There’s no way to push back the tide of AI, but it is possible – and vital – to ride the waves and not simply sink below the surf.
AI is changing the world of PR and comms forever, just as it is shaping most other industries. Technology enables humans to achieve great things, but it also now has so much autonomy that it threatens our very existence.
That 70% of Gen Z use ChatGPT instead of conventional search tools is just one indicator of the shift. Elsewhere, PR ranks highly on lists of professionals most impacted by the AI revolution. The sharp drop in WPP’s share price (63% in the past 12 months) has led to suggestions of the impending death of the agency.
Yet, Jennifer Sanchis, insights consultant at CARMA, the media intelligence agency, is taking a more optimistic view. “The future of PR research and PR intelligence can be saved not through AI but through human consultancy,” she said in a keynote speech at the recent PRWeek Measurement Conference. “It’s the ability to tell stories that instil trust and the ability to deliver services that ultimately won’t be replicated by machines.”
While AI models can increasingly exhibit human traits such as compassion, humour and emotional intelligence, there is still plenty that they can’t do. Sanchis cited examples such as Deloitte being fined by the Australian Government for using AI in an intelligence report that contained a number of classic AI ‘hallucinations’. Bloomberg has used the term ‘work slop’, meaning low-quality work that erodes trust and ultimately adds to workloads and cost for organisations.
According to the ICCO World PR report for 2024-25, the need for strategic consultancy has increased year on year and ranks highly as a growth area.
Here are Sanchis’ seven key attributes to navigate an AI world:
- Strategic thinking: AI can spit out plenty of data, but it’s vital to ask the right questions in the first place. So the consultants must be able to understand client briefs, client objectives and the challenges that must be overcome to develop these objectives.
- Interdisciplinarity: “The most underrated skill in PR intelligence right now is not storytelling or data, it’s adaptability,” said Sanchis. “You need to be a Swiss army knife, doing a bit of everything.” PR and comms has exploded into multiple different areas. For example, corporate affairs practitioners now have to be across geopolitical shifts, ethics and reputation. “If we want to safeguard the profession, we’re going to have to be curious about becoming more cross-functional,” added Sanchis.
- Creativity: The volume of content on the internet is now starting to plateau, which affects the amount of training data available to LLMs. “What makes us human is our ability to learn and grow indefinitely, but these machines are limited,” explained Sanchis.
- Authenticity: Sanchis believes that the ability to “sell experiences” and have a “personal brand” will be increasingly important. “We’re going to have to be authentic, show proof of humanity, tangible evidence of our presence, coupled with our creative outcomes that can’t be replicated by machines,” said Sanchis.
- Relational intelligence: Humans are the ones who can bring people together, connect them, whether that’s interacting with clients or within organisations. “I’ve seen time and time again my clients not being able to get hold of the marketing data because the CCO doesn’t really talk to the CMO,” said Sanchis. “AI is not going to help with that – you need to have that human third party in the room to facilitate these interactions.”
- Critical thinking: “Don’t take the answers that AI throws up for granted,” urged Sanchis. Everything must be scrutinised and fact-checked for biases of all kinds, whether they be commercial, corporate, political, cultural or ideological.
- Tech story-telling: According to Sanchis, we need to be more like Deloitte’s Lara Sophie Bothur, who has become a corporate influencer by promoting and unpicking complex technology stories. “Whether we like it or not,” explained Sanchis, “we’re going to have to become tech ambassadors, effectively translating these stories that people trust.”
This article was originally published on PRWeek UK.
