The Dumbest AI Communications Products Sales People Pitch Us
AI start-ups keep hyping new “public relations AI tools,” but none of the software grasps a fraction of the services comms specialists offer.
My favorite grifters are the tech executives who pivoted from digital media to the metaverse to crypto. Now, many of these failures work at AI companies, and they email me constantly, offering allegedly innovative AI software that will “revolutionize” the communications industry.
The problem with all these pitches: Their software misunderstands the basics of communications, crisis consulting, and public relations. Software should solve problems, not increase them. In many circumstances, their technology would create issues for my business.
Take one company’s “AI media training offerings.” A sales rep promised me his new AI would analyze clients’ speaking and then offer second-by-second feedback on how the clients could improve their skills. For instance, at which minute they should talk louder.
The technology contradicts the central goal of media training, which is to make clients sound natural and charismatic when speaking to reporters. Often, tech executives hire our firm for media training because they talk like Wall-E and want to sound like humans. This software would cause our tech clients to sound more robotic than they already do.
These problems increase with the AI companies offering to automate pitching. Each of these startups suggests we pay them to scan reporters’ X accounts, then automate pitches based on their posts on X. Of course, this means if a politics reporter tweets about an ABC sitcom, they could get inundated with pitches about comedians even though they don’t write about actors.
Many companies believe they’ve reinvented the wheel, but start-ups have offered these “services” for years. Earlier companies all failed because guess what? A robot just creates spam. Few reporters respond to spam. They reply to interesting, unique, carefully targeted pitches.
The worst AI offering of them all is the new software that generates text. These should be helpful. They should predict the next word in pitches, but they automate with so many biases that they are useless.
Often, the AI text generation outright hates my clients. As a comm specialist, I represent many controversial figures. Multiple times when writing pitches for clients, the generative text has suggested my client is “problematic,” “sexist,” “racist,” etc. Why would I pay for software that critiques my clients in pitches?
Of course, writing pitches is a small percentage of my job. The magic happens when I’m on the phone with reporters and meeting them in person. There’s no way AI can assist me in this regard, but how can I use AI for my job when it doesn’t even cover the basics, let alone know what a comms specialist does? For now, Microsoft Word is much more beneficial to my business than any of these AI companies’ “revolutionary software offerings.”