Reflections on the AI for Public Relations Conference 2026 – it’s still ALL about the people

In 2017 I completed a piece of research on ‘The impact of digital communications on expectations of senior PR and communications leaders in the Irish market’. It was a story of communicators missing the starting gate on SEO, data analytics and social media. Instead, I found that “the questioning about digital methods has become a proxy for airing the challenges the industry has itself with finding a voice and articulating its value to those whose business it is trying to win.”

That learning echoed with me when Paul Conneally told the PRII National Conference a year later that the communications sector was substantially at risk of “sleepwalking into AI”, Around the same time the Chartered Institute of PR in the UK (CIPR) produced a seminal review[i] ‘Humans still needed;’ which concluded that within five years AI would be fully competent to complete about 35% of the work that was mapped as being within the scope of public relations by the Global Body of Knowledge (GBOK) project which described over 50 skills and abilities needed to practice public relations[ii].    

Against that backdrop I have read, watched, listened to, and – where possible – attended at every opportunity since to not to be that sleepwalker.

In our instantly changeable, re-directable, re-programmable world it may seem counter intuitive that a book could capture the momentum in the progress of AI. Knowing its editors and a number of the contributors however I was drawn to the potential of the recently published (May 2026) ‘AI for Public Relations’[iii] to do just that. I was further reassured that those involved were happy to take the thinking behind the book into a public discussion at a dedicated full day  conference[iv].

In an echo of the 2017 research, my first take on the book was to remark how a notable number of the contributions are reflections on where public relations as a whole sits just now. Public relations is still questioning itself. What is its place and role? How do we recognise and attribute its contribution and value? How do we plan for it, organise for it, govern it? That we are now focussed on those questions through the prism of AI highlights its significance for practitioners.

As I read the final ‘future of public relations’ section of the book, I found myself concluding that the way to see AI is as ‘an’ intelligence in the room. It is not THE intelligence. Yes, there are things that can now be automated where previously it was not considered possible, but it has been so since the arrival of the steam engine. AI, like all technology, only adds value alongside the human, when it is ‘part of’ augmenting or enhancing the value of expertise.

The conference, which took place last week in London, put that proposition under sustained pressure with contributions from practitioners, researchers, technologists and a few deliberately contrarian voices.

There were some ‘how to’ type sessions – of which the standout was a presentation from Golin Ketchum’s Jonny Bentwood on ‘GenAI visibility’ – but the core of the day was to move how we think about AI in the communications workplace  - what role and purpose, governance, policies, procurement and deployment.

The overall context is clear. It is more than "AI is a useful tool." Tools sit in toolboxes. AI instead is changing the frame through which we approach problems. This is a paradigm shift. The environment around us is doing things differently.

The risk, we were told, repeatedly, is that communicators adopt the new frame uncritically, not just to complete tasks but to make sense of context and apply judgment in decision making.

The question of personal agency ran underneath almost everything. Two phrases in an early panel discussion involving current CIPR President Farzana Baduel and globally renowned academic Professor Anne Gregory highlighted the point: "humans in the loop" and "data-led decision making."  Their take was emphatic. The language of AI adoption, they warned, can reassign agency without anyone noticing. Communicators should be decision-makers, not participants in someone else's loop.

The journalist Chris Stokel-Walker, put a complementary point, describing how AI agents now sort, score, and pre-filter the pitches arriving in his inbox. "No automated pitch should go out unless a named human can defend why that journalist received it."  Agency and accountability are two sides of the same coin.

Those contributing to ‘AI for Public Relations’ were clearly advocates but there was no sense of the fanboy or girl  either. In both the book and at the conference it comes across clearly that we have to be intentional. Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should.

For example, in his session on measurement, Paul Hender, a 30-year veteran of the field, showed research on brand exposure though AI search. It challenged the integrity and value of measurement efforts to date around a system that is fundamentally probabilistic and non-replicable. There is not yet a means of measurement and attribution that is capable of meeting the transparency standards that the PR sector is trying to build through the Barcelona Principles.

A discussion on governance likewise highlighted that for every thoughtful, iterative example of policy-making on the use of AI, built on communities of practice, prompt libraries and a culture of transparency about what AI is being used for, and how, there are also settings that enable shadow AI, with gaps in accountability and no process to validate outputs. Building good policy into behaviour over just having the policy written is a  distinction that communicators need to take seriously.

With that as a point of reference, making the best of AI, as with digital transformation before it, will be about people and culture, not technology. Unsurprisingly too, the issues facing both are similar – oversight, technical confidence, and the willingness to learn by ‘doing.’

The conference confirmed that AI cannot replace the fundamentals of good communication. It cannot think for you, only with you. It can collate and filter, see patterns and select but it cannot reliably make sense of things, provide context for what is happening, what is being said, to whom it matters, and what it means.

In the final rallying call of his session, Golin Ketchum’s Bentwood, implored the communications community to “get on with it,” to stop contemplating and start doing – even tiny steps.

The lessons of the book and the conference is that as practitioners we have to do that and take responsibility, for ourselves and for the impact of what we do. If we don’t how can we demand that others take us more seriously. That is how we articulate our value.

AI for Public Relations edited by Ben Verinder and Stephen Waddington is published by Kogan Page