In this blog, Maddy Birtles, Senior Account Director at Whiteoaks, explores:
- How AI can help PR teams interrogate information and uncover useful signals
- Why the strongest stories still depend on original ideas, opinions and creative thinking
- Why human judgement and journalist relationships remain essential to effective media relations
AI has given PR professionals powerful new ways to interrogate information. It can analyse large datasets, summarise lengthy reports, accelerate research and help teams find new connections with journalists that may once have taken considerably longer to uncover. All these capabilities are saving huge amounts of time and are no doubt useful, but none of them on their own create a story.
Compelling storytelling depends on more than identifying an interesting statistic or summarising what is already known. It needs an idea. It might challenge an accepted view, connect two seemingly unrelated developments, offer an opinion others are not expressing or find a fresh angle relating to a subject that a journalist has covered before.
That is where the distinction between processing information and creating a story becomes important. AI can help PR teams get to the raw material faster, but people still have to decide what is worth saying.
AI can support story development but it can’t find the story for you
One of AI’s most valuable applications in PR is its ability to work through large quantities of information quickly. If you give it a substantial dataset, a collection of reports or existing coverage, it can identify recurring themes, anomalies and patterns that might spark interest or further investigation. However, this doesn’t automatically create a story.
When analysing research data, for example, AI might identify that one result differs significantly by industry, company size or geography. What it cannot determine with the same level of understanding and human context is whether that finding challenges a widely held assumption in the market, connects to a conversation journalists are already having or gives a spokesperson credible grounds to say something genuinely new. That requires knowledge of the sector, the organisation and the media landscape.
The same is true when responding to the news agenda. Good reactive PR is rarely about simply explaining what has happened. The strongest contributions challenge existing views, identify a consequence others have overlooked, put the development into wider industry-specific context and explain what happens next.
AI can summarise the news, but the real benefit must come from having a unique expert perspective on it.
AI cannot manufacture a meaningful point of view
A strong spokesperson has accumulated experience from multiple customers, projects, conversations and day-to-day decisions. They have seen where conventional thinking does not match reality. They may disagree with the direction their industry is taking or recognise a problem before it becomes widely discussed. Those can be the foundations of interesting thought leadership.
AI can help develop that thinking, but it needs something meaningful to work with in the first place. Give it a clear idea, a strong opinion, first-hand insight or an original observation and it can help interrogate the argument, identify gaps in the evidence or explore its implications. Ask it to create a point of view from nothing, and the result is far more likely to reflect the same familiar and generic narratives already circulating elsewhere.
Effective PR should not be about asking a tool to generate something that sounds authoritative and then treating the output as thought leadership. The thinking has to come first. The role of AI should be to help develop, test or articulate what an organisation genuinely knows, believes or sees differently. PR professionals can then turn that into a story others want to engage with. Ultimately, compelling content still depends on having something worth saying before you start writing it.
Creativity still comes from making unexpected connections
There is also a creative element to PR storytelling that is difficult to reduce to a process. Some of the strongest campaign ideas come from connecting things that do not initially appear related. A piece of proprietary data might suddenly become relevant because of a cultural moment. A technical subject might become interesting when framed through its impact on business or everyday life. An overlooked insight might provide a completely different way into an established industry debate.
AI can generate associations between subjects, but there is a difference between producing possibilities and recognising the idea that will resonate. That judgement is informed by experience through knowing what journalists have already seen, which narratives are becoming tired, what audiences will understand and where there is space to do something different.
It is also why creativity in PR cannot simply mean generating more ideas. The skill lies in identifying the one worth pursuing and developing it into something distinctive, credible and relevant to the organisation behind it.
Relationships provide context AI cannot see
The same principle applies once the story is ready to reach the media. AI-powered tools can help identify journalists who have written about particular topics or analyse patterns in previous coverage. That can make research faster, particularly across specialist sectors and international campaigns.
But media relations is not simply a matching exercise between keywords in a story and keywords in a journalist’s articles. A PR professional may know that a journalist has recently changed focus, is tired of receiving a particular type of story or is increasingly interested in an adjacent issue. They may know when a story warrants a call rather than an email, when an angle needs adapting or when not to pitch at all. Those details come from strong relationships.
As AI-generated content becomes easier to produce, simply creating more of it is not a competitive advantage. Having something original to say is.
With the rise of AI slop – in other words, low-quality, generic content produced at scale with little original thought behind it – the difference is increasingly visible. Audiences are becoming more accustomed to recognising content that says a lot without really saying anything new.
In PR, AI should be used to support human thinking rather than substitute for it, bringing together technology, sector-specific knowledge, creativity, opinion and relationships to find the stories that are actually worth telling.
If you want to turn your expertise into stories that cut through, our media team combines strong storytelling instincts with unrivalled journalist relationships to help B2B tech brands make an impact. Get in touch to discuss how we can support your PR.
