AI in PR: What juniors need from you | Presspage | Presspage

PR professionals often explain how they learned the ropes with a hint of nostalgia. The hours spent compiling media lists, monitoring coverage, and Googling journalists.

But we shouldn't confuse time-consuming work with valuable learning. Nobody needs to spend an afternoon formatting a media list if AI can do it in minutes, and I'm fairly certain most juniors would happily skip that particular rite of passage.

Still, those tasks taught skills that weren't always obvious at the time. Compiling media lists taught juniors which outlets mattered to different audiences, while drafting statements from scratch forced them to consider how every word might be interpreted. The work was tedious, but the thinking behind it mattered.

Samuel Hall, who has spent 25 years in PR and communications building and working across agency and in-house teams, made that distinction during our webinar. He started his career compiling press cuttings books by hand. Today, he believes AI can help juniors produce media briefing books ten times better than those he created early in his career.

But as he put it:

"Content has become cheap and fast, but judgement remains rare."

In PR, this judgement goes beyond getting the facts right. It's much more about knowing what's appropriate for a particular audience, situation, and moment. Or, in Samuel's words, "making the right call for the right reason at the right time, for the very specific environment that your company or client is in at that time."

Being able to make these decisions comes with experience. And if AI increasingly handles the work juniors once learned from, we need to be more deliberate about how they develop it. To complicate matters further, we often assume younger professionals are naturally AI-savvy, but being comfortable with the technology doesn't mean they've been taught how to apply it in a professional setting.

Tamara Dobeneck, who researches AI adoption in communications at Leipzig University, explained that much of her practical AI knowledge comes from self-education:

"None of the professors can really teach us anything about the practical use of AI."

So juniors are teaching themselves the tools while missing out on some of the traditional opportunities to develop PR judgement. And when senior colleagues fix an AI-generated draft without explaining why, the experience stays with them instead of being passed on.

That's the real judgement gap: we're changing how people work without changing how we help them learn.

Should you invest in AI systems or people?

With 2027 planning underway, many PR leaders face a familiar question: where should we invest, in more AI tools or in the people using them?

You might expect cost to be the deciding factor. Interestingly, when we asked our webinar audience what was holding their teams back from investing in AI systems, nobody named budget. Time was the biggest barrier, followed by knowledge.

Of course, a small poll doesn’t allow us to draw any sweeping conclusions, but it reflects something Samuel is seeing across the industry. Companies are freeing up the money for AI tools, because they don’t want to fall behind. However, finding the time and expertise to put those tools to good use seems to be another matter entirely.

Tamara's research points to a similar disconnect. Outside the tech sector, many companies are still experimenting with AI, despite believing they're further along in their adoption than they actually are.

Perhaps the question, then, isn't whether companies can afford to invest in people, but if they can afford not to.

When I asked Tamara the webinar’s central question, she made the case for investing in people:

"Today's investment of people is tomorrow's leadership, and systems will keep changing and the people who know how to work with them will make the difference."

By the end of the session, we all seemed to agree: investing in AI technology only gets you so far if you're not also developing the skills of the people who use it.

5 ways senior PR leaders can build judgement in their juniors

The good news for senior PR leaders is that there are plenty of opportunities to develop junior talent within the work you're already doing. A little more involvement in decision-making, more open conversations about AI, and the occasional explanation of why you made a particular call can go a long way.

Here are five habits from our conversation that PR leaders can start putting into practice right away.

1. Tell your juniors when not to use AI

Just because AI can do something doesn't mean it should. That's a distinction Samuel makes with his team, encouraging them to start with the work that needs doing and then consider where AI can help, rather than looking for opportunities to use it everywhere from the start.

Take crisis communications. AI might help you research similar incidents, explore different response scenarios, or stress-test a draft statement. But deciding whether to respond publicly, what to say, and when to say it requires an understanding of the situation that goes beyond a well-written prompt.

For Samuel, knowing how to use AI is becoming an expected skill in future talent, much like understanding social media was for an earlier generation of PR professionals. What sets people apart is their ability to recognise when AI is the right tool for the job, and when it isn't.

It's something he also looks for when hiring:

"The person that knows how to apply AI and more importantly when not to apply AI will be the person that gets hired."

But that instinct often takes time to develop. Senior colleagues can help by sharing examples of when they've deliberately chosen not to use AI and explaining what made them draw the line, something that can’t be picked up as easily by self-guided experimentation.

2. Talk ideas through as a team before anyone takes them to AI

AI makes it remarkably easy to turn an idea into a fully developed strategy in minutes. The trouble is that if your starting point is wrong, you can end up a long way off course before anyone notices.

As Samuel pointed out during the webinar:

"AI will never just say, 'I don't know the answer. I'm too tired, it's Friday afternoon, I'll do that on Monday.' It will always reply and try its best."

And because the work moves so quickly, what starts as a small misunderstanding can turn into an entire strategy built on the wrong assumptions. That's why he encourages his team to move from what he calls "single player to multiplayer": bringing people into the thinking process before everyone disappears into their own AI chats.

Even a short conversation can catch a flawed angle early, while giving juniors a chance to see how more experienced colleagues challenge assumptions and make decisions.

3. Compare notes on how you each use AI

One interesting finding from Tamara's research was that AI adoption often starts with individuals rather than company-wide strategies. Someone experiments with a tool, figures out what works, and shares their findings with colleagues.

She explained it as:

"AI transformation is currently often driven by people and not by systems."

But that approach depends on people being willing to compare notes on what they've learned. Samuel has seen how AI expertise can become something people guard rather than pass on:

"I've been in companies where somebody sees the way they're using the tools and terminology as a kind of competitive advantage, and they hold it to themselves.”

And sometimes that reluctance to talk openly about AI starts even earlier, during the recruitment process. It's an interesting disconnect. We're expecting communications professionals to develop their AI skills, but aren't always making space to discuss those skills, even when hiring. And if those conversations aren't happening during recruitment, there's a good chance they're being overlooked within teams, too.

4. Explain why you made the call, not only what to do

I've noticed how much of a PR professional's decision-making becomes second nature with experience. They can spot a problem with a statement or a proposed angle almost instinctively, but explaining why something doesn't work is where the true value lies. 

And it goes both ways. Juniors should also be able to share the thinking behind their AI-assisted work, rather than relying on a polished draft to speak for itself. 

As Samuel explained:

"When I'm given something that looks a little bit too perfect, if I challenge the person on it. I expect them to be able to walk me through that thinking as if they'd written every single word."

The goal isn't to catch anyone out, but to turn feedback into a conversation where both sides can explain their thinking, challenge assumptions, and learn from each other.

5. Protect time to experiment on real work

There's only so much you can learn about AI from training sessions and hypothetical exercises.

Samuel made a strong case for giving juniors ownership of meaningful projects, rather than assigning them exercises that matter little to their day-to-day work. But that also means making room for experimentation in already busy schedules. His advice to managers was to "carve out, respect and defend time for people to just learn and experiment and trial."

Speaking as someone at the beginning of her communications career, Tamara summed it up well:

"Being AI savvy is not the same as being AI wise, and that takes time."

So if you want to make that space, give your juniors the freedom to try new approaches and sometimes get things wrong, with someone experienced there to help make sense of the results.

Where will the next generation of PR leaders come from?

I opened the webinar with a concern about where all this might leave us: what happens if, ten years from now, we're looking for the next generation of communications leaders and realise we forgot to develop them along the way?

It's a legitimate worry, given how much of the work traditionally assigned to juniors AI can now handle. And that's fundamentally changing the path from entry-level PR professional to experienced leader.

But Samuel offered a more optimistic perspective. He believes AI could actually shorten that career path, freeing juniors from repetitive tasks and giving them opportunities to develop more advanced skills earlier in their careers.

Tamara shared that outlook for the future, making it clear that young professionals are willing to play an active role:

"We as young professionals can help shape what the future of communication looks like, provided that companies are willing to involve us in that process.”

I think Tamara makes an important point here. We spend so much time figuring out how AI will change the future of PR that we risk overlooking the people who will actually shape it. They’re already here, eager to learn and contribute. We just need to make sure we’re giving them the chance to do so.

Want to hear the full conversation?

There's plenty more to unpack about how AI is changing the way PR teams work, and what that means for the people behind them.

Watch our AI Leadership in Comms: Should we invest in systems or people? webinar on demand, featuring Samuel Hall from ComplyAdvantage and Tamara Dobeneck from Leipzig University.