What did we get right (and wrong) about PR and AI in 2023?

Since 2022 people have been asking me for my thoughts on AI and PR/communications, but it wasn't until 2023 that I felt comfortable being able to have an opinion and some insight. As part of that, I did some presentations for charities, health services, and companies around what I saw as where PR and AI could work together and why no-one had to panic right away. It was a short deck and a lot of fun, so I was thinking: just how well has this stood the test of time?

Will we have a look and see?

Is AI going to take away PR jobs?

In 2023 this was the first thing everyone asked, so it made sense to be an opening point, especially as I would then go on and point out that "no, it probably wouldn't take your job away." (Now, I would say that it could take a lot of your job away, but it still can't replace a PR professional 100%. It could shrink your team massively - two people can do the job of five from 2020 if you have all the right tools and budget - but it's not eradicating the whole PR team.)

Based on conversations I have today this number is way higher now - and you can see why with the point I've made above.

Is AI a problem for PR?

None of the above was wrong then - and it sure isn't wrong now. People are still too trusting of AI output, people are still uploading confidential information to LLMs, and the tech gets the blame when it's the people causing the problems. Don't expect any of these to change in the next 12 months either IMO.

Here's why PRs shouldn't worry about AI...

OK, this was the slide designed to reassure people that this isn't some new scary tech and that they had been using it for a while. This is also where I would normally point out that, indeed, what we are calling AI isn't really AI or even machine learning, but we're stuck with the names now so we roll with it... This slide could now be updated to have so much more in it.

The poor attempt at a gag slide

It's a lousy gag but I cannot stress just how much PRs and communicators were stressed out by this topic, so I was going overboard to be reassuring, including this lousy attempt at a gag. The 2025 version of this talk really needs to do better...

AI is not PR's first rodeo to panic over

A point I like to make while everyone says the sky is falling is that communicators have been here before - as have journalists, ad writers, and other types of writers and creatives (and historically you can go back to newspapers and books being seen as disruptive too). The point is that with everything that was going to doom PR hasn't killed it and there's still a lot of PR people in jobs - and there will be once we all calm down about PR as well.

By this point, the idea was that people would be calm and accept that, OK there's this relatively new thing on the horizon, I'm not so terrified by it after all, perhaps I may still have a career, and that they could lean into the idea of using it with their job instead of fighting it.

Meet your future colleague

I used to think people were joking when they asked when the robots would come to the office - but they weren't. Some were expecting something like Amazon's Alexa on wheels, Astro. This was an eye opener for me, hence a slide pointing out that LLMs and everything else were really just another aspect of cloud computing. I can't stress how many people were disappointed.

Fundamental starting points

Seven or so slides before we get to the starting point - am I concise or what? This slide was important then and is still important now because too many people don't think about a lot of these aspects. The FOI aspect is, admittedly, more something for public service bodies in the UK but the rest of it is still super valid (and as for the environmental aspect, I refer you to the text and graphic on the front page.)

The risks of AI to the PR industry

This was taken from Muckrack's 2023 State of AI in PR report. I think most of those concerns probably still stand in late 2025, though the concern about people being overwhelmed with content is a bit of a stretch. People were already overwhelmed with stuff in 2023. Is there more content going about? Yes, but there has been for ages, so the need to be more strategic and savvy is nothing new.

The risks of AI to the PR industry

Again, taken from Muckrack's 2023 State of AI in PR report. and I would wager that this still stands up today, though a part of me wonders if press releases would not be in top position. What's also interesting to note - and I would bet that it would be a lot different now - is that most of these tasks are text based. There's very little here to suggest that ElevenLabs, Synthesia, or other tools were being used considerably.

What this slide was great for though was showing people that this wasn't all esoteric technobabble or job-stealing terrors and that AI tools could actually make a difference to the day to day.

A text based approach to AI and PR

More text based thinking from Muckrack's 2023 State of AI in PR report. and in hindsight, it shows how a lot of the industry does still think along text lines for press releases, social media posts and website updates. What makes that even more concerning is that the more visual mediums like Instagram, TikTok, and others have been about for a long time. If we were any more backwards looking there's a chance that someone would be trying to get AI to send better faxes.

(And don't worry, we'll get back to that 'key growth area'.)

The modern tools for the trade

Ouch. That's a list that's well and truly out of date. There's also too many tools on there, which is why the next slide cut back to a few of the tools that I had experience with at the time and could most suggest as good options for beginners looking to get in with text-based basics.

Staying positive to stay in jobs

This section has dated and dated terribly, but at the time it came from a place of optimism. Of course the one key skill is fairly obvious.

Yeah, prompt engineering is the future! In fairness, at the time it did seem it was going to be that way and not a case of everyone becoming a prompt engineer, while the LLMs also got better at understanding what humans want. It's also a bit of a poor show that there's no mention of using markdown format.

One last thing...

Always got to leave people with some more expertise to follow up from the basics and I still maintain that this is a fairly solid list of people to suggest without being overrwhelming.

So how well does 2023 stack up in 2025?

There's some decent fundamentals in place here. Basic but handy starting points. Having said that, I'm happy that I'm redeveloping this intro deck to be more up to date. If you're interested in learning more about that or having me present it to you, drop me a line.