Earlier this year, I attended a conference where Dan Schulman (the former president and CEO of PayPal) was the headliner. He talked about AI and all of the things you can do with it. While his underlying message was that AI is coming at us faster than we can almost keep up and you need to get on board, he used his time to scare the poop out of people. What most people heard was, “AI is going to replace you in the next three years.”
While he DID say that, it wasn’t entirely what he meant. Will AI replace you if you stick your head in the sand and not use it? For sure. Will it replace most of us? Of course not!
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report confirms this reality: while AI may displace 85 million jobs globally, it’s expected to create 97 million new ones. And here’s the good news for you—only 14% of our tasks are considered highly automatable.
A recent study predicted that AI with replace jobs involving repetitive tasks, such as data entry, and routine analysis, such as cashiers, telemarketers, data entry clerks, and customer service agents. That same study showed that AI will augment many jobs, including creative services, which is where we fall in.
Augment. Not replace. And truth be told, I’m totally fine with that! AI has made me so much more productive in the past 18 months. I no longer procrastinate deep work that requires a lot of my brain power because AI gets me started. It’s far easier for me to work from something on the screen than a blank sheet of paper.
Your job, then, is to get as familiar with it as you can and begin to use it in myriad ways to augment the work that you do, within the guidelines of your organization, of course. You can also use it to augment many things in your life—like writing notes, building trip itineraries, creating a weekly meal plan, and more—though it still doesn’t do your laundry or dishes.
Where AI Is Already Helping Communicators
When I started my career, I had to manually create media lists, use actual scissors and glue to paste stories onto paper that would then be placed in a binder for clip books, and read publications, watch TV, and listen to the radio to manually compile results.
Can you imagine? It was so inefficient! Software then made things so much easier—and now AI is doing the same.
According to Muck Rack’s State of PR Report, 75% of PR professionals are already using AI tools in their work, with ChatGPT being the most popular (88% adoption among AI users).
Getting Started with Writing
I mentioned earlier that overcoming the dreaded blank page syndrome is one of the most immediate benefits. Whether I’m drafting a pitch, a plan, job descriptions, or even this article, I’ve found that asking AI to create an initial outline or rough draft gives me something tangible to work with. From there, I can inject my expertise and experience, our brand voice, and my strategic thinking.
Let me give you an example. Before I wrote this article, I prompted ChatGPT with, “Please provide an outline of an article about whether or not AI can really replace communicators. I’d like to do a deep dive into where AI enhances PR work and where human expertise remains irreplaceable.”
It gave me an outline that I then took to Claude (which I have trained better for Spin Sucks content) and prompted it with the exact same thing. It gave me an outline that was pretty similar, but had some things I liked that ChatGPT didn’t have.
So I copied that outline, went back to ChatGPT, and said, “Please combine your outline with this one.” Then, I pasted the Claude outline into the chat.
Then I wrote my intro. Once that was finished, I went back to ChatGPT and prompted it with, “Here is how I started the article. How does it change your outline?”
It gave me some additional things to consider, including adding pro tips and exercises to each section (which you will read in just a second!). With those tips, I sat down to write.
It took me longer to tell you what I did than to actually do it. And it got me started with a bang!
Other Ways to Use AI
AI isn’t just for writing, though. It excels at processing vast amounts of information quickly, and repurposing and scheduling content, analyzing coverage, monitoring social media, building highly targeted media lists, fast research, personalization at scale, competitive analysis, crisis simulation, and helping you create your crystal ball by analyzing trends and predicting the future.
According to the Global Communications Report by USC Annenberg, communicators are quickly adopting AI for specific functions: 54% use it for content creation, 41% for data analysis, and 36% for monitoring media.
This means your life is about to get lots easier because AI excels at tasks that are repetitive, data-heavy, or require processing large volumes of information.
AI Pro Tips and Exercises
I promised I would use ChatGPT’s very good idea to give you pro tips and exercises. Here are the first few!
First, pro tips.
Start small with AI adoption. Choose one repetitive task you dislike and see if AI can help streamline it. Most see the biggest initial wins with first drafts and research, like I did with this episode. Don’t try to revolutionize your entire workflow overnight—pick low-hanging fruit first and build confidence.
Another pro tip is to create templates for your repetitive tasks (news releases, pitches, social posts, blog post outlines) that you can feed to AI with specific parameters to maintain your brand voice and style.
The more guidance you provide upfront, the better the output. Whenever someone tells me AI gave them a crappy response, I always respond with, “User error!” It’s not the AI. It’s you.
Now I have two exercises for you!
The first is to choose an upcoming piece of content and ask an AI tool to create an outline based on your key messages. Then, ask it to generate three different introductory paragraphs using different tones (formal, conversational, and direct).
Compare these to your usual approach—what’s better or worse? How could you combine both methods to create something stronger than either approach alone?
The other thing you can do is identify three admin tasks you do weekly that take at least 30 minutes each.
Test using AI to handle one and measure the time saved and quality difference. Be specific about what you want the AI to produce.
For instance, instead of prompting, “Write a social post about our new product,” try “Write three LinkedIn posts announcing our new product that highlight its sustainability features, include relevant statistics from our news release, and end with a clear call to action.”
Super fun, right?
AI Won’t Replace Communicators
For all its impressive capabilities, AI has clear limitations when it comes to the work we do.
AI lacks real-world experience and cultural understanding. It can process information but doesn’t truly comprehend context like humans do.
To boot, the work we do is fundamentally built on relationships with journalists, influencers, stakeholders, clients, and the public. This is perhaps the most significant area where AI falls short. Until AI can do my dishes and my laundry, I’m not at all worried about it taking over my relationships.
And, while AI excels at pattern recognition and can make predictions based on historical data, true strategic thinking requires more.
We recently planned a campaign for a client entering a completely new market category. There was no historical data to draw from, which meant AI would not be at all helpful.
The strategy was successful because of our creative thinking, business instinct, and the ability to synthesize disparate insights into something new—capabilities that remain firmly in the human domain.
And…we have the small issue that anything AI creates is pretty sucky, even if you know how to prompt it correctly.
A Morning Consult poll showed that 65% of consumers could identify AI-generated content, with 73% saying they trust it less than human-created content.
This is because, while AI creates great outlines and helps you brainstorm effectively, its content is never as good as what we can create. It always makes me laugh when I publish content to LinkedIn and someone uses AI to summarize the article and write their comment.
I want to respond, “I know AI wrote this for you, you lazy butt.” Instead, I don’t respond at all (so if I don’t respond to you on LinkedIn, now you know why!), but I have lots of friends who will call those people out.
Don’t use AI to write your content or your comments. We all know that’s what you’re doing. Worse, the search engines know you’re doing it, too, and will penalize you.
Last but not least, AI is not good at storytelling, which is the backbone of what we do. Storytelling isn’t just about arranging facts—it’s about connecting with audiences on an emotional level. It draws from human experience, empathy, and creativity.
AI Pro Tips and Exercises
Certainly, these aren’t all of the things AI cannot do, but it’s a good start and should give you some confidence to use AI to your advantage and not be scared about it.
Now for some pro tips and exercises.
My first tip is to use AI as your first draft machine—and then apply the “human filter.”
Develop a mental checklist of questions: does this consider all stakeholders? Is this culturally sensitive? Would a real person actually say this? Does this align with our values?
These are the questions AI won’t ask itself.
My second tip is to create an “AI boundaries” document for your team that clearly defines which communications absolutely require human creation and review versus which can leverage AI assistance.
For example, you might decide that crisis communications, executive quotes, and messages addressing sensitive social issues always need human authorship, while social media content calendars and media monitoring summaries can be AI-assisted.
Having these boundaries clearly documented prevents misuse and ensures AI is applied appropriately.
With those in mind, a couple of things you can do right now.
First, ask AI to write a response to a hypothetical crisis for your organization. Then rewrite it yourself.
Note what elements the AI missed regarding tone, stakeholder concerns, and brand voice. Pay special attention to how the AI handles expressions of empathy, responsibility, and next steps.
This contrast will highlight exactly where your human expertise adds critical value.
Lastly, take a recent piece of coverage about your organization (or a client) and ask AI to analyze the sentiment and key messages. Then perform your own analysis.
Compare the results, particularly noting where the AI missed subtext, industry jargon, or implicit meaning.
This comparison will help you understand where AI analysis tools are reliable and where human interpretation is essential. This is particularly valuable for helping you determine when to trust AI-powered sentiment analysis tools in your media monitoring.
AI Won’t Replace You—But Someone Who Uses It Will
Remember Dan Schulman’s warning that had everyone sweating in their seats? There was truth in what he said, but not in the way most people interpreted it.
The World Economic Forum’s data tells the real story: while AI is reshaping our profession, it’s creating more opportunities than eliminating. Only 14% of our tasks are highly automatable—and those are precisely the tasks most of us would gladly hand over.
AI is exceptional at handling the mundane, repetitive parts of our work—the tasks that have traditionally filled our days but not our souls. It can help with research, first drafts, media monitoring, and data analysis. It can give us a running start when we’re facing the dreaded blank page.
But AI simply cannot replace the core elements that make us valuable: our strategic thinking, relationship-building skills, contextual understanding, ethical judgment, creativity, and authentic storytelling abilities.
The key isn’t to resist AI—it’s to embrace it as a powerful assistant that handles the heavy lifting while you focus on the work that truly matters.
Let AI do what it does best so you can do what you do best.
AI won’t replace you. But the communicator who knows how to use AI effectively might very well replace the one who doesn’t. Which one will you be?
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