What I Learned From Hosting Our First Webinar on AI and PR
By Courtney Glymph, Founder & CEO, YourStory PR
When we first started planning Trust, Visibility and Discovery: Rewriting the Rules of PR in the Age of AI, I wasn't sure exactly what shape the conversation would take. We had three brilliant panellists, a subject that is genuinely top of mind for our industry, and a lot of questions I was personally curious to explore. What I didn't anticipate was how much the discussion would crystallise my own thinking.
I encourage you to watch/listen to the full conversation if you haven’t already, but I wanted to pull out some of my key takeaways of our 90-minute conversation here.
The fundamentals of good PR are now also the fundamentals of AI visibility
Before we even got into tactics, Cara Corbett from SUSO set up something that kept coming back throughout the session. AI tools don’t surface brands randomly. They look for trusted, consistent, well-structured information, for authority signals, and if you strip that back, it’s exactly what good PR has always aimed to produce.
"Earned media definitely has the chance to own this domain. PR has the chance to own this domain."
Cara Corbett, Partner Growth Manager, SUSO
The discipline of building credibility through third-party voices, placing clients in authoritative publications, and creating consistent narratives is directly transferable to an AI-first world. While the mechanics of discovery might have changed, the things that algorithms look for (authority, consistency and credibility) are the same fundamentals that good PR has always been built on.
Cara's practical suggestion of running your brand through every AI tool available and simply asking 'what do you know about us?' is something I'd encourage every client conversation to include right now. What comes back tells you a great deal about how your brand is being represented, where the gaps are, and whether your messaging is landing consistently enough to be picked up and repeated.
Journalists are under more pressure than most of us realise
Chris Stokel-Walker brought a perspective to the session that I think every PR professional needs to hear more often. Journalism is contracting, newsrooms are smaller, editors are more selective, and, in that environment, AI has arrived, making an already difficult situation considerably worse.
"The quality barrier gets higher and higher. It’s not that PRs aren’t doing it right. It’s just that as the pressures increase on journalists, having that kind of quality in a pitch becomes ever more pressing."
Chris Stokel-Walker, Freelance Journalist
The pitches that cut through are the ones that require the least work to understand, with a clear angle, a story that is already mostly there, and a line that maps to something the journalist has covered before. What Chris was describing is a bar that has risen not because journalists have become harder to please, but because they have less time and fewer resources to excavate a story from a poorly constructed pitch.
Chris also made a distinction that I think is worth dwelling on. He runs a local LLM that trawls 1,000 RSS feeds every 15 minutes and surfaces stories that might interest him. He uses AI for discovery, not for writing, and he draws that line deliberately. For those of us building AI strategies for our clients, that distinction between using AI to find and filter versus to produce is one we should apply with equal care.
"AI is more an accelerant of what was already going on before. The bad habits are becoming entrenched, and the scale of the problems is becoming greater."
Chris Stokel-Walker, Freelance Journalist
If AI is accelerating existing problems rather than creating entirely new ones, the response isn’t to reinvent everything. The relationships we build with journalists, the genuine understanding of what makes a story, the care taken over language in a pitch, none of that is less important. If anything, it’s the thing that now separates average PR from excellent PR.
AI is exposing inconsistency, and that's a good thing for brands willing to look
Danielle Le Toullec's section of the conversation was the one that probably generated the most to think about from a strategic and tactical standpoint. Her framing of LLMs as 'the world's most influential editors' was one of those lines that lands differently the more you sit with it.
"LLMs don't care about your org chart. They don't care about your brand ad. What they care about is the consistency in what you say and what others are saying about you."
Danielle Le Toullec, CMO, Erevena
She’s right, and it has a direct implication for how we approach client work. If a brand is saying one thing on their website, a slightly different thing in a press release, and something else again in a byline, an AI tool will surface something muddled. AI has no editorial instinct (or at least none that we’re aware of right now) and simply reflects the signal it finds.
Danielle also pushed back on the assumption that AI-first thinking means starting from scratch. The funnel still exists, the paid, owned, earned model still applies, and what has shifted is the weight placed on earned. What third parties say about a brand now carries more signal than what the brand says about itself.
She gave the example of the Forest Bikes campaign, built off the back of an old street market jingle, tested organically and then amplified with paid, which went viral on TikTok within days. The insight came from listening, not from a big budget, and that kind of creativity and lateral thinking, the ability to spot a moment and move on it, is something AI cannot replicate, and something smaller agencies can genuinely compete on.
The next generation of comms professionals need honest guidance
Chris was candid about his journalism students. They're scared of what AI means for their careers, and understandably so. But he made a point I thought was worth sharing directly.
"If you completely forswear AI and say, 'I'm never going to use it', you are going to be replaced by AI. If you love it and let it replace everything you do, you are going to lose the skills you've developed."
Chris Stokel-Walker, Freelance Journalist
It’s a point that applies well beyond journalism, and for anyone starting out in PR and comms right now, the same binary exists. Danielle’s suggestion of getting together with an accountability buddy, or even hosting your own informal AI workshop, is worth taking seriously. The divide between those who engage with AI and those who don’t is going to grow, and it will not benefit the people who are earlier in their careers if those who know more don’t share what they’re learning.
Cara's closing point captured the energy I want to hold onto from the session. We really are in a new era, and for those of us in PR and comms, this doesn’t have to be an existential threat to our business models. It is, however, the right time to evolve and expand what an integrated PR and communications offering looks like to take advantage of an evolving media (and mediums) landscape.
What I'm taking back to the team
Running this webinar reinforced something I already believed but can now say with more conviction: the brands that show up consistently across every channel, every publication, every piece of content, are the ones AI tools will surface. For anyone with a good grasp of the fundamentals of PR, that's not a revelation. What's changed is the consequence of getting it wrong.
My thanks to Cara, Chris, and Danielle for giving up their time and for being so generous with what they know. And to everyone who joined us live, and those who'll watch the recording, I hope it gave you something useful to take back to your teams.
If you're an external communications or marketing professional thinking about how to adapt your strategy for an AI-first world, we'd be glad to have that conversation. It's one we're having with our clients every day, and we're still learning, just like everyone else.