AI does not replace PR work. It redraws the line inside it. Here is how to choose AI for PR teams, without the hype.
I am the COO of Determ. We build media monitoring software, which means I spend my days around two things at once: a lot of media data, and a lot of AI run over it. I also get the same question almost every week, from comms leads, agency owners, and the occasional CEO who just signed up for something and is not sure why. The question is some version of: which AI should we use, and what do I actually need to understand before I start.
This post is the answer I give: a practical guide to choosing AI for PR teams. It is not a primer on how neural networks work, and you do not need one. You need enough to make three decisions without wasting money or trusting a confident wrong answer: which assistant, which plan, and what the tool is genuinely good and bad at for the work your team does. That is the whole post.
One thing to set up front: this moves fast. The model that is best this month may not be next month, and prices shift without much warning. That is exactly why I am going to talk in concepts and trade-offs rather than version numbers and price tags, and why I will keep updating this post as the ground moves. The durable skill is not memorizing today’s tools. It is understanding a few ideas well enough to judge whatever ships next, and testing things for yourself rather than taking a vendor’s word, or mine. Grasp the concepts, then go try them.
A bit of context for why this is worth ten minutes. By one widely cited survey, 92% of PR teams already use generative AI in some form (Cision, 2025). Most of that adoption happened by accident: someone opened a free chatbot, it was useful, and now half the team pastes client material into a tool nobody chose on purpose. That is the part worth fixing, and it starts with understanding what you are choosing between.
The landscape, without the spec war
There are three assistants a comms team will realistically consider: Claude (from Anthropic), ChatGPT (from OpenAI), and Gemini (from Google). They are all large language models, and for everyday PR work they are more alike than the marketing suggests. I am not going to run a feature war, because the differences that matter for comms are smaller than the differences in how you set them up.
What actually moves the needle for PR work:
How much it can hold at once. A model that can read a long messaging guide, three client briefs, and last quarter’s coverage in one go answers very differently from one you have to feed in scraps. This is the single most practical difference for comms work, where the value is almost always in giving the assistant enough context.
Whether it can work with your files and tools. Some setups just chat. Others can read the documents on your machine, pull from your monitoring data, and cross-reference your CRM in one request. For a team, that second mode is where the time savings live.
Whether you are locked in. Here is the part nobody selling you an “AI feature” wants to say out loud: the work you put into an AI is mostly just text. A good messaging guide, a set of prompts, a knowledge base, all of it is portable. Keep it in plain files and you can move from one assistant to another in an afternoon. That is your insurance against betting on the wrong horse, and it is worth protecting.
My own honest take, since people ask: we use Claude heavily, partly for the amount it can hold in context and partly because it works directly with files and tools, which is how we connect it to our own data. But the principle in this series is deliberately tool-agnostic. Pick the one your team will actually open every morning. The habits matter more than the logo.
The five words that save you money and embarrassment
You can use these tools well while understanding almost nothing about them. But five concepts will save you from the two most common ways comms teams get burned: paying for the wrong thing, and trusting an answer that was wrong.
Model. The “brain” you are talking to, and each provider offers a few. There is usually a most-capable one (slower, pricier), a balanced default that handles the large majority of work, and a fast cheap one for simple tasks. You do not need the most powerful model to draft a holding statement. Using the heavyweight for everything is the most common way people burn through their plan.
Token. The unit these tools count in, roughly three-quarters of a word in English. It matters for one reason: longer inputs and outputs cost more and run slower. When you paste an entire year of coverage and ask for a summary, tokens are why it takes a moment and why heavy use has a price.
Context window. How much the assistant can hold in its head at once. Think of it as desk space. The bigger it is, the more briefs, guidelines, and past coverage you can have open together. When a long chat starts “forgetting” what you said at the top, you have run out of desk. For comms work, more desk space is usually the feature you actually want.
Hallucination. The one to take seriously. An AI does not look things up by default; it predicts plausible text. When it does not know, it often produces something that sounds right and is not: a quote nobody said, a stat with no source, a journalist on a beat they have never covered. It is not lying, it has no concept of truth, and it will be just as confident either way. The fix is not to avoid AI. It is to give it real data to work from, and to verify anything you would put your name on.
Consumer versus enterprise (this is the privacy one). Free and personal tiers often reserve the right to use your conversations to train the model, and they make few promises about confidentiality. Paid business and enterprise tiers typically guarantee your data is not used for training and give you real controls. For a PR team this is not a footnote. Embargoed announcements, client crises, and unpublished strategy do not belong in a tool that might learn from them. The rule I give everyone: do not put anything into a consumer AI that you would not be comfortable seeing leak. If you handle client material, get on a paid business plan and turn off model training in the settings on day one.
Which plan a comms team actually needs
Pricing changes, so treat this as direction rather than exact figures. The shape is consistent across providers.
Free tier. Fine for trying the tool and for throwaway personal tasks. Not fine for client work, because of the privacy point above, and usually limited on the better models. Use it to get a feel, not to run your day.
The around-twenty-a-month plan. This is where most individual comms professionals should start. You get the capable models, higher limits, the privacy posture you need for real work, and access to the file and tool features. If you are one person deciding whether this changes your work, this is the tier that answers the question.
Higher tiers. Worth it once AI is genuinely part of your daily workflow, you are running long analyses, or you are working across a lot of data and hitting limits. Most people should grow into these, not start there.
For a team, the decision is less about the per-seat price and more about getting everyone onto a business plan with consistent privacy settings, rather than a scatter of personal logins nobody can govern. One chosen tool beats five accidental ones.
The real question: which half of the job are you buying help for
Here is the idea this whole series rests on, so I will say it plainly: AI does not replace PR work. It redraws the line inside it. The job splits into two halves, and choosing a tool well starts with knowing which half you are handing over.
One half is the high-volume, repeatable work that eats the early part of a comms career and never fully goes away. We mapped it across five levels of seniority, from coordinator to communications chief, and the shape is consistent. In our experience a junior gives 8 to 12 hours a week to media monitoring and clipping alone, and another 5 to 8 to building reports. An account executive pours 10 to 15 hours into pitching and follow-up.
The surveys say the same from the outside. 79% of PR professionals spend at least a quarter of their week on media relations (Muck Rack, 2024). 62% name content creation as their most time-consuming task (Determ, 2024). And 81% say they are under pressure to do more with less (Cision and PRWeek, 2025). Reading overnight coverage, drafting the weekly report, building media lists, adapting one piece across channels, spotting a trend across hundreds of articles: this is where AI earns its keep, and it is most of the week.
The other half is the work that defines a senior communicator, and AI is weak, sometimes dangerous, on all of it. Setting strategy. Building a real relationship with a journalist. The judgment call in a crisis when the facts are still moving. A byline that has to carry an executive’s actual voice and conviction. AI can prepare the ground for any of these: the background, the first pass, the data. It cannot own the decision, and you should not let it try.
So the honest framing: AI clears the operational weight, the sorting and drafting and cross-referencing, so your judgment lands where it is irreplaceable. The teams who get the most from it are not the ones who hand it the most. They are the ones who know exactly where the line is. That is the whole game, and the rest of this series is about working it well.
What to do next
If you do not have an assistant yet, pick one, get on a paid plan, and turn off model training before you do anything else. That alone puts you ahead of most teams.
Then the real work begins, which is getting it set up so it knows your business instead of answering like a stranger. That is the next post in this series: setting up Claude as a daily PR tool, the projects and first prompts that make it stick. After that, building a knowledge base that actually knows your messaging, your clients, and your spokespeople, so the answers come back like they are from someone on your team.
If you already run Determ and want to see what this looks like with your own media data in the assistant, ask us for Determ MCP beta access in the chat on determ.com. New to Determ? Start a free trial and have a look.
Ivor Bihar is COO at Determ. He co-writes this series with Claude as a drafting assistant. The product decisions, opinions, and the call on what to trust AI with are his. Next in the series: setting up Claude as your daily PR tool.
