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Artificial Intelligence represents a revolution for public relations.
With social listening and monitoring tools, not to mention machine intelligence and unstructured data, artificial intelligence promises to identify trends, track issues, generate sentiment analysis and produce reports in ways that are faster and better than what humans alone can deliver.
Should we sit back, wait for the insights to come to us and distill the best bits for our clients and leadership teams? Is technology alone “good enough” for what communications professionals need now?
Industry insiders and academics predict a radical change in how we define a communications professional. They forecast that 38% of PR skills will be taken over by enhanced artificial intelligence over the next 5 years.
Are machines taking over PR?
Like any tool, artificial intelligence, machine learning and automated platforms enable human expertise to execute more with less, for less and in less time. Like any tool, the technology is limited by the vision, expertise and skill of the person who manages the tool and the job at hand.
“The measurement of PR and communications has come a long way from the ‘thud factor’ of clippings books and piles of cuttings,” says Orla Graham, UK Cision insights manager and AMEC member. “More and more, technology alone can do a lot of heavy lifting—data ingestion and content sourcing that previously required expensive human resources.
In the hands of the right experts, technology can do more than ever before. But simply saying that machines are taking over isn’t