by This byline was originally published in O’Dwyer’s.Â
There’s a question sitting underneath much of the conversation about AI in communications: If anyone can generate content, what actually makes communication valuable?
For years, the public relations industry has treated content creation as both a training ground and an output engine. Junior staff learned by drafting press releases, statements, briefing notes and refining their judgment through repetition and critique. It could often be inefficient, sometimes painful, but ultimately effective. The work itself was the education, an experience enriched by getting colleague feedback and guidance. In fact, it’s the collaborative process of content development that contributes significantly to professional development.
AI disrupts that model completely.
Today, the same early-career stage tasks—drafting, iterating, rephrasing—can be done faster and often at comparable quality by AI. That raises an uncomfortable possibility: if the work that once built foundational skills is automated, where does the next generation of communicators develop judgment about what effective content looks like?
Some argue this is a loss because without the discipline of doing the work from scratch, the craft erodes.
That concern is overstated.
Used properly, and within a collaborative ecosystem of teamwork and quality control that should be no different than it ever was (but certainly more efficient), AI doesn’t eliminate the learning process—it compresses it, and has the potential to make it more professionally enriching. The iteration that once took days can now happen in minutes. A communicator can generate multiple angles, test different framings, challenge assumptions, and refine outputs in real time. In that sense, AI can simulate much of the back-and-forth that once happened with a manager’s red pen. (Still, everyone needs a non-AI editor!)
But editing with AI can work if the writer knows what to question, and managers know how and when to engage in the process. That dynamic—who asks the right questions, who knows when to push back on an AI output—will define the long-term value of public relations professionals in an AI-augmented industry.
Read the full article in O’Dwyer’s.