Since the emergence of Artificial Intelligence, the PR industry has debated whether its increased use will overwhelm journalists, dilute trust, and replace human storytellers. But the 2026 Cision State of the Media Report makes the real issue unmistakable: PR’s biggest problem was never AI. It’s irrelevance.

Journalists have been saying this for years, and now the data says it too. According to the Cision Report, 82% of journalists reject pitches because they are “not relevant to my audience or coverage area.” Another 72% say spamming them with irrelevant pitches is the fastest way onto a don’t-call list.

That points to a targeting problem, not a technology problem.

AI Didn’t Break PR: It Exposed What Was Already Broken

AI didn’t suddenly make PR worse. It simply made it easier to send more bad pitches, faster.

Journalists are already under intense inbox pressure. Most receive 50+ pitches per week, yet 72% say fewer than a quarter are relevant to their work. When generative AI entered the workflow, many PR teams used it to scale output rather than improve alignment. That meant more generic outreach, templated angles, and pitches that felt mass-produced.

One journalist in the report captured the frustration perfectly:

“Too many PR professionals pitch me without ever learning who I am or what I do. Their pitches are thus irrelevant.”

AI didn’t create that problem. It just made it easier to repeat at scale. 

Turning AI Into an Opportunity With AI-Powered Relevance

AI is not a threat to PR. It can be a powerful tool for public relations activities when used as a guide rather than an unchecked author and researcher.

Media overwhelmingly say relevance is the #1 factor that makes a pitch stand out. 79% cite relevance to their beat or audience as the top determinant of engagement. They also want credible data, expert access, and timely angles, all of which call for careful preparation, not mass production.

Instead of using AI to simply produce more outreach, PR teams can use it to do more of the research that underpins better outreach. It can help analyze a journalist’s beat and recent coverage, identify angles that align with newsroom priorities, work through reports and data, and support more personalized pitches.

The value of AI in PR should be measured by how much more relevant it makes the work, not how much more work it lets us produce.

An Example of Using Relevance to Your Advantage

One example of how pinpointing relevance made a difference was ControlUp’s Windows 11 adoption campaign.

The narrative was saturated. Every vendor was talking about migration. But ControlUp had something no one else did: real‑time endpoint telemetry showing how Windows 11 actually performed in the wild.

Avista rebuilt its media strategy around relevance: journalist mapping, beat alignment, and data‑led storytelling. We used AI for research, which informed and helped us customize our pitches.

The results:

• 90 earned media articles
• 2.85M online viewership
• 1.06B total audience reach
• Coverage in Computerworld, IT Pro, MSN, TechRadar, The Register, Tom’s Guide, Windows Central, Yahoo Finance, ZDNet

Those results didn’t come from sending more pitches but from being more deliberate about who we pitched, why the story mattered to them, and what we could bring to the conversation.

The Future of PR Isn’t Automation: It’s Alignment

Journalists aren’t anti-AI. In fact, they increasingly use it. Only 21% say they don’t use generative AI tools, but 53% oppose AI‑generated PR pitches due to concerns about spam and low‑quality writing.

There is an important distinction there. AI can absolutely have a place in the PR workflow, but it cannot replace the judgment that makes outreach relevant in the first place.

The PR professionals who get the most from AI won’t be the ones who use it to send the most pitches. They’ll be the ones who use it to better understand journalists and find stronger connections between their stories and the people covering them. Making every pitch relevant and valuable results in greater trust from the media and more overall coverage.