The most useful thing we took from the Midlands PR Conference was not that it introduced a completely new conversation about AI and communications. That conversation is already well underway, particularly here at Tank. What it did was sharpen and reaffirm something we have been seeing for some time: that AI is not making brand PR less valuable. It is making the best parts of it more important.
AI will undoubtedly change how PR work gets done. It can help with planning, research summaries, angle exploration and the repeatable admin tasks that sit behind good communications work. Those things still matter. But they are not where the full value of brand PR lives.
The greater value sits in what those tasks enable: judgement, trust, reputation, relationships, narrative structure, audience understanding and strategic counsel. In an AI-shaped world, those human skills do not feel diminished. They feel newly exposed.
It’s less about seeing AI as a production tool and more about what it gives us the chance to make visible: the deeper, more valuable parts of communications that clients do not always see, but absolutely feel when they are done well.
Trust is influence
The conference was built around the idea of accelerating influence, but what came through repeatedly was that influence is not created by speed alone. The ability to produce more content, more quickly, only makes the foundations of influence more important.
There was a neat irony in hearing Rachel Duffy speak about trust after winning The Traitors, a show in which the whole point is, of course, to build trust convincingly enough to deceive people.
It was funny, but also useful. Trust is not soft. It is a form of influence. It can be built, borrowed, tested, lost or manipulated. And, in an AI-shaped communications environment, where content can be produced instantly and confidence can be manufactured synthetically, understanding how trust is created becomes even more important.
For brand PR, that matters. The value is not simply in getting a message out. It is in helping people believe that message, understand where it has come from and feel that it has been earned.
The hidden cost of AI efficiency
Grant Currie’s session on the AI-augmented communicator gave the most practical version of this argument.
As founder and CEO of Currage Consulting, and a senior communications leader with experience across both agency and in-house roles, including Workday, Grant brought a useful mix of practitioner realism and strategic perspective. His message was not that communicators should resist AI, but that we need to be honest about what it can and cannot do.
AI can save time, and in some areas the advertised efficiency gains are huge. But his most useful point was what he called the “Human Verification Tax”. If AI can confidently produce something that is wrong, incomplete, badly judged or reputationally risky, every output still needs a human being to check it.
We know of marketing teams who are using AI to fully produce content but just remember that checking is not a light-touch proofread. It is fact-checking. It is sense-checking. It is narrative judgement. It is tone. It is context. It is knowing whether a line is technically accurate but strategically unhelpful, or whether an idea says something meaningful rather than simply sounding like the kind of thing every other brand could say.
That means the real time saving is likely to be smaller than the headline efficiency gains often promised by AI. But that is not a bad thing. Even if AI gives us back a quarter of our time rather than half of it, the question becomes what we do with that time.
And that feels like the real test. Not whether we can produce more, but whether we can use the space AI creates to do better work.
The risk of the sea of sameness
One of the dangers of AI is that it makes volume too easy. More posts, more comments, more pitches, more articles, more versions of the same idea pushed through more channels.
But if everyone is using similar tools, trained on similar information, to produce similar outputs, the result is not distinctiveness. It is what Grant described as a “sea of sameness”.
That phrase captures a real danger for brands. AI can help us move faster, but it can also flatten the work. It can remove the specificity, friction and tension that often make a story worth paying attention to in the first place.
The brands that win in an AI-shaped communications environment will not be the ones that use the technology to say more. They will be the ones that use it to think harder.
Why earned reputation matters more in an AI world
This is where the case for brand PR becomes much stronger.
GEO, or Generative Engine Optimisation, is still an emerging discipline, but the direction of travel is clear: brands will increasingly need to understand and influence how they appear in AI-generated answers, not just traditional search results.
That is something we have also been exploring through our own ThinkTank sessions in Manchester. One of the clearest takeaways was that this work does not begin and end on a brand’s owned channels. Large language models are not only looking at what a company says about itself on its website, blog or LinkedIn page. They are drawing on the wider universe of credible third-party signals: media coverage, expert commentary, analyst references, research and reviews.
Muck Rack’s research adds weight to that point, finding that 89% of AI citations come from earned media. In other words, AI engines are treating third-party coverage and external sources as primary evidence, not just supporting material.
That is why Gartner’s prediction that PR and earned media budgets will double by 2027 feels so significant. It is not a side note. It is a signal that the market is beginning to price in the value of authority, credibility and trusted third-party validation in an AI-shaped search environment.
A company can fill its website, LinkedIn page and newsletter with AI-assisted material. But that does not mean journalists, customers, investors, employees, analysts or AI systems will treat it as authoritative.
Reputation still has to be earned.
From productivity tool to reputation issue
Rachel Phillips’ session made that point from a different angle.
As Corporate Reputation Lead at Ipsos UK, Rachel brought the view from senior communicators and the boardroom. Drawing on Ipsos’ Reputation Council research, she showed that CCOs are not just thinking about AI as a productivity tool. They are thinking about it as a reputation issue.
That distinction matters. If AI accelerates misinformation, increases the risk of error and creates uncertainty among employees, then communications cannot sit at the end of the process, tidying up the message once decisions have already been made.
It has to be closer to the decision-making.
In a world of more information, more automation and more noise, communicators have to help organisations understand what matters, what is credible, what is risky and what should be said (or not said) in the first place.
That is not a task AI can own. It requires judgement, context and an understanding of people, politics, culture and consequence.
Activity is not the same as value
The later sessions reinforced the same theme. Rachael Clamp’s session on moving from activity to value challenged the assumption that more content, faster delivery or broader reach automatically creates more influence. Anthony Tattum brought it back to how people really make decisions. Sessions on storytelling, misinformation, C-suite influence and change communications all pointed in the same direction: influence is still human.
It is built through clarity, consistency, relationships and trust over time.
That felt like the real throughline of the conference. AI can accelerate activity, but activity is not the same as impact. It can help with production, but production is not the same as influence.
The opportunity for agencies
For agencies, this should be exciting.
AI should not just help us do the same work faster. It should help us spend more time on the work clients actually value most, even if they do not always know how to ask for it.
That means understanding their market in more depth. Understanding their audiences. Knowing the competitive landscape. Spotting the cultural or commercial tension behind a story. Building stronger points of view. Asking better questions. Bringing sharper counsel. Helping clients decide what they want to be known for, and then earning that reputation consistently.
In that sense, the direction of travel for brand PR may be closer to management consultancy than content production. Not because we should lose the craft of communications, but because the craft needs to be attached to deeper strategic understanding.
The future will not belong to communicators who simply know how to prompt AI. It will belong to those who know how to use AI to become better advisers.
The real value was always human
That is a much more positive view of where the profession is heading.
AI will change the practical mechanics of PR, and we should not pretend otherwise. Used well, it will make communicators more efficient and more informed.
But it also gives us a chance to move up the value chain: away from being judged by activity alone and towards being valued for influence, reputation and commercial judgement.
Our biggest takeaway from the conference was this - AI is not making brand PR smaller. It is making the strongest version of it more visible.
And that should be an opportunity.