How PR is using AI: food for thought

Last week (2 July 2025) PRmoment hosted its second AI in PR Masterclass, which saw delegates attending, both in-person and online, to hear what speakers had to say about the latest trends, discussions and advancements in AI.

The one-day event, hosted at London’s Kings Place events began with light networking over pastries and coffee, before attendees took their seats for a day of learning and insight from PR professionals at the forefront of AI use.

Here’s some of the highlights and key takeaways from the day:

AI delivers gains for journalists

Delivering her talk, How AI is changing journalism, Harriet Meyer, financial journalist and AI trainer said that: “Authenticity is going to be really important. One thing we can't do anymore, which you will have probably seen stories about recently, is using stock photos on case study features, because people just think AI.”

When asked how the media will make money she suggested: “People are talking about sub-stacks and all sorts of things, but I feel like the awareness [amongst publishers] is really starting to grow.”

But, on the subject of whether Meyer would like AI to be trusted so she can use it, or mistrusted so she doesn’t have to compete, she said: “Trusted, because I think it's incredibly powerful and actually offers new opportunities”.

Could AI change the agency pyramid?

Nathan McDonald, co-founder and former group CEO at We Are Social, discussed the impact of AI on the agency business model.

He said: “We should think about AI as a co-worker. This is cognitive labour done by digital agents, and that's a fundamental shift [in thinking] for agencies especially, but also for brands. And, it means we need to think about the business model and how we actually create value and get compensated for the work we do.”

But, McDonald added that creating a pricing structure for human and AI work could impact junior positions, as its core work would be “junior-level” tasks.

“We're starting to see less and less junior roles available,” said McDonald.

“I think the bottom of the pyramid will start to shrink, because you really need to supervise the AI at the moment, and who's better to supervise? People with more experience and seniority. So the labour structure and shape of an agency will start to change as we use AI more.”

A consumer confidence crisis

Discussing the link between AI and the plummeting cost of assets, Priti Mhatre, chief AI and product officer at Hogarth/WPP made some daunting predictions in her talk, AI in content production.

“The cost of assets is diminishing, and is going to be near zero very soon. So, how do we drive value and create value in this world where the cost of assets is nearing to zero?

“What that leads to is what we've all seen probably in the last 18 months or so; we don't know what is AI generated and what is human generated. We've seen consumers are starting to distrust and are looking at ads skeptically, which means there is an authenticity crisis, and an erosion of consumer trust.

“Stories which are used to touch hearts, consumers are now looking at [an ad wondering if it is] AI generated, or if that human is real.”

“Enough of that, you bearded geek”

During his talk, Is LLM optimisation the biggest opportunity for PR in the last 20 years, Daryll Sparey MD and co-founder of Hard Numbers suspected the audience thought he was a “big bearded geek” as he ran through how he compiled Hard Numbers’ AI research findings.

“We wanted to find out how much traditional and digital media shaped corporate reputation on LLMs. We wanted to do research that focuses on the 100 biggest companies in the world, and focus on key reputation traits like trust, quality, innovation and value for money.

“We got the list of 100 most significant companies in the world from Forbes, then built our reputation model based on the four traits I talked about: quality, trust value for money and innovation.

We then asked Chat GPT hat it knew in relation to each of these four traits about those hundred companies via prompts, and we interrogated the prompts to say ‘cite the source, effectively’. On top of that we said what were those sources, as in editorial, media, earned media, was it awards, a press release, and so on.”

AI images for commercial use?

During his talk, The legalities of using AI sourced content in your communications: text, video, audio or an image, media and technology lawyer Luke English gave insight into his terms and conditions deep dive on AI image creation tools, including Midjourney.

“I couldn't find any reference to any commercial use, so if you're using Midjourney to create images and putting it out there, it doesn't look like you're allowed to. [There’s also no] reference to copyright. But, what it does say is that it owns your output.”

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