Caution With AI Among PR Pros
A Q&A with COM’s Arunima Krishna
Beginning in 2018, COM public relations faculty and PRWeek, a major industry publication, surveyedPR practitioners across the country each year, probing for trends in hiring, skills and best practices. The result was the annual Bellwether Survey, which swiftly became a go-to source for insights about and for the field.
Spurred by the growing use of generative artificial intelligence, the partnership restarted with the publication this month of “AI in PR Survey,” available in a 71-page premium edition.
COM’s Arunima Krishna, associate professor of public relations and a lead researcher on the survey, shared some of the new insights the team helped uncover.
Q&A
With Arunima Krishna
COMTalk: How do PR professionals use AI today in their work?
Arunima Krishna: Arunima Krishna: I think that there is a lot of interest among peer professionals to use AI, but a lot of them report that their organizations are not really ready to adopt AI as much as they want. So there is a lot of interest in adopting AI, and they are using it to automate certain aspects of their work, like analyzing large data sets to get insights, media monitoring. These are things that folks are using more than others, but there is a concern about organizations not really being ready to embrace AI as much as they want to or they should.
COMTalk: What was the most surprising thing that you found from their answers?
Arunima Krishna: I think the most surprising thing was that organizations aren’t ready. They don’t have the infrastructure right now to embrace AI as much as their employees want to. And this may be more of an agency versus corporate divide. Agencies are much more ready than corporations are, or in-house practitioners reported that their organizations were a lot less ready than agencies are.
Which, if you think about it, is not super surprising, but really interesting, because for agencies, PR professionals, public relations is their revenue center. For a lot of in-house practitioners, public relations is a cost center. And so, it’s not super surprising that companies aren’t really investing that much in them as much as agencies are, and therefore, are turning to agencies to help support those aspects of their work, rather than investing in their own infrastructure.
COMTalk: Could the lack of readiness or investment be due to other factors, like, cultural caution or other concerns about downsides that AI presents?
Arunima Krishna: Yes, certainly. There are actually concerns about using AI that folks reported, including maintaining accuracy. Folks are concerned about low quality of AI-generated content, too. There is caution about reduced critical thinking, which I found really interesting. Reduced creativity and reduced critical thinking because of AI overuse, which really echoes with us as educators, because we’re worried about the same things.
This survey actually confirmed a lot of what we talk about as educators. We’re talking about students needing to be critical thinkers and creative on their own, outside of AI, and then be able to use AI as a tool or a collaborator to make their work better, not do that work for them.
And that is exactly what professionals are telling us as well. So, it’s a really nice dovetail into what industry is saying and what we are saying. So, it just tells us that we’re on the right track in how we are handling AI.
COMTalk: As an educator, what were some things that you learned in this survey that you think students or people thinking about entering the study of public relations should know?
Arunima Krishna: What is evident from this survey, and what I think we as educators should take away, is that it’s important to educate students about AI – but students need to be able to think on their own. It’s nice to have that echoed from professionals as well. I think our concern in higher education is that students use generative AI as a crutch. You know, an assignment’s due at 5 p.m., it’s 4.55, you throw the prompt into generative AI or chat GPT, and it spits out an answer. That is not the solution. And that is most definitely not what the practice is looking for in people that they’re hiring. I think that message is something that we really need to hammer home to students.
We need to encourage them to be independent thinkers, to be critical thinkers, and be creative, whether as writers, copywriters, designers. Those skills, the human aspect of it, are not going away. And that’s something we see from the survey. There are certain aspects of the job that can be helped using generative AI, but the key human aspects of the job continue to be very, very important. In fact, PR practitioners report that generative AI usage is relatively low for most of their job functions.
So, AI is helpful, but is it this all-encompassing thing that will do your job for you? It is not. Your brain is still extremely important. The human is still extremely important.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
