The media industry is seeing a rapid shift as AI tools become more accessible and widely accepted. AI in public relations is becoming more commonplace as busy PR agents seek ways to react faster and appropriately. But how exactly can you use AI in PR?
Right now, it’s a bit of a gray area. AI can help to streamline things like detecting trends and getting ahead of crises. But there are also ethical considerations in using AI for PR. Algorithmic bias, data privacy, and misinformation may impact how a PR team responds to a situation.
Still, the benefits of using AI in public relations often outweigh the risks. Let’s explore AI PR, how they intersect, and how you can use AI in PR safely and ethically.
Contents:
Understanding AI in Public Relations
Benefits of Using AI in Public Relations
Use Cases for AI and PR
Ethical Considerations in AI-Driven PR
How Meltwater Embraces AI in PR
Understanding AI in Public Relations
We define artificial intelligence in public relations as the application of AI technologies to various PR tasks, including audience research, trend analysis, and content creation.
PR is a data-heavy role that relies on analyzing large volumes of data. PR specialists review this data to help companies position themselves in the market, respond to crises, and maintain a desirable image. What a human team of data analysts can do in days, AI can do in minutes.
In addition, AI can help to automate manual tasks to free up human PR professionals. This might include posting social media content, building media lists, creating press releases, or responding to customer comments, for example.
As AI grows in sophistication and function, so will its use cases for public relations.
TIP: Want to learn more about AI-powered PR tools? Check out our free Data-Driven PR Playbook.
Benefits of Using AI in Public Relations
Companies are already exploring AI’s benefits in public relations, and there’s plenty of room for new use cases to make an impact. Currently, AI public relations offers the following advantages.
Real-time media monitoring
AI can be everywhere all at once, which makes it a helpful tool for keeping tabs on your brand and competitors. You can use AI to monitor trends, keywords, and online media in real time and be ready to respond when something shifts.
Companies can use AI to spot potential crises and take action to reduce damage to their reputation. Monitoring public sentiment will help brands protect their image and even find opportunities to improve it.
Improved Audience Targeting
Public relations professionals not only need to be artful in crafting messages; they also need to tailor those messages to the right people.
AI can improve audience targeting by finding hidden commonalities between individuals that might not be obvious on the surface. AI can shine a light on shared interests, behaviors, and actions to help you learn about your audience on a deeper level.
Time and Money Savings
AI can help companies reduce manual effort and perform tasks much faster, and these benefits extend to PR and AI. Faster, more in-depth data review frees up human analysts while providing better insights. Companies can save on labor costs and do more with their existing resources.
Operational Efficiency
PR teams face a myriad of tasks in a given day, but their most important work centers on strategy and optimization. PR automation can handle day-to-day tasks to free up time and let employees focus on more complex work, allowing teams to operate more efficiently and avoid getting bogged down in busy work.
Use Cases for AI and PR
Public relations and AI are already becoming an inseparable combination, and new use cases are likely to emerge over time. Let’s look at some examples of AI public relations to see how AI tools can add value to your strategy.
AI chatbots for customer engagement
AI-powered chatbots can help PR teams communicate important information at scale. Whether there’s a new product launch or you’re fielding media inquiries, adding an AI chatbot to your website will engage visitors while allowing you to keep a consistent brand voice.
Social media automation
AI in marketing can streamline social management to help you stay connected with your audience at all times. Use AI to find the best times to post on each channel, know what type of content resonates with your audience, and even post content on your behalf.
Press releases and other content
Generative AI can create images and text based on natural language prompts. Tools like ChatGPT for PR or Meltwater's own AI PR Assistant can give you first drafts of press releases, blog posts, and other types of content that are ready for you to edit and fact-check.
AI can also come up with headlines, rewrite drafts for different audiences, or create social media posts based off the drafts you create.
TIP: Check out our free Data-Driven PR Toolkit, which includes includes ready-made AI prompts and more resources for PR pros to be more efficient!
Sentiment analysis
Audience sentiments can affect your public image. Whether you’re recovering from a crisis or creating a new campaign, AI can take your audience’s temperature at all times so you’ll know how you’re appealing to them.
Media monitoring
You’ve probably set up Google Alerts for your brand name and related keywords. But this free feature falls short of telling you how people are talking about you (not just where you’re being published online). Your alerts also don’t cover the entire web, so you’re only getting part of the media picture.
AI can step in to fill the gaps by monitoring your brand’s presence online in real time. It can do a better job of cutting through the noise and finding stories and mentions that matter to your company. You can also use AI media relations to find relevant publications and journalists to help you expand your coverage.
Ethical Considerations in AI-Driven PR
Safety and ethics in PR are critical to maintaining trust with your audience. AI as a whole is facing ethical concerns that spill over into the PR world. While these concerns are not unique to public relations, they do need to be taken seriously and mitigated as much as possible.
Generative AI may hallucinate
Generative AI is far from perfect. It uses large amounts of data to “train” on, then can produce responses according to this data. However, AI doesn’t get it right all the time.
When AI receives bad data as part of its training (which, with out-of-the-box tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, can include the entire internet), it will regurgitate this same bad data in its responses, which can render them useless.
AI tools also make up information, a phenomenon called hallucination. AI models want to give you what you’re looking for, so they will often make faulty inferences and create hypothetical examples without telling you that they’re doing it. If you’re using AI to create something with high-stakes consequences (e.g., financial reports or disaster responses), the last thing you want to do is spout falsehoods.
Pro tip: If you’re unsure if your AI model has generated hypothetical information, simply ask it; they will usually tell you and regenerate without it.
Remember that generative AI models aren’t designed to create epic content. They’re really just geared to predict the next word in a sentence until it forms a complete thought. It has no knowledge beyond what it’s been trained on, so it can’t be considered a silver bullet for PR pros.
You might accidentally share top-secret knowledge
Every time you use AI technologies, those technologies are learning from your inputs. This is how they improve over time, which means all the data you feed it could potentially be used in the future.
Take Samsung, for instance. The electronics brand learned about knowledge sharing the hard way when it realized employees leaked sensitive data into ChatGPT.
It’s a tough lesson to learn, but use this example as a warning. You shouldn’t use AI tools for highly sensitive data unless you know for sure the information is staying within your organization’s servers. And even then, companies may need to create their own protocols about what can and can’t be input into AI platforms.
Evaluate responses for bias
AI has the potential to create bias in its responses, especially if it’s trained on data containing bias. While bias might not be intentional, it can certainly cause more problems if those biases go unnoticed before you release any information or content to your audience.
AI is no substitute for human review. PR professionals need to examine every output with a fine-toothed comb, whether text, video, or imagery, to ensure fairness and credibility.
Don’t skip fact-checking
We’ve already covered the fact that AI can hallucinate, but it can also create half-truths or confident-sounding claims that need to be fact-checked.
In PR, the human touch is crucial. Technology should complement human discernment, not replace it. Even if a claim seems obvious, do your due diligence to fact-check every item. Back it up with multiple sources, if possible.
How Meltwater Embraces AI in PR
Using AI for PR is becoming more acceptable, provided you have the right guidelines in place. AI is still very much like the wild west, where there is little settled law and nearly anything is possible. Everything needs to be scrutinized to avoid potential mishaps.
Meltwater leverages AI for PR with its data-driven suite of media tools, including sentiment analysis, audience analysis, social media management, media databases, and our AI-powered press release generator. It’s built for PR and marketing professionals who need access to real-time data and suggestions on how to apply the data to their strategies.
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