The rise and evolution of AI frequently dominated the headlines in 2025 and has continued to be a hot topic at the start of 2026. It’s already infiltrated many aspects of our everyday lives, from virtual assistants and GPS applications to online shopping and even our streaming services.
But how is it working in the PR industry, and what changes have we already seen, and can expect to see?
Media monitoring services
One way that AI has been present in PR for quite some time is in our media monitoring applications, helping us to track brand mentions across the digital space with alert systems in place to notify us straight away. A very helpful tool that ensures our fingers are on the pulse for our clients.
Online meetings and speech-to-text applications
Long gone are the days when we would have to manually type out our meeting notes or transcribe an important interview. Thanks to AI in Microsoft Teams meetings, we’re able to simply end a meeting and have the notes ready to go. Whilst it’s not completely word perfect, this is still one of many time-saving hacks that AI provides us with, enabling our time to be better spent getting the results we need for our clients.
Reporting
At Silver Pear Communications, we’ve overhauled the way we do reports. Goodbye to the extensive and time-consuming Powerpoint presentations and hello to new systems such as Coverage Book, which uses AI-powered features and integrates AI for analysis and insights to provide tangible results for our clients – and helps to prove our worth even further.
AI as a creative partner – not a replacement
The above are great examples of how AI works well in the PR world, but there are elements that we firmly believe it should never infiltrate – and the first is copy. By all means, experiment with AI for headlines, puns or alternative ways to draft a sentence, but we are huge advocates that you cannot replace well written and meaningful copy with tools such as Chat GPT. This human creativity, storytelling and emotion remains an essential part of the PR machine, that AI alone cannot deliver.
Like many rapidly advancing phenomenons, sometimes the bubble could burst – if this became the case for the overuse of AI, it could leave some PR professionals not knowing how to write essential copy. There’s time saving and then there’s cutting corners.
Journalist relationships
We mentioned earlier that AI hit the headlines last year, with several national and regional publications being fooled in using fake stories with what seem to be AI-written releases. More details are in the Press Gazette article here. Now, it would be fair to assume that journalists are being even more cautious about what they are using and from who – they’re searching for a personal connection from PRs that they know they can trust.
This means the relationships PRs have with journalists is more important than ever before, and we’re confident that instead of brands thinking they can do PR themselves with AI-generated press releases, they will in fact be turning to the expertise PR agencies bring, ensuring PR blends seamlessly with marketing and beyond but most importantly that the stories they are telling are authentic and brand building.
In a recent Cision survey, 50% of the respondents stated that AI and automation (adoption, integration, balancing technology with human touch) is in the top three challenges they were facing right now. Yet 48% also said that AI and automation to drive efficiency and insight is the greatest opportunity for their team in 2026. Whilst the rise of AI and automation adds another layer of complexity, it is also creating opportunities.
