By Rory Flashman-Wells, Managing Director at Spa Comms

There’s no doubt that AI is reshaping every aspect of Public Relations (PR).

It’s impacting how brands show up, how stories are told, and how and where audiences find information.

Trust, authenticity, subject matter expertise, and credibility are now the cornerstones of marketing, comms and storytelling, and the pressure on business leaders is becoming increasingly obvious, as consumers and media become more skeptical of brands.

Importantly human expertise – a person’s subject matter or their lived or professional experience – have become critical and are one of the single biggest safety nets facing professionals navigating the AI revolution.

What’s next?

Like many of us, I can’t be certain how this will play out in the long run. But there is one thing that’s becoming clear: PR has never been more critical to how brands appear in an AI-driven world.

A new blog from Muck Rack, for example, found that Claude tends to cite smaller publications, niche trade outlets and specialised media sources, while ChatGPT leans more heavily toward larger, mainstream publications.

Muck Rack’s Generative Pulse report further reinforces the point: 82% of the links cited in AI responses come straight from earned media, with generative engine optimisation (GEO) prioritising authority and credibility, both of which can only be built through PR.

As a technology company, especially in the data centre, renewable energy, or AI infrastructure landscape, if you’re not showing up where AI is influencing or shaping decisions, you run the risk of being left behind.

If your competitors invest more in PR, react faster to the news agenda, and tells stories that are more credible and relevant to readers, they’ll appear more authoritative and become more visible to the very audiences you’re trying to reach. That’s not just a branding problem. It very quickly becomes a market share problem.

Creativity: Led by human insight

In my opinion, no client or PR agency should be using AI to generate long-form content without human input and verification. That’s the quickest way to blindly assume that the content you’re producing is relevant and accurate, and damage trust.

AI doesn’t yet understand the nuance, context or the industry instincts PR professionals have developed over years. It needs constant, iterative training, and requires technology leaders to be the inspiration that feeds the engine.

While AI agents are quickly becoming widespread in multiple industries, AI can’t yet have a conversation with a reporter to learn what they are working on. It can’t read minds, nor can it tell when a story is misaligned or simply not the right message for the moment – a judgement call which must be made by PR pros daily.

Where AI does add value is as a creative partner, however: generating ideas, exploring angles and testing narratives, offering different ways to frame a story or building creatives and visualising early-stage concepts – all of which can spark ideas to bring an omni-channel campaign to life.

AI can also help remove the inertia at the start of the process and accelerate brainstorming, but it needs experienced communicators to shape ideas that enable stories to come to life and resonate with the target audience.

Execution also becomes vital. The timing, sequencing and the relevance of your campaign to a specific outlet or audience is something that must be chosen carefully. AI can’t land you an exclusive, it also can’t make reporters interested.

Efficiency: Removing the friction

AI can, however, do some of the heavy lifting for you. It can automate some aspects of time-consuming work, quickly giving you the information you need, when you need it.

Automated media monitoring, meeting summaries, technical breakdowns of product information, competitive analysis, and building coverage reports, for example, are all areas that can be streamlined – allowing teams to remove the friction that can grind their day to a halt, and create opportunities to do the deep work that has the most impact.

Productivity: Making time for what matters

Handing over simple, time-consuming tasks, allows us to do more for our clients as an agency. The real value we bring to the table is in the deep work that moves the needle — strategy, thought leadership, and most importantly, relationship-building.

I, for one, have always believed that media relations, and the ability to have human conversations with real people is what matters in PR – and while every story may not land, I haven’t yet met a journalist who doesn’t appreciate you checking in from time to time.

That is another thing that is becoming clearer. In a world that’s increasingly digital and remote, human connection matters more than ever.

AI cannot build relationships with the press. It’s not going to replace the relationships you already have, and I can’t imagine a scenario, yet, where a journalist is going to be receptive to a call from a bot. But maybe that’s a story for the BBC…

Experience tells me that journalists take your call because of the relationships you’ve developed, the relevance of your stories to the news agenda, and the trust they have in you and your clients.

Impact: The outcome that matters most

When you combine creativity, efficiency and productivity, you get more impactful work. Not because AI does it for you, but because it clears the runway.

It gives you the space to do better thinking, craft better stories, and deliver better results. All of which are the things our clients care about.

PR done well strengthens trust, authority, and visibility. It creates opportunities for better earned media coverage, and now it happens to be the foundation of brand growth in the AI era.

The truth is that none of it works without human oversight, however. Generative AI cannot guarantee accuracy. It cannot protect against misinformation. It cannot validate whether something is representative of a client’s business strategy – unless of course you’ve trained it to do so.

Impact requires trust and experience, both of which you find in people and their ability to learn and understand the clients’ business.

And while AI literacy is fundamental in PR – something we at Spa are focusing on continuously – AI alone won’t take your job. The people who integrate AI within their roles are the ones likely to surpass you, which puts the emphasis on the people using the tools, and not the technology alone.

Looking ahead

It’s now March 2026. GTC is taking place in San Jose this week, and a new generation of AI-based predictions are likely to materialise.

Personally, I believe the next 12 months will see continued impact from AI in the PR and marketing industries.

GEO will become a standard PR measurement metric, sitting alongside share of voice, coverage quality sentiment, and market penetration. Joining the dots between storytelling and commercial impact will also be critical, as more technology businesses begin to realise that PR is a ‘commercial driver’ of their business, and not a nice to have.

There’s also no doubt we’ll likely see more “AI content agencies” entering the market, and many agencies going to market around their AI capability.

Brands that cut corners, however, will start to look and sound the same – putting even greater emphasis on the trust, credibility and authenticity that can only be built through well crafted, strategic, earned media.

The next 18 months will ultimately define which brands lead the market and which get buried in AI-generated noise. Those who use AI tools in a smart, efficient way with human experience at their heart will be the winners.