Review: Augmenting Public Relations

Augmenting Public Relations: An Introduction to AI and Other Technologies for PR
David Phillips
CRC Press, 2025, 177 pages

Spot the human

David Phillips has been a distinguished practitioner and a lecturer and author too, but I think the description that fits him best is ‘futurist’.

He argues here that the business of public relations, focused as it is on relationships, has largely resisted automation up to now. Yet, given the rapid advances in artificial intelligence, if this continues ‘the PR sector is doomed’.

So this is a prophetic book, warning of risks ahead. ‘The PR industry has to change. Its bread and butter business, media relations, has been cut from under,’ he writes.

The 26 short and thought-provoking chapters range widely across the technology landscape. This isn’t the introduction to AI promised in the subtitle, but something much broader and more challenging.

Take this description that applies the concept of the semantic web to corporate affairs. ‘The simple truth is that the practice of corporate affairs now has a role in explicating the organisation’s values and ethics where the network carries its values across what once would have been stakeholders or publics but which now are networked people with common semantic interests in the organisation, which are also reflected in their values. Semantics is now part of corporate affairs where context affects meaning.’

The threat implied here is that a reputational crisis could occur without any human intervention, rather as stock markets face the risk of algorithmic collapse. 

The book’s great insight is that the media used in public relations is now technological (‘where, once, the media was relatively narrow, it’s now extensive.’) It will most likely involve apps, chatbots and QR codes; perhaps the metaverse, augmented reality and computer games; it might involve application programming interfaces (APIs) and brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). The public relations practitioner – once a skilled manager of relationships – now needs to become skilled at data and technology (though they might not have to learn coding since AI can manage that). Human-centred parts of the job such as stakeholder identification and mapping can and will be assisted by AI.

Phillips acknowledges that ‘networking is one of the joys and pleasures of public relations… Yet the days of the ‘little black book’ of contacts is long gone.’ We’re already at a point where networking is more likely to take place on LinkedIn than at events, so the future is likely to involve yet more apps and algorithms.

Ethical questions are considered throughout – and addressed in a separate chapter – but I’d have welcomed more on what Gareth Thompson has termed Post-Truth Public Relations (involving a discussion of the landscape of disinformation and misinformation) – though Phillips does state that ‘the bad actor automation crisis is near to us all’). Cybersecurity will increasingly fall within the remit of public relations – and this too merits a chapter alongside security management.

Inevitably, there are minor errors, and this glaring one: Sam Altman of Open AI is wrongly stated as ‘hailing from the UK’. One surprising lesson about writing in the age of AI is that errors suggest a human hand – despite the talk of hallucinations. A student introducing some manual errors into an assignment prepared with the help of AI would be more likely to find their work deemed credible and acceptable by a lecturer. To err is human…

Phillips is upfront about his use of AI to assist with parts of this text. There are sections that do read like colourless AI summaries. So another lesson is that since AI chatbots like to give you answers, to differentiate the human you need to focus on asking better questions. The following section reads as human- rather than machine-generated: ‘What would the world be like if your ideas could be brought to life? If others could enjoy the art that lives inside you in the way you envisioned it? How would that change the lives of the people around you? How would that change your life if you knew what was within your heart and mind could be accurately expressed?’

Another lesson is that we should avoid over-use of ‘in conclusion’. It’s a formula adopted so frequently by AI chatbots that it no longer reads as ‘human’. ‘In conclusion, deep learning stands as a cornerstone of AI-driven transformation in public relations and communication.’ That’s surely not a phrase ever spoken or even written by a human. The search facility on my ebook shows me that ‘in conclusion’ was used five times in the text in addition to some chapters ending with a Conclusion.

Back to the substance of the argument. The emergence of the worldwide web in the 1990s allowed David Phillips to shine as a thinker and author of Online Public Relations. I now think that the emergence of artificial intelligence may be an even more transformative moment and we’re lucky we have the same author to help shape our thinking and warn us about the need to change our ways.

Just as there’s no longer a need for a book called Online Public Relations today, so there will soon be no need for books about AI for PR. At that point, you will already have augmented your public relations – or will have found some other occupation.