The latest Muck Rack’s ‘State of AI in PR’ report –the third in the series-has a newsflash for the PR and Comms industry: PR priorities have changed unprecedentedly.
The Muck Rack’s report surveyed 1089 PR professionals from June 5 to July 16, 2025, and uncovered some interesting facts.
Among them: 80% PR pros prefer to pitch before noon, 87% keep their pitches under 300 words and 51% prefer to pitch on Tuesday!
Still, these were not the seismic findings from the Survey. The seismic finding here is that “Media Relations” and “Strategic Planning”, perceived as the two paramount PR priorities, have slipped in their importance to second and third priorities.
The leading PR priority? AI and Automation.
According to the survey’s findings, 59% of PR pros believe that AI and Automation “will grow in importance over the next five years”, ahead of media relations (35%) and strategic planning (33%).
The weight given to AI and Automation by respondents was such that the distance between media relations (35%) and strategic planning (33%) versus “AI and Automation” (59%) is not by a mere few percentage points, but almost half the number of respondents in comparison to the numbers choosing “AI and Automation”!
This speaks volumes about the adoption of AI in PR and Comms.
The AI embraced by the PR industry is nothing new and has been ‘trending’, for some time.
A survey released in October 2024 by WE Communications and the USC Annenberg Center for Public Relations found most communicators “now generally have a positive view of Generative AI and utilize the technology frequently in their daily work.” The survey found that PR pros have adopted AI by wide margins: 66% communicators saying they “now use AI frequently”, 95% said they have “a positive outlook on AI”, 70% reporting that it “improves their work quality” and 73% claiming “it helps them work more.” In December 2024, the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism’s 2025 Relevance Report “AI Activated”, quoted USC Center for Public Relations Director Fred Cook as saying: “…now we see big PR agencies appointing chief AI officers to drive innovation and corporations experimenting with AI in every aspect of their business…”
Still, the latest Muck Rack’s ‘State of AI in PR’ report not only upholds this trend but also pops a seismic finding: In the face of rapid AI interfacing, even ‘default’ PR industry priorities are taking a backseat.
One of the downsides of increased AI integration shall be clients’ unhappiness as they come to realise they are less and less served by real humans and more and more by machines, creating the potentially dangerous distance between them and the Industry.
Still, the new trend helps expand the industry considerably. In that, the PR pros are now able to increase their productivity levels. Their work becomes more efficient with considerable time saved, industry bottom lines would improve, and their routine activities get automated thus freeing them to focus on substantive PR and Comms work that they ought to be really focusing on: Creative outputs, medium and long term client relations, creation of more authentic and tailored communications for the clients and innovations in strategic content and outreach.
Overall, the industry, while prioritising AI and Automation, needs to have its sights clearly set on the use of AI. Implications of AI need to be well understood, while AI’s strategic direction within the industry needs to be managed well.
