Dan Kahn is the president and CEO of Kahn Media.
With AI-powered tools like ChatGPT and Adobe AI proliferating the market, I’ve observed that some company leaders are weighing whether they should downsize their PR and marketing departments and replace them with such tools—and if so, to what extent.
Against the backdrop of current economic uncertainty, these deliberations may become more commonplace as companies seek to curb spending. That’s understandable. AI-powered tools have made it easier to perform many functions, such as content creation, video editing and media monitoring. And sure, theoretically, a company downsizing its PR and marketing team and relying more heavily on AI-powered tools could work, especially for startups and solopreneurs with limited budgets. But I posit this: A tool is only as effective as the person wielding it. Treating AI-powered tools as wholesale replacements for PR and marketing, rather than accelerants, is a risky move.
Why AI-Powered Tools Aren’t Replacements For Human Strategy, Expertise And Oversight
An analogy I like to use for overreliance on AI-powered tools is deciding to fix a flickering light fixture at home by yourself instead of calling an electrician. You can purchase a spool of wire, wire strippers, some crimps, a soldering iron and a bunch of solder. But if you don’t know how to properly use any of them, if you don’t know how to diagnose what’s happening in the first place, if you don’t understand how DC and AC power work, having these tools at your disposal won’t do anything for you. To get the best result—and to avoid the risk of electrocution—you’re better off hiring an electrician who can pinpoint why your light fixture is flickering and use the right tools in the right way to fix the problem.
Similarly, say a pet product brand wants to save money. To do so, the company’s executive team decides to primarily run AI-driven marketing campaigns and downsize the marketing department. However, the few people left don’t have copywriting or copyediting expertise, and they don’t catch the stilted copy that the company’s generative AI tool of choice produces. In turn, the copy the company puts in front of its target customers fails to resonate with them, and DTC sales drop. If there’s no sound underlying strategy and expertise, and no proper oversight, overreliance on AI can produce poor results. AI-generated content requires human strategy, expertise and oversight to maintain quality, align with a brand’s voice and ultimately resonate with a brand’s target audience.
The Risk Of Alienating Consumers With AI-Generated Content
An overreliance on AI-generated content could also put brands at risk of alienating consumers.
Consider this: when the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Sonata Insights “surveyed 300 Gen Z/Millennial consumers and 75 advertising industry executives” in 2024, they found that “Gen Z and Millennial consumers are less likely than advertisers to have positive sentiments toward businesses that create ads using gen AI—a feeling that was especially strong among Gen Zers.” In fact, the research uncovered that “consumers were more likely to perceive brands that use gen AI to create ads in a negative light—such as ‘inauthentic’ or ‘unethical’—compared to industry respondents.”
Additionally, research by NielsenIQ (NIQ) published in 2024 found that “AI-generated ads—even those perceived as ‘high quality’—elicited weaker memory activation in the brain, compared to traditional ads. This reaction suggests a misalignment between the content and existing memory structures—a gap that could impede consumers’ motivation to act.”
In my view, leaders should heed the results of these studies. That’s not to say that there’s no place for AI-powered tools in PR and marketing, but rather, that approaching AI-powered tools as wholesale replacements is a risky gamble as far as audience perception goes.
How To Use AI-Powered Tools
Instead of approaching AI-powered tools as wholesale replacements in PR and marketing, I recommend leaders use them as accelerants and efficiency boosters.
AI, in my experience, is great for PR and marketing tasks such as ideation, research and other ways of supplementing content creation. Starting with ideation, instead of a marketer spending, say, an hour trying to brainstorm 10 different blog post topics, they could prompt a GenAI solution and get 10 potential topics in a matter of minutes. As for research, at my firm, we’ve created a walled garden with ChatGPT for training and onboarding—we’ve uploaded our handbooks, SOP documents and reference materials so that our employees can turn to them whenever they need guidance on how to navigate an issue. Instead of spending hours hunting down that information in multiple PDFs, they can ask questions in the walled garden and quickly get answers. Finally, when it comes to other ways of supplementing content creation, AI-powered tools can be effective for tasks such as basic video editing, modifying existing content for different platforms and audiences and building storyboards.
Ultimately, my advice to any leader considering the use of AI-powered tools in PR and marketing is to treat them as accelerants, not replacements. Having a team with expertise in the psychology of marketing and selling, PR storytelling, brand building, strategy formation and so forth is crucial for guidance while using AI-powered tools—it’ll help you avoid getting electrocuted.
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