We have officially solved the problem of creating PR content: feed an AI tool a company announcement, a half-baked op-ed idea, or a rough campaign strategy, and within seconds it will return something that looks remarkably close to the finished article. Sharpening a headline, rewriting a quote, or generating journalist pitches can now be done in the time it once took to draft an opening paragraph.
Muck Rack’s 2026 State of AI in PR research found that 76% of PR professionals now use generative AI at work. Of those surveyed, 93% said it helps them complete projects more quickly, while 82% said it improves the quality of their work.
Yet there is an important distinction between producing PR content and doing effective PR. AI may be making content cheaper, quicker and more accessible, but that does not make doing PR any easier.
Higher volumes, lower quality
Thanks to Generative AI, companies that may previously have relied on PR agencies – and who have little media experience themselves – can now create credible-looking PR material and start pitching themselves.
But producing a press release is not the same as knowing whether something is newsworthy, which journalists will bite, or how it should be positioned. AI can help a company sound like it understands PR, but it cannot provide years of experience understanding how journalists and newsrooms actually operate.
The same issue applies within agencies and in-house teams. AI makes it possible to produce far more content, much faster. Used intelligently, that creates valuable efficiencies. Used badly, it simply increases the volume of generic, weakly targeted material entering journalists’ inboxes.
That matters because journalists already receive more content than they can use. Recent research from Cision found that 29% of journalists receive more than 50 pitches every week, while 72% said fewer than a quarter of the pitches they receive are relevant. Muck Rack also found that 88% of journalists will delete pitches that do not relate to their beat.
The challenge facing PR therefore isn’t a shortage of content, but rather a shortage of content that actually matters.
Newsworthiness can’t be prompted into existence
Good media relations starts long before a first sentence is drafted. Is there actually a story? Why does it matter now? Who will care? What has genuinely changed?
Often, the strongest angle is buried beneath the announcement the client actually wants to make. Finding it requires human intuition and editorial judgment:
- The Senior Hire: Instead of a standard appointment announcement, this might be the proof-point for a story about rapid regional expansion.
- The Product Launch: Instead of a list of technical features, the launch might reveal a fundamental shift in customer behaviour.
- The Internal Data: Instead of a dry quarterly report, the data might contain a single, counter-intuitive statistic that highlights a broader industry trend.
Sometimes the most valuable advice a PR professional can give a client is that the announcement they want to make is not actually the story at all.
The ultimate sycophant
This is where the limits of technology become obvious: generative AI is the ultimate sycophant. If a company asks an AI to write a press release about a minor, irrelevant software update, the AI will instantly generate 500 glowing words. It will not ask, “Does anyone outside this building actually care?” Good PR professionals act as a filter against corporate navel-gazing, whereas AI simply acts as an amplifier.
As content gets cheaper to produce, originality, genuine expertise, and authenticity will become exponentially more valuable. Journalists themselves are embracing AI, but they are already wary of its impact. Cision found that 72% are concerned about factual errors in AI-generated pitches, while 58% worry AI will increase the volume of PR content without increasing its quality.
In this environment, the “relations” in public relations matter more than ever. A journalist opens an email not just because the subject line is well-crafted by an algorithm, but because they recognize and trust the human being who sent it. That trust, earned through years of relationship building and understanding a reporter’s specific beat, cannot be automated.
AI makes PR teams infinitely faster, and any agency not using it to drive efficiency is already falling behind. But the true value of modern PR no longer lies in the ability to draft a perfect press release. It lies in having the editorial judgment to know what is actually worth saying, the strategic confidence to tell a client when their news isn’t a story, and the trusted relationships to ensure journalists actually listen.
