Managing a Public Relations Team in the AI Era

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping how public relations teams work, but the managers who get it right won't be cutting talent - they'll be competing to hire it. For communication leaders, the challenge is no longer whether to adopt AI, but how to do it strategically, responsibly and without losing the human expertise that makes great public relations effective in the first place.

Professional deployment of AI

It is understandable that many public relations managers and leaders are focused on developing their team’s skills in deploying generative AI. AI affords practitioners advances across a wide range of activities - from content generation to ideation, summarization to audience insights, planning to personalization and evaluation to automating repetitive tasks.

And for the public relations function to be credible, practitioners need to be capable and professional in deploying AI to support this kind of work. To succeed, managers will need to foster a culture of experimentation, set clear governance and invest in systems that support safe and effective AI adoption. This requires a strategic, rather than laissez-faire, approach to implementation, maximising productivity while providing the space, time and environment for a team to learn new systems and processes.

Teams also need clear guidance and guardrails to help them mitigate the various risks of AI adoption - such as hallucination, bias and privacy violations. Often this will mean ensuring that perfection does not become the enemy of good - developing a working or draft team policy even if the organizational policy is incomplete or unsocialised. Because the technology is so advanced, the team will require continuous professional development. This is likely to take the form of rolling internal training programmes and support networks.

Retaining core competencies

While AI deployment may offer a competitive edge, public relations, like many professional disciplines, is now experiencing an AI-powered productivity ‘arms-race’. Those competing for our audiences’ attention are increasingly likely to use AI as well. Effective use of AI will therefore be a powerful determinant of success or failure, at least in the short and medium term. But, beyond efficient adoption, there are other very important factors public relations managers need to consider.

As the digital sphere becomes saturated with AI-generated slop, audiences are increasingly likely to place a premium on human creativity and communication. To meet this demand, managers will want to retain core copywriting and communication skills in their team’s job descriptions and personal workflows, even if an AI large language model (LLM) such as ChatGPT or Claude is highly effective at those tasks. Preservation of such core competencies will become even more important as teams battle the effects of cognitive offloading, in which excessive reliance on such technology can lead to a decline in our own abilities.

And, beyond generating content ourselves, our use of AI depends on those abilities. We need foundational skills to judge whether AI output is any good or not.

A new delivery model

For agencies still selling time rather than value, AI poses a significant threat to the model. The client who used to pay for 40 hours of media monitoring activity isn't going to pay for three hours of prompting. Practitioners need to redesign the proposition around insight, outcomes and risk management.

Corporate teams face a different reality. They can’t go and ‘win another client’ when efficiency reduces workload. Yet internal demand for sophisticated communication is exploding.

AI handles routine tasks such as policy updates, newsletter compilation and intranet maintenance. That creates space for what has always been needed but rarely resourced: genuine employee engagement, stakeholder mapping, proactive issue management and strategic narrative development.

Team size and shape

Managers and leaders will also have to grapple with the very difficult questions of team size and structure.

AI deployment is spawning new roles and capabilities. Progressive teams are redesigning roles around human advantage and AI/practitioner alignment, with early career practitioners focusing on higher value tasks such as:

· cultural insight and trend‑spotting

· creative ideation and experimentation

· platform expertise and community management

· influencer identification and engagement

· culture and values translation

· cross-functional project coordination

· stakeholder experience mapping.

But deployment is also generating pressure on public relations functions and teams to realise new efficiencies.

Although labour market data is yet to show the impact of AI on public relations employment, anecdotal evidence suggests that parts of the industry are already slowing down recruitment at entry level as a result of adoption. Public relations leaders and managers will need to understand where such efficiencies might cause big problems in the future. For instance, ethical decision-making requires contextual human judgement that AI can't reliably provide. We risk stretching LLM supervision too thinly without sufficient numbers of humans.

PR teams also risk becoming too dependent on tech companies whose pricing, terms and reputational baggage we cannot predict or control, trading the autonomy that comes from growing skilled people for a licence agreement with a company whose future behaviour is outside their control.

Human talent appreciates - people develop, build institutional memory and add proprietary value - in ways LLMs cannot.

Organizational Disruption

Cutting junior hiring because AI can do the production work is likely to lead to organizational injury. Within five years, teams that take this path will have lost those who understand how the systems work, why they fail or when to override them. They'll have lost cultural translators, relationship builders and future leaders - people who develop by watching real decisions get made by fellow humans.

At this point, it is not clear whether the industry can evolve fast enough to capture the expanded opportunity AI creates. The managers who get this right will be competing to hire the people who can navigate what comes next. They won’t be cutting talent.

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