For most of its modern history, public relations operated on a fairly predictable model. A company had news. A publicist wrote a press release, worked the phones, and pitched reporters who covered the relevant beat. The publicist’s value came from knowing which editors cared about what, when to call versus when to email, and how to frame a story so it landed. The craft was part writing, part relationships, part timing.
That model was already under pressure before AI entered the picture. Newsrooms have been shrinking for two decades. Beat reporters who once covered narrow verticals now juggle five or six topics. Inboxes that used to receive fifty pitches a day started receiving two hundred. The signal-to-noise ratio was deteriorating year by year, and the publicists who still got results were the ones who had earned enough trust with editors that their pitches actually got opened.
Then tools like ChatGPT and OpenClaw made it possible for anyone with a laptop to produce a polished press release in thirty seconds.
The immediate effect has been exactly what you would expect. Journalist inboxes are now flooded with machine-generated pitches — grammatically clean, structurally competent, and almost entirely interchangeable. A 2025 survey by Muck Rack found that 59% of journalists reported receiving noticeably more AI-generated pitches over the prior twelve months, and 72% said they now delete unsolicited pitches faster than they did two years ago. The volume has gone up. The conversion rate has gone down.
Andrew Garson, a marketing executive who spent eight years as a vice president at Cohn & Wolfe and later served as senior vice president of brand marketing at WME, has watched this shift play out across both the agency and brand sides of the business. He sees the current moment less as a crisis and more as an accelerant — AI did not break PR, he argues, but it is speeding up a reckoning that was already underway.
“The spray-and-pray model was dying before anyone had heard of ChatGPT,” Garson said. “What AI did was make it free to spray. So now everybody sprays. And the people who were already doing it badly are doing it at ten times the volume, which makes it worse for everyone.”
The practical consequence is a widening gap between two tiers of the industry. On one side are the firms and freelancers using AI to pump out volume — mass-generating pitches, blasting media lists, and hoping that statistical probability will land a few placements. On the other are the practitioners doubling down on what Garson calls “the stuff you cannot automate” — genuine editorial relationships, original angles, and the kind of judgment that comes from years of knowing how a particular reporter thinks about a particular beat.
The numbers bear this out in an unexpected way. While overall pitch volume has surged, the placement rate for high-quality, relationship-driven outreach has actually improved, according to multiple agency heads interviewed for this article. Editors who are drowning in AI-generated noise are more grateful than ever for a publicist who calls with something actually worth covering.
“I had a reporter tell me last month that I was the only person who pitched him that week who had clearly read his last three stories,” said one New York-based agency founder who asked not to be named. “That used to be table stakes. Now it is a competitive advantage.”
Garson, who founded his own consultancy, Albany CT Creative, in 2018 after his tenure at WME, sees the disruption creating opportunity for a specific kind of practitioner — experienced professionals who combine strategic thinking with personal credibility. The AI tools are useful, he acknowledges, for first drafts, research synthesis, and media list building. But the final mile — the phone call, the tailored pitch, the instinct for what a particular editor needs at a particular moment — remains stubbornly human.
The irony, Garson notes, is that the same technology making it easier to generate mediocre PR is simultaneously making it easier for journalists to identify and ignore it. Several major newsrooms have begun using AI-detection tools to flag and auto-filter pitches that appear machine-generated. Others have tightened their submission guidelines to require phone-based pitches or warm introductions for unsolicited stories.
“The bar is going up, not down,” Garson said. “If your pitch reads like it was written by the same model that wrote the last fifty pitches in that reporter’s inbox, you are done before you started. The relationship is what gets you through the door now. It always was, honestly. But now there is no pretending otherwise.”
For younger practitioners entering the field, the message is both daunting and clarifying. The days when a junior publicist could build a career on volume — blast enough pitches and some will stick — are effectively over. What remains is the harder, slower work of becoming someone whose calls get returned because the person on the other end of the line trusts your judgment.
It is, Garson suggests, a return to something closer to what public relations was supposed to be in the first place — before the industry scaled itself into a volume game that was never sustainable.
“The best PR people I have worked with over twenty years all had the same quality,” he said. “They knew their clients’ stories cold, they knew their reporters’ interests cold, and they never wasted anyone’s time. AI cannot replicate that. It can write the email. It cannot build the trust.”
