The AI PR Playbook: How to Use AI on Your First Draft Without Sounding Like a Robot

Every journalist now has a word for AI-generated press releases. It is not a compliment.

Generic lede, overloaded adjectives, CEO quote that could apply to any company in any industry. Journalists call it "AI slop." It gets filed in the trash folder before the first paragraph ends.

Here's the thing: the releases that avoid this problem are also written with AI. The difference is the workflow, and specifically, knowing what AI should never do alone.

What AI Gets Right in PR Writing

Structure: AI is reliable at knowing what a press release should contain and in what order. The five-W lede, the executive quote, the supporting data paragraph, the boilerplate: AI handles this scaffold well. This alone saves 30 to 45 minutes on a first draft.

Completeness checking: After you draft, AI is good at asking "did you include X?"

Variation generation: Need three different headline options? Two versions of the executive quote? AI generates these quickly.

What AI Should Never Do Alone

Specificity: AI doesn't know the specific detail that makes your story interesting. You have to supply all of this. Every piece of generic-sounding AI output is generic because the human didn't provide enough specific input.

Voice: Executive quotes written by AI have a tell: they use full, formal sentences with consistent structure. Real executives use fragments, emphasis, unexpected word choices.

Newsworthiness judgment: AI doesn't know what's actually interesting to journalists. That judgment still belongs to a human who knows the beat, the journalist, and the news cycle.

The Prompting Approach That Works

Front-load the specifics: Before asking for anything, give the AI the raw material: founding story, specific metrics, customer name (with permission), what the money is for, the one thing you want journalists to remember.

Give structural constraints: "Write a press release with a lede that leads with the funding amount and the specific use case, a CEO quote that expresses a specific opinion (not excitement)..." Constraints produce better output than open-ended requests.

Edit for voice, not just accuracy: After the AI draft, your editing pass should focus on two things: does every claim have a specific fact behind it, and does the executive quote sound like a human being?