Most communications professionals right now are somewhere between genuinely excited about AI and quietly anxious about what it means for their work. Both are reasonable responses. But the question worth sitting with isn’t “Will AI affect my job?” It will. The more useful question is: what do you do about it?
AI strategy for communications teams doesn’t require a major rollout or a tech background. It starts with a decision about how you want to work – and a willingness to figure it out before someone asks you to have it figured out.
What you actually need to worry about isn’t AI replacing you. It’s getting left behind while everyone else figures out how to use it well. The communicators pulling ahead right now aren’t the most tech-savvy people in the room. They’re the ones who started experimenting early, built firsthand opinions, and positioned themselves as the person who understands this – not the person who’s still waiting to.
This is a moment where getting curious has a real professional advantage. Here’s how to approach it.
What does a good AI strategy for communications teams actually look like?
A strong AI strategy for communications teams is human-led and AI-assisted – with people staying in charge of judgment, strategy, and relationships while AI handles the repetitive, time-consuming work.
Think of AI as an eager intern. It’s capable, fast, and willing to do the work that nobody else has time for. But it needs direction. It relies on your experience, your context, your understanding of what the organization needs to say and why. Left on its own, it produces output that’s generic. Paired with your expertise, it produces a useful first draft, a solid research summary, a cleaned-up set of notes – work that would have taken you an hour, done in minutes.
Why do communications professionals hesitate to start with AI?
Most communications professionals hesitate because the noise around AI is loud and the starting point isn’t obvious – not because they lack the skills to use it.
There’s a new tool every week. There are think pieces about what AI means for creative work. There’s leadership asking questions nobody feels fully equipped to answer yet. It’s a lot to process alongside an already full plate. But the gap between the people actively learning and the people not wanting to deal with it keeps widening. Research from McKinsey consistently shows that early AI adopters in knowledge work report meaningful time savings within the first few months – not after a long learning curve. The curve is shorter than most people expect.
The same instinct that leads to waiting – wanting to have it figured out before engaging – is exactly what builds PR momentum over time. Getting started before you feel ready is almost always the right call.
What should communications teams actually use AI for?
Use AI for the work that’s repetitive, time-consuming, and doesn’t require your judgment – research, first drafts, summarizing notes, organizing information, and generating options to react to. Tools like ChatGPT for PR are a practical starting point for understanding what’s possible.
A practical example: if you spend an hour every week pulling together board report summaries from meeting notes, that’s an AI task. Hand it off, get the hour back, and spend it on the media strategy work that keeps getting pushed to next week. That’s not a small shift. Over the course of a month, it adds up to meaningful time back for the work that actually moves the needle.
Keep with you: the strategy, the relationships, the creative decisions, the calls that require context and experience. Nobody is automating that. And in an AI-heavy world, those skills become more valuable, not less, because they’re harder to replicate.
The part of communications that most people got into this field to do – the thinking, the storytelling, the work that actually shapes how an organization shows up – tends to get crowded out by everything else. A well-built AI workflow can give some of that white space back. This is the kind of shift that we see communications teams benefit from when they move from reactive, scattered PR activity to something more intentional.
How do you get started with AI without a big plan?
The most effective starting point is one task – something repetitive you do every week that eats time – and a willingness to test a tool on it.
Get in the sandbox. Test something, make changes, try again. The learning that comes from actually using these tools is different from reading about them – and it’s what lets you speak to AI’s real capabilities and limits with confidence.
When leadership asks, “Can AI do that?” – and they will, if they haven’t already – the most useful position to be in is informed. Not because you have every answer, but because you’ve spent enough time with the tools to have a perspective worth sharing. That’s what moves you from the person reacting to the conversation to the person leading it.
According to the 2024 Nonprofit Communications Report, communications staff cite time constraints as their top barrier to strategic work. AI tools directly address that constraint when applied thoughtfully – which makes getting started now a practical move. When you’re ready to think through earned media strategies alongside your AI workflow, that’s where the two compound well together.
What’s the difference between AI replacing communicators and AI-assisted communications?
AI replacing communicators means AI making decisions, managing relationships, and owning the strategy. AI-assisted communications means people staying in charge while AI handles the work that doesn’t require human judgment.
The distinction matters because it changes how you approach the tools. If you treat AI as a replacement, you’re either afraid of it or over-reliant on it. If you treat it as an assist, you stay in charge and use it to do more of the work you actually want to be doing.
Getting started isn’t about having the right strategy or waiting for the right moment. It’s about building enough firsthand experience to have real opinions – and showing up as the person on your team who took the time to figure it out. If you want a sounding board for how strategic communications support fits into this shift, that’s a conversation worth having.