With AI now embedded into our everyday lives, audiences are consuming content with doubt built in.
A recent Prophet study of 2,000 consumers found that, even as the majority of consumers use generative AI tools, 71% are concerned about inaccurate information from AI and its impact on decision-making. A 2026 Epsilon report showed a similar finding, stating that 58% of consumers feel AI can be inaccurate or biased. A 2025 survey by the Reuters Institute also found that 58% of respondents globally are concerned about how to distinguish truth from falsehood in online news.
The pattern is clear: As AI utilisation grows, audiences increasingly question whether a story is original, whether a source is credible, whether a claim has been verified, and whether a piece of content has been written for them or generated at scale using AI.
That widespread mistrust is a very real challenge for communicators, who are responsible for building and maintaining brand trust. Generative AI has opened real opportunities, from faster research and analysis to sharper message testing. But it raises a more fundamental question: how do teams use AI to move faster without losing the human creativity, judgement, and accountability that make communications effective?
According to a 2026 Cision study of 600 communications industry professionals, 91% of communications teams use AI; at the same time, they still recognise that the ability to tell original stories and build relationships ultimately wins the day.
AI can help teams move quicker, spot patterns, and produce first drafts very efficiently. But speed and volume alone will not build trust. In a landscape where people are already sceptical, output is not enough. Brands need originality, judgement, context, and a clear human point of view.
When volume replaces voice
Even as AI tools grow more accessible and get more sophisticated, they do not remove the need for human creativity, original thinking, and strategic communications. If anything, they magnify it.
The risk is not that AI exists, it is that teams begin to treat more content as a substitute for better thinking. In an industry under constant pressure to “do more with less”, that temptation is real. Generative AI can help teams churn out more content, more quickly. But more content does not compensate for weak ideas, generic storytelling or lack of credibility.
If every brand uses the same tools trained on the same inputs, the result can quickly become a flood of similar-sounding ideas, generic phrasing, and shallow commentary. In that world, distinctive, challenging thinking becomes harder to find, and trust becomes harder to earn.
For PR and communications teams, this is an especially daunting notion: Their work depends on credibility. A campaign, statement, or executive point of view only lands if audiences believe it has been considered, checked, and shaped with intent.
Journalists in particular, who hold the key to the earned media coverage that is so critical for PR teams, are the first to question content they see from PR teams. More than half (53%) are opposed to PR professionals using AI in the content they share, citing concerns over accuracy and personalisation, according to Cision’s 2026 State of the Media Report. That does not mean communicators should avoid AI; it means they need to use it with clear standards, strong oversight, and a proper understanding of the audience they are trying to reach.
AI should create an opportunity for better thinking
The best use of AI in communications is not to replace creativity; it is to create more space for it.
For communications teams, the challenge is not to produce more content at ever greater speeds. It is to navigate a more complex information environment. Media coverage, social conversation, search behaviour, and AI-generated answers are increasingly connected, and the signals that shape reputation are spread across more places than ever.
General purpose AI tools can often help teams draft, summarise, and explore ideas. But they are not a reliable view of the communications landscape. They do not automatically know which sources matter, which narratives are gaining traction, how audiences are responding or how a brand is being perceived across channels. That takes trusted data, specialist intelligence, context and human judgement.
At its best, AI is not a shortcut to understanding. It is a way to create space to think. It can take on mundane tasks, speed up research, act as a sparring partner, and surface things teams might have missed. That frees communicators for the work that needs human judgement: deciding what matters, what to say, how to say it, and how it will land.
The value of AI is not the stories it can generate. The value is in how it can help PR teams enhance those stories, understand what resonates, and go beyond what is expected.
Oversight is not an afterthought
Human oversight cannot be a final proofing at the end of the process. That is the wrong way around. It needs to be built into how teams use AI from the start: checking sources, questioning outputs, testing forbias, protecting brand tone, and making sure a message has a defensible point of view, not just a plausible one. That is where relevance and trust are built.
It also means recognising that communications is not just about what can be produced, it is about what should be said. AI can help generate possibilities, but people still make the choices. Which ideas are credible, which are distinctive and which matter to the audience.
So the future of communications will not be defined by AI alone. It will be defined by how well teams pair AI’s speed with human judgement, editorial discipline, and a point of view worth defending.
It will also be defined by what teams feed the machine. General purpose tools all draw from the same public inputs, so they all drift towards the same answers. The teams that pull ahead will work from trusted, first-party intelligence and a governed view of the whole environment; media, social, search, and AI-generated answers. All in one place. Not a general purpose chatbot’s best guess. That is the Cision point of view. The winners will own the signal, not just the speed.
As content gets easier to generate, credibility and the ability to stand out get harder to earn. That is why human expertise, working from data you can trust, matters more than ever. The best teams will use AI to get sharper, not just louder. This is no longer a luxury. It is what turns information into insight, messages into meaning, and content into trust.
