How AI is changing PR and marketing, and what it still can’t replace

There is no denying that AI is changing the way that work gets done in the marketing industry, but there are things at the heart of what we do that cannot be replaced by AI. Understanding the difference is what separates the businesses that are using AI well from those that are getting burned by it.

What AI is good at 

We have to start by giving credit to AI tools where it’s due. Some AI tools have become an incredibly useful part of the marketing workflow, especially for tasks that need to be done at speed, with heavy amounts of data processing or research.

When it comes to summarising research, generating first drafts and creating ways to repurpose existing marketing materials at scale, AI tools can help you be more efficient and save time for where you need to focus your energy most. The same is true for SEO research tasks. Areas of SEO that take significant legwork, like keyword research, content briefs and meta tags, can all be shortened with the use of AI. 

Data and statistics are another place where AI thrives. If you need help with spotting trends in social listening data, analysing campaign performance, or surfacing insights from large datasets that would take analysts days to work through manually, you can turn to AI for help. 

One of the tasks that we use AI for the most at Chapter II is ideation. If you’re stuck for angles or need to generate several ideas to pitch to a client, AI can be your best friend. Some of the things you can achieve with AI include content lines, subject lines or campaign hooks. Most of the ideas your tool throws out won't be right, but occasionally something in the list will spark something worth pursuing.  

When you can’t rely on AI

Here’s where we often see businesses getting their AI usage wrong. 

AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are pattern recognition machines at their core. They get trained on huge amounts of existing content and use this to generate sentences and paragraphs based on what the most likely combinations of words are.

This means that although AI can remix and repackage content in a variety of ways, the critical thing is that it cannot think originally, so the results you get will automatically be oriented towards content that already exists. AI also doesn’t know your story. It has no understanding of why your business exists, what makes you and your team tick, or what you had to sacrifice to make it this far. These are the things that make your business unique and are the human elements that AI can’t uncover for you. 

PR, at its core, is all about the connections you make, and AI can’t help you build relationships.  The coverage that moves the needle for your brand doesn't come from a well-structured press release sent into the void, but rather it comes from a journalist who trusts the person pitching them, who knows they'll only be contacted when there's a story worth telling, and who picks up the phone because there's a real relationship on the other end. 

Another one of the most underrated skills for anyone working in PR is knowing when to speak and when to stay quiet. Navigating a sensitive story, advising a client through a reputational moment, or reading the room on a news cycle requires judgment that is built from years of experience and genuine human understanding. Getting these calls wrong can be costly for any business and could not only impact you financially but also damage your reputation beyond recovery. 

How we use AI at Chapter II

We use AI tools where they make us better and faster at the parts of our job that benefit from it, not to replace our expertise, creativity or the relationships we build with our clients. 

We're a team of writers, strategists, designers, and relationship-builders who have spent years understanding how to get brands noticed, trusted, and talked about. AI can make us more efficient as a team, but it can’t replace us.