Why PR (And Marketing) Pros Need to Embrace Imperfect AI Writing Technology Now
People often say
artificial intelligence (AI) isn't going to put anyone out of a job any time
soon. But they're wrong. Unless you work out how to incorporate AI into your
workflow today, tomorrow you'll be out of business.
Not saying an AI writing bot is literally going to do your job
for you: AI still can't produce intelligent, comprehensible text without human
supervision. But AI can already generate pitches, press releases, email
outreach, and social media updates, and it can do it faster than a human
can.
So, although AI may not replace PR professionals outright,
agencies that don't adopt AI run the risk of obsolescence.
Many industries have seen the writing on the wall. Healthcare,
finance, and transportation have all become leaders in AI adoption,
and those industries have become more efficient and profitable as a result.
But for some reason, PR lags behind. Despite dozens of articles
written on how to use AI in marketing and PR, many agencies just
aren't biting. Why?
Yes, change is hard, and it's certainly understandable that PR
firms and marketing companies would be comfortable with their established
patterns and workflows. It can be tempting to keep doing things as you always
have.
But it's time for the PR industry to adopt AI and adapt it to
its own purposes. Even if AI is not perfect.
The Rise of 'AI Wrote This'
Right now, for many PR companies, AI is a novelty. We've all
seen the quaint blog posts and articles that marvel,
"AI generated this text!"—although usually with human oversight.
The articles get shared in the company Slack channel. The
reaction is often "pretty cool, smarter than expected, wild to think AI
came up with this all on its own." Maybe someone says, "Should we try
this out sometime?" And then the idea is forgotten or dismissed as mere
curiosity.
The lack of urgency is understandable. AI applications for PR
right now are admittedly limited. Here is an example of a leading AI
text-generator company to generate a LinkedIn outreach message, it was
basically a word salad:
Hey Steve,
I love that you founded Intelligent Relations and it was
co-founded by startup founders. And our experience, startups are often super
innovative, always questioning the status quo and doing things differently - I
admire that. Also the fact that the industry has been around for so long but it
hasn't improved as a real issue - I'd love to see it be more transparent and
accountable.
Not exactly Shakespeare.
You can see why you'd dismiss an AI text generator as a
time-wasting tool. Why bother taking the time to change your processes to
incorporate a tool that is still flawed, at best?
Novelty vs. Application
Imagine two PR
companies.
PR Company A is still
stuck in the curiosity phase. The company tinkers around with AI, maybe using
it once in a while to see whether it really can write an article. The people at
that company are having fun, but they're still thinking of AI as a toy and
failing to see its true potential.
PR Company B has
integrated AI into various facets of its business: drafting press releases,
sending pitches to journalists, and doing social media outreach. Yes, sometimes
it's messy, and the results require human intervention to catch logical flaws
and just plain weirdness. But the company understands not only the current
applications and limitations of AI but also its future promise.
Some firms have incorporated
AI into every process you can think of, from scanning the media landscape for
trends to gathering data about publications and journalists to generating
pitches to send to those publications and journalists. No, AI isn't perfect,
but it's a hell of a lot faster to ask AI to generate text and then edit it
than to come up with the text yourself.
It's the difference
between sending out 25 focused pitches and sending out 100 spray-and-pray
pitches. It's the difference between getting a press release to a client in
just one or two days vs. needing a week to put it together.
And as AI inevitably
improves, companies that adopt it now are going to be the ones best positioned
to take advantage of those improvements.
Sometimes AI text
generation will generate a press release that needs a lot of work. The
journalist outreach it generates is not always pitch-perfect. But capacity and
overall levels of high-quality output have increased incorporated AI into projects.
PR Company A will
eventually realize—maybe in a year, maybe in five—that AI isn't going away and
that its applications will become ever more crucial to running a successful
company. But by then it'll be too late. By the time Company A begins
integrating AI into its workflows, all of its clients will have moved on to
companies that already did—and are better, faster, and more efficient as
result.
A Necessity, Not a
Replacement
It's understandable
that although AI will never replace human ingenuity, creativity, and
originality, some marketers are intimidated by it: It's a tech-heavy subject
full of unintelligible acronyms and terms such as "neural network."
When things are
working well as is, and when AI is still laughably bad in many cases, it's
tempting to conclude that you don't need it.
But that's not the
danger. The danger is that if you don't start using AI now—even with its
limitations—you'll be outrun by companies that do. Because AI is here to stay.
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If you need help with your email, web site, video, or other presentation to promote your company, product, or service, please give me a call at 440-519-1500 or email me at john@x2media.us
Until next month. . . .remember. "you don't get a 2nd chance to make a 1st impression." Always make it a good one!!
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