Neural Notes: AI won't replace PR, unless you’re bad at your job

Welcome back to Neural Notes, a weekly column where I look at what’s been happening in AI. In this edition, I strongly disagree with the view that AI will take PR jobs.

One of the most dominant conversations around AI over the past two years has been about replacing jobs. In research, surveys, reports, and media articles.

This has only become more prevalent as generative AI tools have gotten more sophisticated and AI Agents have begun entering the chat.

In fact, most businesses and startups in the space have to be careful to include lines in their value propositions to mitigate this fear — about how AI isn’t there to replace jobs, but to give humans the time to work on more meaningful and complicated tasks.

The other thing you hear a lot is the importance of relationships and having a “human in the loop”. In some cases, this line is clearly being spun to mitigate concern.

But it’s also fundamentally true.

This week one of Australia’s biggest digital mastheads published a laundry list of jobs allegedly on the chopping block. One that caught my eye was public relations (PR).

According to the article, which included an interview with a computational intelligence expert, PR manages communications and promotes the image of an organisation to the public. It goes on to say an AI could replicate this by taking inputs and then aiming them at different groups to promote the client.

Here’s why that is, in my opinion, utter BS.

PR is a hard, often thankless job

For the majority of my decade-long career, I’ve been a consumer technology journalist. And for the past two, I have been ingrained in the startup and small business space.

All of these niches have something in common — PR.

Every business has an image to maintain or a product to sell, so they hire professionals to handle that. And it goes far deeper than that when you bother to take a look at specific types of PR — media relations, strategic communication, crisis comms.

PR gets a bad rap with journalists. It’s a complicated situation for all involved. We often need to work with each other to a certain degree, but there are tensions and frustrations.

A lot of us journos complain, often publicly, about those doing the job. The emails flooding our inboxes, the follow-up calls and texts, the never-ending pitches of non-stories, but also not getting information quickly enough.

I’m guilty of it too.

I wonder how many of us have actually taken the time to think about the pressure associated with the job. The often-unreasonable expectations from clients, having to constantly explain how media actually works, and the blowback from anything other than glowing stories being published.

Then on top of that, they have to deal with bitchy journalists like me who swing between being totally unresponsive one day and needing a comment within an hour the next.

It’s a bloody hard and often thankless job, which makes it very easy to tell who is great at it.

I can count on one hand the PRs I would always pick up the phone for, any time — day or night. It’s not because they have the clients I want to talk to the most or the cool tech I want to review.

It’s because of relationships.

What AI can’t replicate

Over the years PR professionals haven’t just peddled products and interviews at me. They have the expertise to know what a good story is and what publication is a good fit. They know when to push back on clients because they see the bigger picture.

They also don’t shy away from a bad news story. Instead, they advise their clients appropriately and actually answer questions from journalists. You won’t see a blanket and permanent “no comment” because they’re smarter than that.

All of this is to say — how on earth is AI going to replicate that?

We need more of this level of expertise, trust and communication skills in PR. What we don’t need is an algorithm dictating how to best clog up our inboxes.

In my experience, that kind of work can’t be replicated with inputs and data scraping. Sure, we’ll probably see more tools introduced to help with admin. But that isn’t the whole job.

Sure, you may see some agencies try this, but I’m willing to bet they’re already the ones nobody wants to work with or for.

If we’re serious about an “AI future” being one where relationships will be imperative — PR will continue to be a beacon for that.

If you think what talented PR professionals do can be automated, you don’t know what you’re talking about.

And if you’re someone in the PR industry who agrees — you’re probably bad at your job.

Other AI news this week

Australia’s AI Build Club raised $1.8 million after launching just 13 months ago.
Google Lens now lets you search with video.
Another loss from OpenAI as one of its Sora leads (the company’s video generator) has jumped ship to Google Deep Mind. This is just the latest in what seems to be an exodus trend for the startup.
An Australian lawyer has been busted for using AI in a court case that generated false case citations.
A casual 160,000 virus species have been discovered by AI.