How you can use AI in PR responsibly without harming your brand credibility
Last week, I wrote about why PR is now essential for AI discoverability. If you read the article, you’ll have discovered how and why earned media creates the right signals that large language models (LLMs) rely on to understand and recommend your brand.
Hopefully, you have also started following the four-week plan to break down the steps to improve your AI overview mentions.
But I believe that if you are serious about creating an AI PR strategy, you need to be clear on how to use AI safely within your PR process, without risking journalists’ trust, accuracy, or your brand voice.
While AI can absolutely support an AI PR strategy and day-to-day AI public relations tasks, it can also cause serious damage if used mindlessly. And with many UK outlets (quite rightly) introducing no-AI policies, you need to be aware of this.
That’s why I want to help you understand where you can use AI in PR to streamline your workload and where you need to rely on human intervention and oversight.
Responsible AI use matters in PR campaigns.
As I’ve always said, the one thing that’s unique to every brand is its reputation. It should be the thing that you nurture and protect above everything else, which is why you need to be careful in how you use AI in PR activities.
AI-powered tools now play a huge role in how your customers search for information, summarising key points. As I explained last week, LLMs are constantly pulling data from trusted online sources, often combining press coverage, owned content and expert commentary into a single answer.
But inside the PR workflow itself, it’s a different picture.
It’s about recognising the changing needs of journalists.
Today’s news outlets are very different. Publications have fewer journalists than ever before, and many rely on AI to write articles and share information.
This means that, as PR professionals, we now have an active duty to ensure we use our comms strategies to share open, honest, and truthful communications, especially in the never-ending fight against misinformation.
You might be tempted to use generative AI tools to write your PR content. But you need to understand that many UK editors have active policies that reject AI-generated bylines, images, and quotes.
In fact, the Press Gazette have begun naming and shaming those agencies who are pushing ‘fake’ experts to the press for media commentary.
That’s why I always ensure that every media response I send to journalists is accompanied by a detailed biography of the commentator, outlining who they are, their professional experience, their areas of expertise, and their contact details (including LinkedIn profiles). That way, the journalist has their due diligence taken care of for them from the outset.
This isn’t about being anti-technology, it’s about protecting accuracy, trust and the integrity of reporting.
We all know that AI poses real risks, so we need to prepare for them.
Even the best models can hallucinate sources, invent statistics, misinterpret data and blend similar companies or product features. It can even manufacture journalist names or email addresses.
So, your goal shouldn’t be to use “AI in PR at all times”. It’s about recognising how you can use AI for PR with clear boundaries in place.
One clear point to remember before you continue reading: you should NEVER upload confidential client information to a public LLM. Make sure you align with your internal workplace policies on AI, as it could put you at risk of data breaches, GDPR violations, or other reputational risks.
Artificial Intelligence can add value to your PR campaigns if used safely
I want to be clear. I’m not anti-AI at all. In fact, there are many ways in which I find it hugely valuable, and a massive timesaver.
It can be beneficial for ideation and early-stage thinking when used in the following ways.
- Brainstorming PR angles
- Reframing your story for industry or local media
- Translating a technical feature into a “problem–solution” narrative
- Checking whether an angle aligns with what journalists usually cover
- Checking that you haven’t made any assumptions
- Clarifying complex topics into easier understandings
This is where AI for PR is beneficial as both a creative and analytical partner. But it won’t do the job for you. It works for me because I have 20 years of experience. I know what I’m trying to achieve and how to do it. I know what works and what the press wants to know, which means I can spot those hallucinations and mistakes that it will inevitably make along the way.
Can you use AI in PR for clarity and positioning checks?
As I mentioned, you shouldn’t use your generative AI to write your press release for you. A journalist will spot it a mile away because they all sound the same and often fail to tell the genuine newsworthy angle.
But where AI tools like CoPilot can help is by checking that you are clear in your thoughts.
- Have you explained a complex topic well?
- Have you made any inadvertent assumptions that the reader already knows who your brand is and what you do?
- Is your angle newsworthy enough, or could it be improved further?
- Is your story relevant to a reporter covering this area?
- If you’re responding to a specific media enquiry, has your response answered the question?
This is where your AI tool can be used as a sounding board, not a ghostwriter, because you can use that feedback for further editing and refinement.
AI can help with your media lists, but you need to verify the information manually.
If I have a particular press release to send out, I’ll rely on my own press contacts and use tools like Veulio to build a strong list. But sometimes that data can be out of date, or it might be overly restrictive in what I’ve selected as my search terms.
AI can help uncover adjacent trade outlets, niche publications you may have missed, or give details of journalists covering related themes.
But every AI-suggested contact must always be checked manually.
One reason building a media list takes so long is that once I’ve generated my list of potential outlets, I always want to review each outlet manually to see if it’s right for my story. I’m looking for the name of the right reporter (not just the generic contact address), and I want to know which section a story would logically fit into and whether they’ve published anything similar recently.
I will always do this as a manual task, because I believe it’s that attention to detail and verification that is essential for sending the right story to the right people, not just ‘send to all’
Don’t be afraid to use AI for research summarisation
A lot of PR work is always rooted in research. It’s about reading the landscape in your sector and understanding your customers’ problems, challenges, wants, and needs.
AI is useful for skimming industry reports, analyst commentary and market conversations. It helps you quickly improve your knowledge and understanding of an area, and you can use that information to identify potential opportunities for article pitches or proactive outreach.
But we all know that AI will hallucinate information.
AI is incredibly powerful for speeding up research, but it’s also notorious for fabricating information in ways that sound convincing at first glance. It will confidently invent statistics, produce plausible-sounding but completely fictitious reports, and misattribute quotes to the wrong sources, all issues I’ve seen repeatedly when sense-checking AI-generated summaries.
It can also misrepresent academic papers by overstating findings or merging similar‑but‑distinct datasets into a single narrative that was never present in the source material. In some cases, it even invents dates, titles or publication details that don’t exist. This is exactly why, although I use AI to accelerate my research process, I refuse to trust any output without returning to the original material for verification. The tool is helpful for scanning, framing, and quickly exploring an issue, but the responsibility for accuracy remains with humans.
AI is also helpful for PR evaluations, especially tracking coverage analysis and measurement.
AI can help you summarise themes in recent coverage. It can track sentiment patterns and competitor mentions. It can tell you whether you are experiencing any seasonal uplift in coverage, or whether there are gaps where your competitors are taking advantage.
These are all useful insights, but they rely on raw data. You always need to retain a human interpretation of whether your PR activity is genuinely changing your brand reputation.
It’s about recognising that AI is useful for supporting measurement, not for concluding. That’s because humans can interpret meaning, understand nuance, summarise business outcomes, and draw strategic insights.
AI should make you a better PR, not a faster copy-paster
Hopefully, now you’ve got a stronger idea of how your small business can use AI to improve your PR activities. It’s about using the tools that you have at your disposal to help you achieve more, even when you’re on a tight budget.
It’s been an absolute game-changer in helping me work better.
But it’s only worked because it’s built on my processes, which prioritise human oversight in everything. I recognise that if you’re trying to juggle your PR activities by yourself, you might not have the same knowledge I do, so here’s a quick recap of when you can use AI to help you, and when you need to steer clear.
Responsible vs Irresponsible AI Use in PR
Responsible uses of AI
- Brainstorming angles
- Checking clarity
- Draft tightening (with human edit)
- Coverage summarisation
- Finding suggested outlets for human review
Irresponsible uses of AI
- AI-written byline pieces
- AI-generated quotes
- AI-generated images
- Sending unedited AI copy to journalists
- Automated mass pitching
- Factually unverified stats or claims
Used responsibly, AI can act as a brilliant assistant because it’s fast, tireless, and genuinely helpful. But it cannot replace judgment, narrative skill, ethical decision-making, or journalistic understanding.
Artificial Intelligence and PR: What you need to know
If you’re an SME in Ipswich, and you’re struggling with time and budget, then the best advice I can share is to remember this four-step process.
- AI is for thinking.
- Humans are for writing (if you struggle to write, I find using the Dictaphone tool and ‘talking to the computer’ can help hugely)
- AI is for refining what you’ve written and helping you to rewrite and edit.
- Humans are for accuracy, relationships and trust.
If you follow this process, you’ll retain your brand credibility, and you’ll remain in control of your external messaging.
Further reading
If you found this article helpful, why not head over to these blogs?