AI Can’t Manufacture a Point of View
If no agency is a good fit, ever consider it was you? Every few months, a founder turns up in my inbox wanting the cover of Forbes by next Thursday. He has a product, a price, and a link to buy it. What he doesn’t have is a reason for anyone to...
- Home
- Intelligent Insights Blog
- AI Can’t Manufacture a Point of View
If no agency is a good fit, ever consider it was you?
Every few months, a founder turns up in my inbox wanting the cover of Forbes by next Thursday. He has a product, a price, and a link to buy it. What he doesn’t have is a reason for anyone to write about him or his company. When I explain this, he claims his last agency didn’t “get it” either. That’s usually the fourth or fifth agency he’s said it about.
I’ve done PR for over a decade and now help build an AI-native platform for it, so read this with that bias in plain sight. You’d expect me to promise AI changes everything. It’s changing plenty. However, it won’t do the one thing these founders need most, which is to make them worth covering.
Five agencies can’t all be the problem.
There’s a comforting story going around that PR is broken and AI is the fix. Yes, some agencies act like black boxes. They charge retainers for “relationships” and “maybes.” Meanwhile, your competitor gets featured in TechCrunch. Some of that is fair. And a monthly report that’s mostly a screenshot of a media list is just a receipt, not transparency.
But churn through five of them, watch every one fail, and the math stops pointing at the agencies. The one variable in every failed engagement is you. Sorry, not sorry.
The man who wanted Forbes for $500
Years ago, at a different shop, we signed a guy who ran a service that rewrote people’s dating-app profiles. Polished your bio, promised more matches. He called himself a serial entrepreneur but went quiet whenever anyone asked what he’d built before. He wanted Forbes within two weeks, or he’d cancel. He just wanted coverage that mentioned his service. It needed to say something like, “This rewrites your dating profile for a fee. Buy it here.”
He lacked some key things: no case studies, no data on rewrite success, and no theory on why most profiles fail, other than saying, “ours are better.” He wouldn’t even give up a few free tips, because tips were the product. He wanted a national magazine to run an advert for $500 a month. When we suggested he buy actual ads, he said ads were too expensive; PR was cheaper.
He arrived misinformed at best, deluded at worst, but the agency put him under contract anyway. Someone should have warned him before he signed. No one buys a Forbes cover for a $500 retainer and a checkout link. A founder with nothing to share gives his PR team nothing to sell. Instead, we took the money and hoped. That’s the quiet rot in this business, and it predates AI. Agencies sign clients they can’t help, or promise what nobody can deliver, because turning down revenue is hard.
If a prospect thinks PR is a cheaper form of advertising, you’re already on the back foot. You can still win from there, but only if someone resets that expectation before the invoice. No tool does it for you.
The shortcut just changed clothes.
The corner-cutter isn’t new, but the methods have been upgraded. Ten years ago, the weapon was the newest mail merge tool. It fired the same “Hi {FirstName}” pitch at four hundred reporters and called it outreach. Now it’s an LLM writing four hundred smoother versions of the same empty pitch. The spam is better spelled, but it’s still spam. The problem was never the typing. It was that there was nothing to say.
Place a large language model in front of a company with no research or an opinion worth quoting. Add a spokesperson who speaks fluent press-release, and it generates confident but unusable text. AI can’t manufacture a point of view you don’t have, or help a nervous executive say something a human would quote. What it does well is real, and I use it daily. Muck Rack’s 2026 survey found 93% of PR people say AI helps them work faster, and 82% say it lifts their quality. But leverage is a multiplier, and a multiplier does nothing to zero. Ten times the reach for a company with nothing to say is ten times the people ignoring it.
Your chatbot won’t tell you that you’re boring.
We offer targeting and relationship intelligence. Some may wonder if this is just the old idea of “good relationships get you the cover”, but it’s not. A relationship buys you a fair hearing; it doesn’t guarantee coverage. Just like good targeting puts the right story in front of the right person, but it can’t make a boring one interesting.
And here’s the odd thing to admit as someone building with these tools: most LLMs are trained to be agreeable. Ask a chatbot if your dating-profile startup deserves a Forbes cover, and it’ll help you craft the pitch. But the founder really needed someone to say no. That’s the least automatable job in PR, the honest conversation about why the story isn’t there yet. I wouldn’t trust today’s models to have it, precisely because they’re built not to.
So, will AI replace PR people? For anyone whose whole value is speed, probably, and they should have seen it coming. For everyone else, the work becomes more interesting because the grunt is now someone else’s problem. What remains is the judgment and perspective that no tool can provide. The founder who wanted Forbes didn’t need a better agency or a “smarter” tool. He needed something to say. The machine will do nearly everything now. It still can’t do that.
[CTA]
Want to see what a serious relationships engine does for earned media? Book a demo. It’s very good at getting your story to the reporter most likely to run it, so bring one worth telling. Not sure you’ve got it yet? Talk to one of our senior PR advisors first for an honest read before spending your money.
