Who gets seen as "AI talent" in PR?

This is the latest in a series of articles to celebrate PRmoment's PR Masterclass: AI in PR, where we talk to experts about how AI is changing the PR sector. If you want to understand more about the how AI is changing the output and make up of PR teams, often for the better, come along to PR Masterclass: AI in PR.

I asked Google a blunt question while thinking about this piece: "Are men typically behind the AI creative campaigns coming out of the UK?"

The answer was blunt: yes.

It pointed to two overlapping realities. Women remain under-represented in AI and data roles, with one UK figure putting female representation in AI at 22%. Plus, creative leadership has its own long-standing imbalance, with only 12% of creative directors in the UK reported to be female. 

So, when AI is blended with creative work, two male-skewed pipelines are colliding. And that should give the PR industry pause, because as AI becomes more embedded in comms, (yes, we’re still deciding which tools to use), we’re also deciding who gets recognised as credible in the next phase of the industry. Who gets hired. Who gets promoted. Who’s invited into the strategy meeting. Who’s seen as commercially valuable AI talent.

And right now, I worry that the image forming is too narrow.

Break the silence

At a recent collaborative panel between Hotwire agency and gender-based grassroots movement group Break The Silence on the silent weight of mental load carried by women, industry legend Miranda Mitchell said something that has stayed with me: “How something lands depends on who’s saying it.”

And while she was talking in the context of gender, work and the invisible weight many women carry, the insight felt painfully relevant to the AI conversation in PR too. The same idea, suggestion or feedback can be received very differently depending on who voices it. A man talking about AI adoption can be heard as commercially progressive, even if he brings up questions of ethics, risk, audience impact or quality control, while a woman might be interpreted as cautious. While young people playing with tools are frequently perceived as naturally fluent, a senior practitioner applying 15 years of judgement to AI outputs can be treated as playing catch-up. Smells like prejudice, no?

The industry, and even hiring teams, aren’t neutrally looking at capability any more. You can see it happening in real-time. They’re filtering capability through old assumptions about who looks technical, who looks creative, who looks confident and who looks like they belong at the front of the room. We know, because we’ve been conditioned to operate this way in PR. But the evidence I’ve been collecting points somewhere more interesting. 

I’ve been speaking to founders building AI tools and AI-led production capabilities for PR teams, agency leaders, hiring leads and people developing AI talent inside comms businesses. Across those conversations, one very clear thing keeps coming through: AI capability does not have one profile.

James Hilditch, owner and co-founder of video production agency BearJam, has been looking at this from both a hiring and delivery perspective. BearJam works with PR teams and recently produced 80 to Infinity for SD Worx, a future-facing campaign created to mark the company’s 80th anniversary and imagine the future of HR and payroll.

“The project used AI to create a fully AI-driven film, but the interesting part for us wasn’t simply that AI was involved,” says Hilditch. “Lots of campaigns can now claim that. What mattered was what still had to come from people, concept, narrative, taste, discernment, audience understanding, and the ability to turn a technology experiment into something a brand could actually use.”

AI talent in PR

That is where AI talent in PR becomes more interesting than the current perception allows.

Hilditch noticed something similar when hiring around AI capability. “The candidate pool was heavily male. There were two female applicants, including one making it through to the shortlist, but what stood out was that all people brought very different, and valuable, strengths to the table,” he says. “The men and women I spoke to did not present one standard version of AI fluency. They brought different routes in, different instincts and different experiences, and ultimately different kinds of value," he adds.

“What we valued most was that both had grounding in respected industry crafts, and had expanded their output and capabilities with AI. That is what we are interested in, not AI-natives replacing craft, but professionals using AI to enhance it,” says Hilditch.

Effie Kanyua, award-winning founder of We Are Warrior PR agency and founder of LILA Assistant, an ethical AI platform for PRs and business owners, puts it clearly. “The PR industry is at risk of repeating a familiar mistake, assuming that the person most visibly excited about a new technology is the person best placed to use it." She added: "AI capability is not a personality type, and it is certainly not a demographic. Some of the most thoughtful, practical AI work I see happening in communications right now is being done by people who combine genuine critical thinking with lived experience of what good PR actually looks like." Kanyua also highlighted how that combination matters far more than who is loudest in the room about AI. "If we let hiring decisions be shaped by a narrow idea of what an "AI person" looks like, we will miss exactly the type of people who are curious about AI and are experimenting with ways to enhance their roles using AI that can therefore add real value to a business.”

AI capability is not a personality type

That observation, “AI capability is not a personality type,” really should sit at the centre of this debate.

It’s also why organisations like Women in PR UK have recognised this perception issue and acted on it, including running practical AI confidence-building sessions with AI expert and former journalist Harriet Meyer to help comms pros strengthen both their confidence and competence in using AI.

PR does not need exclusive AI talent that can simply produce more content – it needs people who understand reputation, timing, trust, culture, audience psychology, media dynamics, commercial pressure, brand risk, and crucially someone who has people skills. The skills that have always separated average comms professionals from brilliant ones become critical when AI is factored into the workflow.

Experience still matters, and it has no expiration date. Critical thinking matters too. The real skill is knowing when AI has added something useful, when it needs challenging, and when the work should be killed entirely.

The questions we should be asking

There is also a temptation in every technology shift to reward whoever moves fastest. And in communications, speed without judgement can create noise at best and reputational damage at worst. A smart AI user in PR is not necessarily the person with the longest tool stack. It is the person who knows what good looks like before a tool gets anywhere near it.

This has implications far beyond standalone AI roles. We already know AI literacy has become part of the baseline for account management, but also media strategy, planning, content, crisis, internal communications and leadership. I use it as a yardstick too. But the better hiring question isn’t just: “Can this person use AI?” It’s: “Can this person use AI well, in context, and with judgement?”

Women in UK comms are already building, experimenting and applying AI in ways that solve real business problems. Some are creating platforms. Some are redesigning workflows. Some are using AI to interrogate audience assumptions, sharpen strategy or improve creative development. And many are doing it without branding themselves as “AI people”.

So before we decide what an “AI person” looks like, we should ask a more uncomfortable question.

Who have we already stopped seeing?