Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming various industries, and one area that’s been greatly influenced is public relations.
AI, with its capacity to generate lifelike content, is making changes to the way in which PR professionals can produce content.
What is AI?
AI refers to machines that can mimic human intelligence to perform tasks. It was designed to enhance human capabilities, making it a valuable business asset.
According to research by Provoke Media and Sandpiper, an overwhelming 86% of PR professionals globally see AI as an opportunity rather than a risk.
Here are some of the ways that PR professionals can use AI-powered tools to improve day-to-day tasks.
Analytics
AI-powered analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, can help PR professionals to monitor the effectiveness of campaigns. AI algorithms can quickly analyse user data, including social media activity and links from PR generated media coverage, to provide personalised content and recommendations. This level of personalisation helps PR professionals build stronger connections with their clients’ target audience and provide more tailored advice to their clients on web content.
Crisis Management and Reputation Monitoring
In the age of social media, managing a company’s reputation is more challenging than ever. AI-powered tools can monitor social media platforms in real time and alert PR teams to potential crises. This allows companies to respond quickly and effectively.
Ideas and inspiration
AI can be useful to brainstorm ideas and come to a professional’s aid during writer’s block but should not be used as a substitute for individual creativity. You can write something quickly by giving one of the many AI-powered tools context, such as the audience and tone it should be written in. However, in our experience while it can cut down some research time, AI-generated copy definitely needs the ‘human touch’ to ensure the message is tailored properly for the audience and correctly delivered. Instead, it can be a useful tool to save time and cut down word counts when needed.
Creating press releases and reports
Natural Language Generation (NGL) technology uses AI and machine learning to create and generate language. When it comes to press releases, this can enable professionals to generate personalised content tailored to their target audience. Again, AI doesn’t eliminate the need for good ‘human-generated’ content, however it can either make a start and provide the basis for the finished copy or take a good press release and help tweak it for different vertical markets. Always remembering that while it helps, the human touch to personalise and sense check for the market and the client and give it some individuality is essential. In our experience, the ability to summarise a large amount of information before we write it up has proved the most useful.
Videos
That’s right – AI and machine learning can now create videos.
In Text-to-Video, AI, images and clips are matched with any text that you paste, creating a video based on stock footage and text overlays.
There are also some online tools that use AI to help you find the most engaging parts of your video and create highlight clips for social media.
Ethics considerations
While the impact of AI on PR can be beneficial, there are ethical considerations and challenges to be addressed.
The use of AI in public relations raises concerns about privacy, data security, and potential bias in decision-making algorithms.
The Future of AI in PR
As advancements in AI technology continue to grow, the PR industry will undoubtedly feel its impact.
Despite the positives that AI brings to the industry, it can’t be denied that a human touch is needed in public relations. Human capabilities are crucial for truly individual and creative content and for success in building and maintaining meaningful relationships with the media and clients.
DTP tools in the early nineties lead to a lot of staid, similar and basic designs when people thought they didn’t need designers. What they were good for were reducing design time for designers and enabling some of the more mundane layout tasks to be done by anyone. AI-generated content is similar. It may speed up the process on occasion, but it is not a substitute for a good writer.
Maintaining the balance between leveraging AI’s capabilities, ensuring creativity is maintained and maintaining ethical practices will be crucial for the future of PR.
