The world of generative AI is moving so fast it’s overwhelming. You need time to sift through the noise and focus on what’s relevant to you and your industry before you begin to experiment with tools, or it turns into a big waste of time.
Keeping a tab on where your industry is at when in comes to AI technology adoption is a good way to start focusing your efforts to understand how AI can help you work better and faster.
If you are a PR professional or journalist, you will be familiar with Muck Rack. It’s been around since 2009 and was originally used to showcase a journalist’s published portfolio of work.
It’s totally revolutionized its platform since and now has a robust service for PR professionals and journalists alike.
Muck Rack report: The State of AI in Public Relations
Muck Rack recently released a report that surveyed 1,034 PR professionals from March 31 to April 25, 2023, on their understanding and use of AI for their work.
These were the top findings:
- AI is considered one of the top five skills that PR professionals believe their companies will need to focus on to be successful in the future.
- Currently, 61% of public relations professionals use AI or are interested in using AI in their workflow. Only a small portion of them – 15%, say they have no interest.
- Approximately 31% of PR professionals plan to integrate new AI tools into their workflows.
- Of the PR professionals who already use AI in their workflow, 38% are in the C-suite, a higher percentage than employees at other levels of the company.
- The top ways that PR professionals currently use AI are for research, strategy & planning, monitoring and analysis, crafting pitches, writing press releases, and writing social copy (so pretty much everything!)
- Employees at companies with fewer than 500 employees are more likely to already be using AI than those at larger companies.
- The biggest concern that PR professionals have about AI is that the output will be used without first scrutinizing it, thereby lowering the quality of conversations in the field.
The last point is a concern that surprises me; anyone who has used AI knows it’s almost unusable without being edited or reviewed, so I’m guessing those who expressed this concern have not used AI much.
How PR professionals are using AI
Three of the top ways that PR professionals currently use AI are crafting pitches, writing press releases, and writing social copy. Any type of quality communications writing takes so much and effort; any assistance would make a significant difference. So starting with these would be the best way to start on your AI journey.
Muck Rack’s new AI tool PressPal
With that in mind, I’m excited about Muck Rack’s new AI tool PressPal. It will draft a press release or email pitch to an editor in seconds.
Not only that, once it generates it, it also highlights editors and journalists that would be interested in the press release or pitch. With its monitoring database of over 600,000 global news sources spanning 230 countries, it works from a solid data set.
I asked it to write me a press release on my newsletter for Working Mums and the draft was a better first draft than I could put together in 10 seconds! It’s fast, has a clean and simple to use interface, and in its beta stage at the moment.
Aside from speed, the value of AI tools moving forward will be in their specificity I think, because that’s what will make them most relevant to the user they are targeting.
If you are a PR professional or PR content writer looking for some quick wins and to get some work off your plate quickly, well worth a try.
PressPal.ai is free at the moment with no credit card requirement, which is unusual, especially with the better AI tools.
Are you a PR professional using AI? What do you use it for?