The Truth About AI – with Ben Verinder

Bump into any PR leader these days, and the conversation inevitably turns to AI very quickly. And the opinions range from a breathless ‘OMG’ it’s amazing hype to a ‘OMG we’re all doomed! That’s why it makes sense to pay attention to Ben Verinder. He has been writing about AI in our industry since 2017. In fact, Ben is co-authoring an upcoming book on the subject. Speak to Ben and you get nuance and practical insight based on long experience, which is not something many of us can claim. In our PR in the Real World episode with Ben, he talks with real clarity about what’s actually happening with AI in PR, not what we think is happening. Here are the key insights that every agency and in-house team needs to hear.

If You’re Selling Content Creation, You’re Already in Trouble

Here’s Ben’s stark warning: “Agencies are going to have to differentiate their proposition from content generation. If that’s the way you’ve been describing your service, you’re in trouble.”

Ben says he already knows of agencies that’ve lost clients to this shift, as organisations bring work in-house. Companies are training their own AI tools (large language models) and no longer need their agency for content creation.

The solution isn’t to ignore AI, but to be clear about what you’re actually selling. If you’re a media relations agency, you’re not selling content generation, you’re selling relationships with journalists, expert judgment, and the nuanced understanding that comes from human experience.

The Policy Problem

“The vast majority of people using artificial intelligence have never been trained on it,” Ben says while also pointing out. “The vast majority of us don’t have an organisational policy for the use of artificial intelligence.”

Ben’s top policy recommendation? “A clear statement of how you are and how you are not using artificial intelligence.” You don’t need to label every piece of content, but you need clarity about where you draw the lines.

This isn’t just about best practice or compliance. It is an angle that has legal implications too. In the UK, content generated entirely by AI doesn’t have intellectual property rights. If you’re signing over IP rights to clients for AI-generated content, “that’s not worth the paper that’s written on.”

We’re All Kidding Ourselves About AI Use

Ben’s research reveals a fascinating disconnect. When he asks in-house practitioners whether they have requested AI policies from their agencies, they say yes. However, when he asks agencies whether clients have requested AI policies, the numbers are “statistically far, far lower.”

“What we’ve got is this big mismatch,” Ben explains. “In-house people saying they have—what they mean is, I’d like to, but I’ve not asked yet.” Ben also says that people tend to underreport AI use to employers and clients, but overreport it in anonymous surveys. The result? A lot of wishful thinking masquerading as data.

PR Professionals Have a Secret Weapon

Ben says PR professionals might be uniquely suited to the AI age. The key to getting good results from large language models isn’t technical expertise. It’s effective prompt writing.

“Guess who’s good at writing effective instructions?” Ben asks. “Public relations practitioners.”

In his training sessions, he’s found that PR and comms teams often become the early adopters and AI ambassadors within their organisations. This isn’t just about using AI tools — it’s about understanding how to communicate with them effectively, something that plays to PR professionals’ core strengths.

The Environmental Question is More Complex Than You Think

Ben, who is also an environmental poet, has a deep interest in the vexed question around AI’s impact on the environment. But he says the answers are more complex than we are given to think. He says that the commonly cited statistic that AI queries use 10 times more energy than search engines is not as simple as that.”

The search comparison is misleading, not least because search itself is changing. Google now shows AI-generated responses above traditional search results. The fact is, most energy use happens during training, not when you’re using the model. On top of this, the computational efficiency of models is improving rapidly.

Ben is eager to do more research. His take: stay informed and consider using local AI models that use less energy.

Start Small, Think Big

Ben’s practical advice for agencies or in house teams just starting their AI journey follows his “Bridges model”:

Brief internally and externally: Talk to your team and clients about expectations and boundaries
Experiment safely: Use a “sandbox environment” to play with tools without pressure
Adopt gradually: Start with just two or three specific uses, evaluate the results, then expand thoughtfully

He references Ethan Mollick’s observation that we have “a jet plane or Ferrari in the drive and all we do is move it backwards and forwards a couple of metres.” The goal doesn’t need to be to use every AI feature available, but to understand what’s possible, make sense of it for you and your teams and apply it strategically.

The Human Element Remains Critical

Throughout our conversation, Ben consistently returned to one principle: “Always keep a human in the loop.”

This isn’t just about quality control, it’s about maintaining agency over decision-making and ensuring that AI enhances rather than replaces human judgment.

The rise of AI “slop”, the poor quality AI-generated content that drives copywriters up the wall, isn’t a failure of the tech. It’s a failure of users who don’t understand how to use the tools effectively or who try to remove human oversight entirely.

What This Means for You

AI literacy is fast becoming an important professional skill. The agencies and practitioners who will thrive won’t be those who ignore AI or those who jump on every new tool and go mad. They’ll be those who approach AI transparently and strategically. As he puts it, “We’re public relations practitioners. We know that transparency is beneficial to relationships.”

The conversation is moving fast, but here Ben outlines some useful fundamentals.