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| Katarina Garner |
There’s a question sitting underneath much of the conversation about AI in communications: If anyone can generate content, what actually makes communication valuable?
For years, the public relations industry has treated content creation as both a training ground and an output engine. Junior staff learned by drafting press releases, statements, briefing notes and refining their judgment through repetition and critique. It could often be inefficient, sometimes painful, but ultimately effective. The work itself was the education, an experience enriched by getting colleague feedback and guidance. In fact, it’s the collaborative process of content development that contributes significantly to professional development.
AI disrupts that model completely.
Today, the same early-career stage tasks—drafting, iterating, rephrasing—can be done faster and often at comparable quality by AI. That raises an uncomfortable possibility: if the work that once built foundational skills is automated, where does the next generation of communicators develop judgment about what effective content looks like?
Some argue this is a loss because without the discipline of doing the work from scratch, the craft erodes.
That concern is overstated.
Used properly, and within a collaborative ecosystem of teamwork and quality control that should be no different than it ever was (but certainly more efficient), AI doesn’t eliminate the learning process—it compresses it, and has the potential to make it more professionally enriching. The iteration that once took days can now happen in minutes. A communicator can generate multiple angles, test different framings, challenge assumptions, and refine outputs in real time. In that sense, AI can simulate much of the back-and-forth that once happened with a manager’s red pen. (Still, everyone needs a non-AI editor!)
But editing with AI can work if the writer knows what to question, and managers know how and when to engage in the process. That dynamic—who asks the right questions, who knows when to push back on an AI output—will define the long-term value of public relations professionals in an AI-augmented industry.
From Content Creation to Content Judgment
The defining change AI introduces is content abundance.
When content becomes effectively infinite, its value can collapse.
This is where much of today’s AI-generated output falls short—produced without anyone asking whether it should exist, whether it says the right thing, or whether it serves the organization’s actual goals.
To be clear, AI can improve its own output when prompted, challenged and iterated on. In skilled hands, it can approximate insightful critique. But it does not initiate that process. It does not know when something is strategically risky, reputationally tone-deaf or directionally wrong. At least not yet.
That distinction matters in strategic communications, and that is what seasoned, battle-tested PR professionals bring to the table—the sobering yet needed reality check.
The Second Audience: AI Systems Themselves
At the same time, communicators are writing for systems that retrieve, rank and cite information.
Data shows that a disproportionate share of AI-generated citations comes from a relatively small group of sources, and that content with more objective, declarative statements is more likely to be referenced.
This introduces a new layer to communications strategy: retrievability. PR professionals are not only advising clients on showcasing credibility through industry commentary in major and trade media. They are also advising clients on how that credibility must be structured and expressed so it can be retrieved and cited by AI platforms and search engines—not just read by humans.
Content has changed its purpose—being well-informed and timely remains necessary, but visibility to both human readers and AI systems has become an equally essential standard.
Specifically, organizations need to understand:
- Whether their narratives are being surfaced or ignored
- How they are being framed across different AI systems
- Which sources are reinforcing—or distorting—their positioning
This is an ongoing process of testing, observing and adjusting content as AI models evolve.
In effect, communicators are now managing reputation, through content, across two environments simultaneously: human perception and machine interpretation.
Why “Human Judgment” Still Matters—and Where It Actually Applies
Understanding the role of human judgment starts with clarifying why we’re even asking AI to do anything at all. The real purpose of AI in communications goes beyond generating and refining answers—it frees professionals to focus on deciding which questions matter in the first place.
Questions are a form of cognitive testing that help decide:
- What issues to engage or ignore
- Identifying where a narrative may create unintended risk
- How it adds value, not just credibility
These are not purely creative decisions. They are strategic ones, shaped by context, experience and accountability.
As content production becomes easier, it accelerates the consequences of poor judgment.
A Shift in What It Means to Be a Strong Communicator
The industry often frames AI as a tool that will either replace or augment communicators. Both framings miss the more fundamental shift: AI is redefining where value sits in the communications process itself.
AI moves the center of gravity away from drafting and toward interrogation; away from volume and toward selectivity; away from mere expression and toward credibility. Achieving that credibility, not just retrievability, is essential to making communications truly valuable.
The most effective communicators will be those who can:
- Interrogate outputs—human or machine-generated
- Build narratives that remain consistent across platforms and prompts
- Ensure that what is said can withstand scrutiny from both people and systems
The fundamentals still matter—clarity, structure, and storytelling. They must be paired with a more explicit understanding of how information is generated, distributed and validated in an AI-mediated environment.
The Real Constraint
If there is one shift that defines this moment, it is this:
Content is no longer scarce, credibility is—and volume alone cannot manufacture it. Credibility is built through consistency, verification and judgment—applied repeatedly, across every piece of information an organization puts into the world.
Here’s what defines effective communications and PR:
Is this true, does it matter, and is it credible? Answering that still requires a human, hopefully an experienced PR professional.
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Katarina Garner is senior director at Montieth & Co.
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