#WomensMonth | AI's opportunity for women in PR
Public relations has always been a people-powered industry.
We build relationships. We read the room. We manage competing personalities. We know when we need to be assertive, when to listen, and sometimes the best advice that we can offer to a client is to say nothing at all.
For many years now, these capabilities have been labelled as “soft skills”.
Though important, they are often secondary to the more tangible work of communications, such as writing the press release, securing the media interview, overseeing the campaign and compiling a media coverage report.
However, the industry is evolving, and so is the importance of these skills.
AI can already write a press release in a matter of seconds. It can summarise coverage, analyse sentiment and create content. Tasks that historically took communications teams hours to complete can be done in a matter of minutes.
This is not to say that PR professionals are less valuable. But it has forced us to think about where our true value is.
Because AI can generate a response, it cannot tell you whether sending that response may be the right thing to do.
AI cannot fully understand the context or history behind a difficult stakeholder relationship, sense whether an executive is ready for an interview, or navigate the politics behind a brief, or even identify if what the client is requesting is what the business actually needs.
This requires judgement. And judgment has become the PR industry’s hardest currency.
Managing a business relationship
The woman who is managing the client relationship is not just “good with people”; she is managing a business relationship.
Her anticipation of how employees, media, or customers might respond to a business decision is not just empathy, but she’s identifying what becomes a reputational risk.
Challenging corporate messaging is not just rewriting the words, but she is providing counsel.
Recognising women’s skills
I think that the evolution required isn’t based on women having to develop a new set of skills, but about recognising, articulating, and building on the commercial value of the skills that we already practice daily.
While technical capability is important, the PR and communications professional of the future will need to adapt to AI, understand data, analytics, business strategy and the fragmented media and creator landscape.
Discussing business objectives should feel like a natural rhythm to discussing headlines.
As technology takes care of the doing, our value will be in the thinking.
#WomensMonth | Why women need to be thought leaders
Earning our seat
For women in PR, the opportunity today is not to simply become better communicators, but for us to move away from being seen as the people who execute communication, to the people who organisations and business leaders consult before making the decision on what to communicate in the first place.
As an industry, we have been talking about earning our seat at the table for years. Maybe the next evolution is recognising that the skills required at the table are the ones that we were told were soft.
