AI can write a press release, it can't build trust

Every few months, someone asks me, usually a client, occasionally a nervous new hire, whether AI is going to replace the PR industry. I understand the question. AI tools can now draft a press release in seconds, summarise a hundred media clippings before you have finished your coffee, and generate a dozen headline options on command. Tasks that used to take my team hours now take minutes. So, it is a fair thing to wonder about.

My answer has not changed: AI has made the tactical side of this job faster. It has not touched the part of the job that actually matters.

Here is what I mean. Last year, we worked with a client navigating a moment that could have genuinely damaged their brand, the kind of situation where the wrong sentence, sent an hour too early or too late, has consequences. No AI tool was going to tell us that. That decision came down to reading the client’s tone in a phone call, understanding exactly how a specific journalist would react to a specific choice of words, and knowing when to advise the client to say less rather than more. That is not a prompting problem. That is judgment, built from years of relationships and instinct, the kind of thing you cannot shortcut.

This is the distinction I think gets lost in the “AI versus PR” framing: the job was never really about producing content. Anyone who has worked in this industry for more than a few years knows that writing the release is the easy part. The hard part is everything AI still cannot do, sensing when a client’s gut instinct is wrong before it becomes a public problem, knowing which relationship in the room can actually move a story, and making the ethical call about what a brand should and should not say, especially when there is real pressure to do the opposite.

What is actually happening is not replacement. It is a redistribution of where the value sits. The mechanical work, including first drafts, monitoring, transcription, and basic research, is where AI genuinely helps us move faster, and we use it for exactly that at Oak & Ivy. But that has freed up more time, not reduced the need, for the human side of the job: sitting across the table from a founder during a hard decision, building the kind of long-term relationship with a journalist that a database cannot replicate, and holding the line on what is true and what is not when a client wants a shortcut.

If anything, I would argue AI has raised the bar for what “good PR” means, because the tactical work is no longer a point of differentiation. Everyone has access to the same tools now. What separates a strong agency from a mediocre one is no longer who can produce content fastest. It is who has the relationship capital, the ethical judgment, and the strategic instinct that no model has been trained on, because it is not written down anywhere.

It lives in people.

That is worth remembering on a day meant to celebrate this profession: the tools have changed, faster than most of us expected. What makes someone good at this job has not.