Whether you are an early adopter or prefer the human touch, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is here to stay and is transforming the landscape of the business world, including Public Relations (PR) and marketing operations. While embracing AI into your daily working practices opens up new potential for businesses to optimise strategies, enhance customer experiences and increase efficiency, it’s important for business leaders to understand the challenges and risks associated with its use, as much as the opportunities and benefits.
Opportunities of AI in PR and Marketing
Many PR and marketing professionals would like to see AI used to automate time-consuming tasks like social media scheduling, email marketing and reporting. This could create more time to be spent on creative strategies, client engagement and high-level planning, which would have the outcome of deepening engagement and the success of campaigns.
In PR, AI could be used to analyse public sentiment, media coverage and social trends, offering real-time insights to inform strategies. Similarly, in marketing, AI can predict consumer behaviour, optimise advertising campaigns and even adjust pricing dynamically when deployed in e-commerce.
With the addition of AI, social listening tools could be used to detect and highlight early signs of negative sentiment or potential crises on social media and online platforms, allowing teams to respond quickly. This proactive approach can help protect a brand’s reputation and mitigate PR disasters before they escalate.
Challenges of AI in PR and Marketing
While AI can analyse data quickly, the accuracy of insights depends on the quality of the data it processes. Professionals need to ensure that the data collected is reliable, diverse and representative. Inconsistent or biased data can lead to flawed strategies and outcomes.
AI can lack the creativity and intuition that humans bring to PR and marketing. Creating compelling narratives, building emotional connections with audiences, and handling sensitive situations like engaging with members of the press still requires the human touch. Often the results of AI trying to assimilate human creativity has the outcome of identifying its lack of humanity and understanding, which if used commercially can have a negative impact on engagement rates and brand perception.
AI can quickly create images and content, the outcome of its efforts often shows obvious signs of machine intervention, with complex images being constructed with incoherent composition, and written content containing “hallucinations” as the technology strives to please its user by improvising where data is unknown. Releasing such content into the commercial world could erode brand trust, and in the worst case could result in legal cases where AI hallucinations are publicised as facts.
There are ethical concerns, particularly around privacy, data collection and transparency. Consumers are increasingly aware of how their data is used, and businesses must be cautious to comply with regulations like GDPR. Misuse of data or AI can lead to reputational damage and loss of trust.
Risks of AI in PR and Marketing
Over-reliance on AI automation can lead to impersonal interactions with customers and stakeholders. Within crisis situations and press interactions, AI can backfire, as it lacks the empathy and nuance required in sensitive situations.
As AI increases its handling of routine tasks, certain roles may become obsolete. However, this also creates opportunities for professionals to upskill and focus on more strategic, creative work and interesting tasks.
AI can unintentionally perpetuate bias if it is trained on biased data. This can be particularly harmful in PR and marketing, where inclusivity and fairness are critical. If left unchecked, biased AI can damage brand reputation, and alienate target audiences.
Many AI search platforms operate in open networks posing significant risks when processing sensitive customer and corporate information. These open systems may lack the necessary controls to ensure data privacy and confidentiality. This increases the potential for unauthorised access or misuse of information. To mitigate these risks, businesses must carefully assess where and how AI processes sensitive data, to ensure compliance with data protection laws.
Conclusion
Like many organisations, we have started to explore where we can adopt AI to improve our operations and we have engaged with specialist training to understand how to gain the best from the various platforms available to us. So far, we have found AI to be useful for tasks like analysing large data sets to help identify key trends, which might not be obvious in a manual analysis process, and it certainly saves time. However, we have also found that we are much better at understanding and identifying where our team’s intervention and our personal relationships have influenced the success or learnings within campaigns.
We have tested GPTs with more creative tasks such as brainstorming campaign ideas, and writing content and we have found the lack of humanity and understanding of brand history in the creative style of GPTs shines through with obvious language patterns which can be void of the nuances and creativity found in that of a human voice.
Ideally, we would hope to see developments in areas that will support efficient reporting, capturing an accurate view of press coverage and analysis, leaving time for our team to focus on creative activities which are often the tasks which bring the most enjoyment to our roles and add the most value for clients.
On reflection, while there is a growing benefit to using AI in PR and marketing, presently the technology isn’t fully developed in all the areas we want, leaving many processes still better off in the safe hands of human management! In the long term, there is no doubt the integration of AI into PR and marketing will offer numerous opportunities for increased efficiency, personalised customer experiences and data-driven strategies. However, challenges such as data quality, ethical considerations and the complexity of AI implementation must be addressed.