The human advantage: UK PR agency shares how to use AI without losing your human touch

Leading PR agency shares its top tips for making AI work for your business, instead of against it

AI is taking over. From boardrooms to offices, it’s hard to escape new technology as it becomes an ever-increasing part of our daily lives. This rapid rise in artificial intelligence has brought excitement, but also fear. Fear of being replaced by technology that can work faster and write better than a human ever could, fear that such a rapid shift in technology could lead to chaos.

We’re here to put those fears to bed. With over 20 years in the communication industry, our experts at the leading PR agency, Holyrood PR, have witnessed the rise of AI from the start.

Having implemented AI into the everyday life of our business, we’ve found that new technology is nothing to be afraid of. In fact, it can have a hugely positive impact on your business’s everyday life, freeing up your staff’s time and allowing them to get on with the stuff that really matters.

Making AI work with you

1. Automate the Admin That Slows You Down

Much of the fear surrounding AI stems from the fear that it will replace the jobs you love to do. But what if it only took the jobs you loathe?

You could ask AI to draft your press releases and come up with all your ideas, or you could be more strategic. Since the dawn of the industry, the communication industry has been plagued by a hatred of admin, tedious spreadsheets and palming off dull tasks to any intern they could find.

Instead of ploughing through spreadsheets and logging each piece of coverage by hand, we’ve found that AI has been a revolutionary tool in speeding up admin tasks. By training AI tools to work out our monthly figures, log items of coverage and create campaign round-ups of all the metrics achieved, we have been able to reduce once-loathed tasks to a simple click of a button.

Even UK government trials have highlighted the benefit of AI in the workplace, finding that AI could save civil servants nearly two weeks a year on routine tasks.

That’s exactly what AI is for – taking the routine tasks out of your hands and giving you the time to get on with the other vital aspects of your work.

• Make Time for What Actually Matters

We all know the pain of staring down a long-winded, yet vital task. Whether it’s gathering details on 50 businesses across the UK or compiling endless client reports for monthly reviews, these time-draining jobs pile up fast.

However, with the rapid development of AI models, these tasks no longer require a whole day. With the right prompt and a bit of clever training, you can formulate custom-made AIs that work perfectly for your business processes, turning previously daunting tasks into simple processes.

You can also use new AI tools such as ChatGPT to conduct extensive research in just minutes using deep research tools, turning what used to take an entire afternoon of desk work into a streamlined, efficient process that delivers better insights, faster.

This gives your staff valuable time back—shifting hours once lost to research and admin into creating the award-winning PR campaigns that drive real results.

You can’t replicate a human touch

With all the fear around AI, it’s critical to remember that you have something it doesn’t – human empathy and the ability to connect with other humans with genuine emotion.

With over two decades of experience in the communications industry, we’ve found that human-led campaigns, which focus on the people behind businesses and resonate with other humans, are often the most successful.

Whether it’s highlighting the hardworking stars of the fishing industry or spotlighting long-standing staff members making a difference in the community, these stories strike a chord in ways AI can’t replicate. Emotional storytelling builds trust, sparks loyalty, and reinforces brand identity in a way that data alone never could.

In the age of AI, it’s not about choosing between humans or machines — it’s about letting each do what they do best. While AI can streamline tasks and boost efficiency, it’s essential to recognise its weaknesses.

1. AI-generated writing falls into certain pitfalls

This style of writing may deliver information efficiently. Still, it fails to achieve the goal of a good PR campaign: to connect your brand with real people and deliver tangible business results.

AI is a language learning model, and as such, it can only produce content using two tools: the prompt you give it and the information it pulls from existing online sources. It lacks the nuance that comes from a lifetime of experiences and opinions, the passion of a person who truly cares about the story they’re telling, or the firsthand insight into the lives of others.

Instead, AI often delivers a generic overview — ideal for drafting a quick email or pulling together a meta description, but perhaps not the best tool for crafting campaigns with genuine meaning that drive real results.

• Human writing carries an SEO benefit

Human-led, human-written content not only connects better with an audience but also provides better SEO benefits than publishing AI copy to your website or sending out artificially written releases.

Search engines increasingly prioritise original, high-quality content that demonstrates real expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Human writers bring personal insight, nuanced language, and topic relevance that AI often fails to capture. Well-crafted human content is more likely to earn backlinks, encourage longer dwell time, and avoid duplicate content penalties — all of which are key factors in improving your search rankings and online visibility.

Final Thoughts

AI can be a revolutionary tool. It speeds up processes, gives time back to your team, and helps your business run smarter. But for all its strengths, the weaknesses are just as apparent.

AI isn’t going to replace you — because it can’t. It lacks the emotional intelligence, creativity, and real-world understanding that power truly effective campaigns. It can’t produce human-led content that builds trust or craft stories that resonate with people and pass Google’s ever-evolving quality checks.

Instead of fearing AI, innovative businesses should embrace it as a tool — not a replacement. Use it to streamline what slows you down, and invest the time saved into creating emotionally rich, strategically sound campaigns that only people can deliver. The future isn’t man or machine — it’s man with machine.