Each week we'll gather headlines and tips to keep you current with how generative AI affects PR and the world at large. If you have ideas on how to improve the newsletter, let us know!
What You Should Know
Agents Are Coming. Are We Ready for Them?
First came chatbots. Then copilots. Now agents. Each wave promised transformation, and this one is all about delegation.
Agentic AI is being framed as the next phase of adoption — systems that execute entire workflows instead of individual tasks, like monitoring media coverage, updating reports, and sending them to the right inboxes.
Cisco reports that 80% of executives believe agentic AI will be critical to their company’s survival by the end of next year, and that, on average, they believe 55% of their workforce will regularly work alongside agents within 24 months.
On the communications side, adoption is in the early stages. According to Muck Rack, 71% of PR pros are aware of AI agents, but only 12% are actively using them.
That gap isn’t surprising. Communicators have always been at the forefront of using AI well, and they know that agents owning more work and making decisions requires more oversight — nearly 90% say they’d feel more comfortable if a human were involved in the process.
Most teams still think in prompts. Agents require thinking in processes. That changes the skill set required to use them well.
If you tell a chatbot, “Draft a media strategy,” you might get a usable outline. If you tell an agent, “Find reporters covering AI in healthcare,” you’re not specifying a workflow. Without defined parameters, it defaults to poor assumptions. A workable process for building a media list looks more like this:
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Identify reporters who have written at least three AI-in-healthcare stories in the last six months.
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Exclude those focused solely on funding announcements.
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Rank by outlet reach and recent coverage.
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Analyze tone in each reporter’s last two pieces.
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Draft tailored outreach for each reporter based on what they’ve covered recently and how Brand X can move that coverage forward.
That’s the level of detail agents require, and it forces a shift in how communicators think about their own expertise. Much of PR runs on instinct built over years — knowing which angle will resonate, which reporter is skeptical, which executive needs sharper language. Agents don’t operate on instinct. They operate on the logic you provide.
If you can’t explain your work step-by-step, an agent can’t do it. And if you can, you just found your next advantage.
Elsewhere …
Tips and Tricks
Digging into Anthropic’s AI Fluency Index
What’s happening: Everyone is always looking for a way to prompt AI better, and Anthropic’s new AI Fluency Index offers some guidance. It established a framework based on nearly 10,000 conversations with Claude last month, but the results could apply to nearly any AI model.
Strongest finding: The biggest takeaway was that people who treat the first AI response as a starting point and continue refining it, rather than copying and pasting right away, exhibit roughly twice as many effective AI behaviors as those who don't.
Best behaviors: While the report doesn’t explicitly say which are the most effective behaviors, it covers some best practices like questioning reasoning, identifying missing context, clarifying the goal of the interaction, specifying a format, providing examples, and checking facts.
Try this: The report found that only 30% of users tell the AI how they’d like it to interact with them. Including extra instructions like “Push back if my assumptions are wrong,” “Flag anything that sounds promotional rather than editorial,” or “Tell me what you’re uncertain about before giving me a final answer,” can reshape the entire conversation.
Quote of the Week
“You have to be willing to constantly move and learn more, because it's going to keep changing — and faster than you can grasp it. Sometimes AI makes wrong predictions, but it is using words to make that prediction. So I absolutely need to use my English degree in order to figure out keywords and how to prompt it to do the right thing.
“Up until this Al role, I always joked that I wasn't using my English degree. But now I use it everywhere, and it truly does help. It helps with things like talking to executives and also with the role itself.
“It's important to know the language of AI and how it operates. So now, more than ever, I am using every bit of my English degree and understanding English, grammar, and how it all functions.”
— Brit Morenus, Senior AI Gamification Program Manager at Microsoft, in an as-told-to essay in Business Insider
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