AI is everywhere. It dominates headlines, drives conversations and is transforming industries across the board. No sector is untouched, and the PR industry is no exception.
What agencies do, how they engage audiences and how they create value is being reshaped before their eyes.
In a world moving this fast, standing still isn’t an option, and those who recognise the shift first have the chance to define what modern PR looks like.
Sam Barber was one of the first to spot the potential. Experimenting early with sandbox versions of well-known AI platforms, he saw how the technology could change the way PR agencies operate. That insight became the foundation for Pitchr.ai, an AI-powered PR and consulting company focused exclusively on financial services.
But the value of AI isn’t standalone, he says. Its impact has to be understood against a backdrop of wider change in the PR and media industry. Traditional media is shrinking. While there are some success stories, the overall trend is one of contraction.
At the same time, new platforms are emerging, shifting how audiences consume content and fragmenting attention across channels. These changes make life harder for PR teams because securing coverage for clients is no longer straightforward.
“I was witnessing increasingly the standard way of results in terms of securing coverage for clients was becoming much, much harder,” he says.
“I was starting to see the average length tenure of a client decline. Usually, you could expect to hold them for several years but that was reducing because it’s increasingly hard to get value.”
It was against this backdrop of industry disruption that AI began to catch Barber’s attention.
“I started experimenting with AI four years ago, even before ChatGPT was launched as I came across a sandbox mode of it,” he says.
From the start, he recognised that AI wasn’t just a tool for doing the same tasks faster, such as building or checking media lists, drafting press releases, it also had the potential to transform how PR itself operates.
“When I found an early version of ChatGPT, I started playing around and thought this is unbelievable. I sent it to my CEO and said this is going to change our industry and then a few months later, ChatGPT launched,” he says.
With these forces converging, PR is undergoing a fundamental shift. However, Barber stresses that the role of the industry isn’t disappearing, it’s evolving.
“There was a big debate about a year ago around PR is dead. No, that’s not going to happen,” he says. “I started to really think about what is the value prop of a PR agency in today’s world? It can’t just be we immediately secure media hits.”
Indeed, success in PR today goes far beyond media hits. For most companies, relying solely on traditional media relations is no longer enough. Agencies now need to offer a more holistic, multi-faceted approach to deliver real value in a world where the media landscape – and the way audiences engage with it – is constantly shifting.
The AI advantage
When it comes to the value of AI for PR agencies, Barber stresses that the focus has to be on the back end. Too often, people get caught up in the “enter prompt into ChatGPT or Claude, get output, send output” aspect of AI, he says.
However there needs to be more focus on the broader workflow of the account and how AI can be used more efficiently to automate a lot of the workflows that go behind the scenes of a PR agency to really recognise the value of the technology.
This includes using the technology for media list creation and research, or during a call to have actions automated and sent to clients.
“If you look at the account executive, the most junior role, a lot of the role and responsibility that they do, AI can now automate and do so more accurately and do it quicker,” he notes.
Barber acknowledges that can understandably be a worrying thought for people. Therefore, he stresses that the job isn’t going away, the role just evolves as there will always be a need for human oversight, judgement and creative thinking.
“The most successful people in the industry will be the people who have really good ideas and can work with AI,” he says. “That’s how those people are going to separate themselves.”
In practice, AI doesn’t dramatically change the process. Anything it produces still needs to be reviewed by a team member, just as if another colleague had drafted it. The difference is that the review stage now takes much less time.
Beyond workflow efficiency, certain AI-enabled tools are already proving valuable in showing the tangible impact of PR. AI search, in particular, allows agencies to connect their work to metrics that resonate with clients, Barber adds.
“PR for a long time has been searching for more data and more metrics to show its value. AI search is one area where I absolutely can show a real positive impact on the visibility of a company,” he says.
Tools like Searchable, Peak, and Profound allow clients to see how often and how prominently their brands appear in AI-generated answers for key queries.
By using these tools, agencies can show results like: “Your AI search visibility was at X% vs competitors, and after our work it’s now at Y%.”
This kind of metric is far more business-relevant than simply counting coverage hits. It connects directly to discovery, consideration and trust, which are the areas that matter most in a world where audiences increasingly rely on AI to find information.
Turning efficiency into client value
The time saved by automating workflows translates directly into value for clients, because it gives PR teams more space to focus on what really matters: spending time with clients.
By removing the back-end bottlenecks, agencies can dedicate more attention to strategy, ideas, and building relationships. This means clients get better access to senior team members, richer experiences, and stronger creative thinking.
“One of the biggest gripes that people will say about working with a PR agency is that the senior people were there at the beginning and then they disappear,” Barber says. “They disappear, not because they don’t care, but because they don’t have time.”
AI doesn’t just free up time, it can also create real business outcomes for clients. Barber points out that it can help drive impact across the funnel, from lead generation to audience engagement—whether on a client’s website, LinkedIn, or other channels.
And importantly, AI gives agencies more ways to measure and demonstrate that impact, turning abstract PR activity into concrete, business-relevant results.
Moving with the times
With the media landscape shifting, AI advancing, and its value becoming increasingly clear for both PR agencies and their clients, Barber warns that agencies cannot afford to stand still.
Those who resist adopting AI aren’t just missing out on efficiencies or new capabilities, they risk falling behind in an industry that moves fast.
“The amount of times I would say ‘why didn’t you use AI for this’ and the answer of ‘well I don’t like AI’ just isn’t going to fly anymore,” he says.
“I’ve seen real technological luddites come around and they might not like it, but recognising that the commodity that you’re selling is essentially time. If you can cut time, then you can make money.”
As the landscape continues to evolve, agencies that adapt naturally find new ways to deliver value, combining technology with human creativity.
Those that stay static risk watching the world move past them, not because the work has changed, but because the way it gets done – and the expectations of clients – has.