AI is the biggest challenge facing public relations

Since 2018, my agency Chalkstream has supported the CIPR to deliver the State of the Profession study.

It’s a thrilling project, not least because of the large number of respondents – over 2000 this year – and the huge volume of intelligence each year’s survey produces.

The reports published by the CIPR represent a small proportion of the insight generated. 

But in this blog I want to focus on just a few of the questions in the survey – those related to artificial intelligence (AI). 

For the first time, respondents say that AI is the biggest challenge facing public relations. It has leapt up the rankings from relative obscurity, such has been the exponential growth in AI capabilities and tools.

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Using AI for public relations

Nine out of ten PR practitioners have used AI for work purposes, but this belies significant differences in terms of frequency of use. Half of practitioners use AI for work irregularly and one in 10 have never used it.

The younger the practitioner, the more likely they are to use AI at work frequently and males are more likely to use it than females, findings that are consistent with the broader literature and which raise important (and, for those of us interested in equality and diversity in PR, troubling) questions that deserve further study. 

Among the respondents, 67% say their workplace has a policy on artificial intelligence and a similar proportion say they have received some training on AI.

These results are surprising, as they are higher than is typical in the literature (and, incidentally, the snap polls I conduct among practitioners when speaking about AI and PR). 

But we don’t know what type of policies and professional development this is. Policies might, in effect, simply be edicts about whether AI can be used at work or not. Training might be limited to a single AI tool. Again, this is an area ripe for further research. 

The more frequently a respondent uses AI, the more likely they are to say that their organisation has a policy on it. This suggests that where policies do exist, they are not being well socialised. 

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Declaring AI use in PR

The results also reveal a compelling – for a research team at least – discrepancy between what in-house teams say about their expectations of agencies and what those agencies say. 

Among in-house respondents, 37% assert that they often ask an agency or freelancer to declare their use of AI, but only 7% of agency respondents say they are often asked.

This disparity – and the broader set of responses – suggest to me that there is a degree of wishful thinking among respondents, and that those who commission agencies and freelancers have limited insight as to whether AI is used in the production of work.

This is a worrying finding, not least because of the ramifications for intellectual property, given the difficulties in establishing copyright over AI-generated work. 

There is a lot more to discover about our use of AI in the workplace, and a great deal of value in tracking our behaviours as they change, but the SOTP 2024 results provide a fascinating glimpse into the state of play. 

• Read the CIPR State of the Profession 2024 report

Chartered PR practitioner Ben Verinder is the founder and managing director of Chalkstream, a PR consultancy specialising in reputation research and management.