influencers today complain they are being spammed by AI-generated content that lacks an understanding of the topics they cover.
The key is knowing when to use AI, how to use it, and where and when the human touch is still essential. Below are six strategic ways AI can make your marketing team more effective — without sacrificing quality.
1) Get to Know Your Customers — Faster and More Efficiently
Creating buyer personas or Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) used to take hours of market research and interviews. Now, AI tools such as Perplexity AI and Claude give you insight into your customers faster and more efficiently.
Here’s how it works: Use Perplexity AI and your own customer records to collect demographic and behavioral data — such as age, income, buying habits and geographical location – of your “best” customers. Then share that information with Claude, which will generate detailed buyer personas – and will evolve these personas as you add new information. You can even ask these AI personas questions like:
- “What product features matter most to you?”
- “Why did you choose our brand over others?”
- “Would you buy a new product that does XX?”
This is especially useful for companies that sell to multiple vertical markets (such as healthcare, manufacturing, retail or hospitality) or those expanding into new ones. That’s because Claude can also act as a virtual business partner, helping you explore new markets or new product opportunities. Or if your current sales messages are not working, you can use Claude to retool your content to find messages that resonate with each buyer at each stage in the Buyer’s Journey.
Of course, while Claude is great at testing and refining messaging across customer types and identifying possible areas of business expansion, you should always validate its insights with real-world customer research.
2) Keep Tabs on Competitors and Trends
Creating key messages that differentiate your business should always begin with an in-depth understanding of the competitive landscape. GenAI is invaluable here, as just a few prompts can give you reams of information on your potential competitors. AI can help you generate competitor lists, summarize competitors’ positioning, and uncover overlooked players in your space. But beware: AI sometimes invents (“hallucinates”) competitors, so human participation is a must.
Once your competitor list is complete, use AI to monitor analyst and media coverage as well as track new customer announcements, new product announcements, and a host of other data that will keep you up to date on competitors and your market space.
Tried and true PR strategies such as newsjacking and trendjacking – which involve taking advantage of news or a trend to pitch your story – also become much easier when you use PR-focused AI tools specifically designed to track (and rate) media coverage, news trends and coverage spikes. PR tools such as Grok, which interfaces directly with the X social media app to track trends, can be helpful as well.
3) Research Influencers in Minutes, Not Hours
Before your next media or analyst interview, skip the manual digging through LinkedIn, Google News, and PR intelligence tools. Instead, use GenAI to gather background information on a journalist or analyst in half the time – what they’ve written recently, what topics they follow, and new beats they may have added.
Using AI to research influencers also allows you to personalize your pitches by suggesting a new angle on a story they recently covered. AI can also help you discover new, relevant influencers in emerging or existing markets.
If you are looking for statistics about a particular market area, the go-to tool is Perplexity AI, which is great for pulling market statistics with detailed source links — so you can back up your pitch with credible data (and also validate AI-generated data by checking the sources).
4) Repurpose but Do Not Replace Human Content
Relying on AI to write press releases, pitches, or other content from scratch is risky – especially for marketers in niche industries. The results are often bland, off-brand, or just plain wrong. Influencers and journalists can spot AI-generated content a mile away – and they ignore it all. Creating strategic and compelling content still requires a human at the helm.
This is particularly important in public relations and marketing in the communications and telecom technology industry, where translating complex tech issues into newsworthy content requires a level of understanding that AI is simply not capable of yet.
So instead of using AI to draft content from scratch, use it to repurpose existing content using prompts like:
- “Turn this white paper into five social media posts.”
- “Make this content more inspirational.” (or educational or shorter)
- Convert this press release into bullet points for a PowerPoint.
Once content is created, tools like Gamma can turn it into polished presentations, sales slicks, pitch decks, highly readable PDFs or even custom websites in minutes — perfect for creating marketing materials for prospective client meetings, product launches or social media posts. Of course, a human is always necessary to review AI-edited content to ensure its tone, facts, and branding stay on point.
5) Automate the Admin Work
If you’re new to AI, consider getting started by simply using AI to automate tedious administrative tasks. Tools like ChatGPT and CoPilot can generate meeting transcripts, summarize calls, and identify and assign action items. Just be sure to review the document created by AI before sharing, as AI can miss nuances or assign tasks improperly.
For PR professionals who work with communications and technology clients, reading dense white papers, regulatory filings, and technical documents is part of the job — but understanding them no longer means investing hours poring through long documents. AI can summarize long documents with prompts like:
- “What’s the premise of this paper?”
- “Summarize everything related to private 5G.”
- “List any references to predictive analytics.”
These shortcuts turn tasks that take hours into 10-minute reviews — freeing your team to focus on strategy, not drudgery.
Bonus Tip: Keep Humans in Charge of Content, Connections and Strategy
GenAI might help you breeze through administrative tasks or conduct research faster, but for now, humans are still behind every great PR and marketing program. For example, AI will help you find information to personalize a pitch, but it does not have the skill set needed to turn that research into a message that resonates with a specific influencer.
Any great PR person will tell you that in addition to creating compelling content, the number one way to get your messages heard is by building relationships with influencers, customers and potential partners. AI cannot do that for you. In fact, distributing generic, AI-developed content and pitches does the opposite – it will ruin any credibility and trust you have built.
The bottom line is this: Let AI do the administrative work, but leave the strategic tasks and the storytelling in the hands of humans.
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Laura Borgstede is CEO of Calysto Communications.
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