Each week we’ll gather headlines and tips to keep you current with how generative AI affects PR and the world at large. If you have ideas on how to improve the newsletter, let us know!

What You Should Know

How AI Research Tools Help Communicators Beyond Content

Communicators who use internet-connected AI only as a search engine are wasting it. A plethora of research tools from AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Grok, and others have flooded the market. Many use those tools to generate a backbone of data points and analysis that support the content they create — a fine use, but “deep research” can go … well … deeper than that. 

Digiday laid out several examples of how agencies are using AI research tools to craft better pitches and develop sharper creative briefs. The ability of these tools to parse vast amounts of information makes them good partners for strategy. With a few prompts, you can get a competitive analysis of messaging against clients’ competitors with recommendations on how the client can stand out. You can find market gaps for a newcomer in the fintech space and where that client can provide thoughtful commentary. 

Helping a company respond to a crisis? AI can show you how others in similar situations handled their public response: who got dragged, who got a pass, and what language turned into headlines. It can flag what media latched onto and what they ignored, giving you a shortcut to smarter damage control. These research tools quickly offer context and institutional knowledge that would take days or weeks to look up manually and are often better than relying on your gut alone.

Even prospecting gets sharper. Instead of cold emailing a potential client with a generic “we follow your brand,” run a sweep of their owned and earned media. Compare how they talk about themselves to how the press talks about them, or how investors do. The tension between those voices almost always reveals an opening — a story they haven’t told well, or one they’ve avoided telling altogether.

Used well, these tools extend your brain and its capacity. They widen your field of view. And for communicators trying to move fast and sound smart, that’s not a bad place to start.

Elsewhere …

• PODCAST: Where the AI Economy Is Going, According to Founders and Funders
• OpenAI Tests Watermarking for ChatGPT-4o Image Generation Model
• America’s AI Lead Over China Rapidly Shrinking, Stanford Report Finds
• Will AI Save the News?
• Expanding AI Use, White House Orders Agencies to Develop Strategies and Name Leaders

Tips and Tricks

 A look at recent AI tells

What’s happening: Countless LinkedIn posts claim to do what many AI checker tools cannot (at least not well): identify robotic writing. There isn’t really one clearly defined AI style. It’s a moving target as more AI content fills the internet and new AI models train on that material. 

So what?: Our team has developed and continues to maintain a document of these AI tells so content creators know what to look for and eliminate or change from AI copy. Here’s a look at some newcomers to the list.

• It’s not X; it’s Y: The most popular new sentence structure among AI tools
• Excessive em dashes: Especially without spaces on either side of them, which is AP style
• Game-changer: The MVP of generic corporate buzzwords
• Conclusions about first-mover advantage: Too many pieces of content end with how only the strong survive — we included a fix for this a couple weeks back

Quote of the Week

“What we have learned so far is that using AI well is a skill that needs to be carefully learned by… using it a lot. It’s just too unlike everything else. The call to tinker with it was the right one, but it was too much of a suggestion. This is what I want to change here today. We also learned that, as opposed to most tools, AI acts as a multiplier.  We are all lucky to work with some amazing colleagues, the kind who contribute 10X of what was previously thought possible. It’s my favorite thing about this company. And what’s even more amazing is that, for the first time, we see the tools become 10X themselves. I’ve seen many of these people approach implausible tasks, ones we wouldn’t even have chosen to tackle before, with reflexive and brilliant usage of AI to get 100X the work done.”

— Tobi Lutke, CEO of Shopify, in an internal memo that was leaked and that he subsequently posted on X

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