PR corner: Are we replaceable?

AI mania is showering down upon our financial districts, and, for the biggest institutions, the culls are already well under way. At the end of October, Barclays announced its plans to cut 5000 jobs in favour of industrial AI adoption. American Express cited similar motivations when embarking upon its first major round of redundancies in almost a decade. Many a gilet has already been set aquiver across the City by this urge to go lean, and, if the recent surge of LinkedIn posts bemoaning the rise of auto-generated pitches hitting journalists’ inboxes is anything to go by, PR teams might be the latest in the firing line. As more private equity houses begin making the shift towards in-house marketing strategies focused on SEO, GEO, and AEO (Bingo was his name-e-oh…), it’s time to pose the question: is outsourced PR becoming obsolete in the face of Claude-generated communication plans and AI-penned LinkedIn posts? 

In other words: are we… replaceable?

It’s easy to characterise AI-cynics as tinfoil-hatted luddites raging against the machine.
Perhaps we are. Perhaps if it were the seventies and I were a better cook, I’d be raging against the microwave. But when it comes to LLMs, the threat isn’t entirely in our heads. From pragmatic concerns of cybersecurity and data ownership to ethical grappling with environmental collapse, and the mass theft of intellectual and creative property, right through to existential anxiety surrounding the degradation of human relationships and interpersonal skills, there are certainly plenty of reasons to be resistant to the onslaught of machine-generated content.

But morals don’t drive investor distributions. And how much do media relationships even matter when journalists are already packing up their latte cups and migrating en masse towards data harvesting and market research? We meet with one such former reporter over matcha and ask who’s stepped into her previous role. She raises her eyebrows. “Not who, but what”. It’s eat or be eaten.

Silence is no longer safe

Whether you’re for or against it, the fact remains: AI has changed the game. The general abstruseness of private markets, which once served as a welcome buffer against prying eyes and journalistic enquiries, has been unceremoniously stripped away by the advent of generative chatbots. In these virtual lackeys, we are met with what can only be described as a terrier-like tenacity to find an answer, any answer - be it true, false, or somewhere in between. So long as ChatGPT remains undeterred by “no comment”, GPs no longer have the luxury of saying nothing and hoping for the best.

Indeed, if your marketing materials or web content is thin on the ground, in the absence of a defined narrative and established messaging to inform search results and construct responses, AI will fill in the gaps for you. Beyond the obvious optics implications of potentially introducing inaccuracies into your public presence, this autofill approach also runs the risk of turning business down for your company.

According to Forrester’s The State of Business Buying, 2026, over 90% of business buyers are using AI to research targets and determine winners, and LPs aren’t far behind. With deal origination increasingly outsourced to algorithms that scour the internet and press for suitable profiles, it’s imperative that, at the very least, your website and marketing materials clearly spell out your sectors, the market you’re operating in, your core geographies and track record. Remember: in the age of generative AI, silence will quite literally speak a thousand words - none of which will have been pre-approved and signed off by investor relations. If you want control over your perception, it’s time to get talking.

More content ≠ more engagement

When confronted with this incentive to achieve increased output with decreased spending and manpower, it follows that many firms are passionately embracing automated content creation. Why waste working hours on the drafting of press releases or LinkedIn posts or thought leadership articles when a programme can do it all for you? Even worse, why pay a professional? Here lies the first stumbling block.

Although going into overdrive with production can certainly assist with AEO (AKA throwing bots some extra material to swallow up and regurgitate ad infinitum), it doesn’t necessarily guarantee that your human audiences will engage. As far as social media goes, judging by the consistent outperformance of team photos and people-focused content, as well as the enthusiastic uptake to LinkedIn’s new ‘Seems like AI slop’ report feature, there’s a simmering antipathy towards faceless corporations and AI-generated content among audiences. It should be noted that LinkedIn’s guidance on what constitutes slop hinges upon the detection of repetition, substandard quality, unhelpfulness, and general blandness, which hardly speaks to the effectiveness of AI copy. Over a million users engaged with the feature within its first fortnight of activity. People like people.

Differentiation can’t be automated

Of course, the power of unique positioning and nuanced messaging goes beyond media relations. In an increasingly saturated market, with firms forced to jostle for LP attention, differentiation is the key to unlocking capital. Investors want to know who you are, why your team’s experience is relevant, and how your strategy translates into higher returns than your competition’s. The construction of this narrative strategy - arguably the most pivotal point of a firm’s creation - takes time, careful consideration, and profound understanding of a team’s ethos, people, and history. Relying on mass-adopted tools to defy the odds and somehow produce tailor-made and differentiated communications plans falls a bit flat when they’re suggesting identical strategies to all of your competitors. In order to stand out from the crowd, you must first stand out from the slop.

Chatbots trust other people’s words

As well as company content (gathered from websites, whitepapers, social media, and publicly available decks), chatbots rely heavily on third-party sources to furnish them with information. In short, it’s not enough that you’re speaking about your firm - other people need to be.

Even if articles, reports and thought pieces can be materialised out of thin air, the opportunities to actually publish and distribute them through external platforms are much harder to come by without industry connections and professional PR capabilities - especially when those external platforms are subject to rigid editorial policies and journalistic standards of writing. What were LinkedIn’s criteria for identifying AI copy again..? 

Bad news now lasts longer

But what about the coverage you don’t want out there? I speak with a fellow PR professional about the ways in which artificial intelligence is reshaping the industry. He tells me that he’s not worried about losing clients any time soon: “It’s exciting, refreshing, in a way, to be faced with new challenges”. He’s referring to the impact of AI on crisis PR - a communications tactic recently plunged into the spotlight by the rapid reshuffling of media priorities. Prior to generative chatbots, if a leak were reported on a seedy website with twelve hits a month, that information would remain largely unseen before being engulfed by the next news cycle. Now, it’s the disreputable sites of old (the kind you’d frantically exit immediately upon entry, for fear of inadvertently clicking on a pop-up ad for gastric bands), which would historically have been filtered out by manual searching and base-level media literacy, that are drawn upon for neatly repackaged summary responses. Throw source recycling into the mix and suddenly you have bad news lasting much, much longer.

For better or for worse, PR is going through some changes. In a climate where the age-old mantra of “no news is good news” no longer holds up, and where the shelf life of scandal has lengthened to gruesome proportions, hiring or investing in a dedicated PR team to control the flow of information is more significant than ever. As has always been the case, bad press can’t be erased - but, with the right contacts and the right skillset, it can be buried. Strategic content placement, in combination with proactive pitching to media outlets, trade press, and broadcast channels, combats the circulation of undesirable news and ensures that the information that is out there is aligned with your branding, representative of your mission, and truly additive to your strategy.

So, for the time being, hold fire on dismissing your PR team. Take AI with a healthy dose of salt, keep your company’s communications living and breathing, and - if you absolutely must - consider AI a fun plus one to an already optimal guest list. Call it provincial, call it sentimental, call it what you want - we’ll call it good business.