Doomsday, muddling on or elevation? New research on how AI is reshaping practitioner roles suggests that the industry is muddling on.
There’s an ongoing debate in the public relations industry about the impact of AI on skills. The issue is particularly acute at the entry-level. It strikes at the heart of the future of the industry.
The literature and empirical data haven’t settled. That’s a fancy way of saying that no one agrees. The issue is compounded by a weak economy and the recurring question of the value of the communication function.
There are at least three potential arguments.
Doomsday - Public relations and the communication function will be replaced by AI and absorbed into other functions. There’s always been a view that anyone can do communications. AI has made that argument stronger.
Muddling on - Without a clear professional identity, practice will continue to evolve. We lack agreed boundaries and competencies. As a result we react to technology rather than manage it.
Elevation - Practitioners will use AI to assert the value of communication as a management function. New roles in change management, risk and AI visibility will emerge. This is the best case scenerio. How I wish it were true.
Take your pick. There’s data and evidence for each. I could argue any of these cases.
In AI for Public Relations: A How-To Guide for Implementation and Management (now £17 on Amazon), Ben Verinder and I, along with our contributors, tried to counter the techno-optimism of vendors and a cohort within the practitioner community. We couldn’t agree on the future in the final chapter. We’re still debating the range of outcomes and continue to pass studies back and forth in an effort to make sense of what’s happening.
What the research says
The most useful studies in the field are qualitative. Practitioner interviews allow for context and patterns that a blunt survey instrument misses.
I wrote last month about a paper in the Journal of Public Relations Research by Tugce Ertem-Eray and Eyun-Jung Ki, based on interviews with 14 US practitioners.
Their finding was that the technical and management split no longer holds. Practitioners at every level, including senior leaders, now work as AI copyeditors, prompting, checking, and verifying AI outputs.
I want to return to the paper this week because it bears directly on the future shape of the function and the entry level role. It lands on the muddling on argument, rather than elevation.
Work is moving up to management
Content that was previously produced by junior practitioners is now created at near-zero cost using AI. But the prompting and editorial review need someone with domain expertise and experience.
The result is that work is being pushed up to more expensive, senior practitioners. This is a counterintuitive finding that fundamentally undermines the efficiency case for AI, challenging the economics of both agencies and in-house teams.
The study’s participants still expect emerging practitioners to have strong writing, editing and presentation skills. But nobody could say where those skills will come from if the drafting has gone to a machine and the checking has gone to a manager.
This is muddling on.
AI is something that is happening to the function rather than workflow being deliberately redesigned.
Work is being pushed upward, creating effectiveness gains but not efficiency gains. We urgently need to redesign how juniors learn, through deliberate training and review.
Andrew Thomas, Ben and myself are currently working on the design for the AI for PR Conference 2027 on 17 June in London. If you’ve negotiated these issues and redesigned a function we’d love to feature you in a show and tell slot. Please get in touch.
Have a good week ahead.
Further reading
This article was originally posted on my Substack. The Wadds Inc. newsletter is read by almost 6,000 communications and public relations practitioners. We take a slower, critical perspective on the research, evidence and developments shaping the field. We put evidence before opinion, and we say how confident we are in what we publish.
