In case you missed it: PRWeek's Steve Barrett hosts a conversation about our 2025 Relevance Report: AI Activated with guests Frank X. Shaw, Chief Communications Officer at Microsoft, Melissa Waggener Zorkin, Global CEO of WE Communications, and Fred Cook, our Center for PR director. The trio discuss how AI is changing how communicators work, create, and connect and how it makes people in our industry feel more valued. The USC Relevance Report of 40+ forward-looking essays about the current and future use of AI in public relations is available for free download at annenberg.usc.edu/relevance.
This episode is a replay of special podcast hosted by PRWeek about the 2025 USC Relevance Report.
This special PRWeek podcast, "AI Activated," brought together three PR industry leaders and PRWeek Hall of Famers to discuss AI's impact on public relations. Hosted by Steve Barrett, Editorial Director of PR Week, the conversation featured:
The discussion centered on research from Microsoft, We. and USC about AI's transformative effects on PR practices.
Key insights include:
AI as a Tool, Not a Replacement
The panel emphasizes that AI should enhance human storytelling and relationships rather than replace them. Frank Shaw compared current AI adoption to the early days of personal computers, suggesting we're just beginning to understand its potential.
Creating an AI-Ready Culture
Melissa Waggener Zorkin highlights the importance of employer encouragement in AI adoption, noting that organizations should empower employees to experiment with AI tools and celebrate early adopters who can share knowledge across teams.
Education and Skill Development
Fred Cook shares his experience incorporating AI into USC student projects, revealing how prompt engineering skills significantly impact results. He notes that students who crafted detailed prompts received better AI outputs than those using basic instructions.
Practical Applications
The conversation covers AI applications in content creation, data analysis, media relations, and measurement. Frank Shaw discusses using AI for strategic planning and information capture, while Melissa emphasizes AI's democratizing effect, allowing professionals at all levels to contribute innovative approaches.
Future Outlook
The panel agrees that AI will make PR more exciting for young professionals by automating routine tasks and allowing them to focus on more strategic and creative work. The podcast referenced two reports for further reading: "Energized by AI" and "The Relevance Report."
The USC Relevance Report of 40+ forward-looking essays about the current and future use of AI in public relations is available for free download at annenberg.usc.edu/relevance.
Frank X. Shaw 0:02
So it's this culture of experimentation. It's this culture of use. It's finding the tool, thinking about it as a tool, not as something that's happening to you, but something that you are using to be better.
Melissa Waggener Zorkin 0:13
The strongest predictors of AI success within an agency or anywhere, really, are this encouragement from an employer and allowing the freedom and the trust to say you can use this as you see fit. We're
Fred Cook 0:25
trying to immerse the students in this AI experience so they when they get out, they'll be bringing something new to an agency instead of just learning on the job.
Steve Barrett 0:41
Hello everyone, and welcome to this special PR week podcast brought to you in partnership with Microsoft, we communications and the USC center for PR. My name's Steve Barrett. I'm the editorial director of PR week, going to host the show. It's called AI activated. The discussion will be centered around some research that both Microsoft and USC have done on AI's impacts on the PR industry. So we are really pleased to have three legends of the industry. I think you're all Hall of Famers, aren't you? We've got Melissa Waggener Zorkin, who's global CEO of we communications. Hi, Melissa. Hi Steve, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. Frank Shaw, Chief communication at Microsoft Corporation. Hey, Steve, good to see you and you and Fred Cook, Director USC Center for Public Relations and chairman emeritus at Golan. Hey, Fred, Hey, Steve. How are you? I'm well, it's great to be chatting to a West Coast crowd. So
Frank X. Shaw 1:43
to the conversation after the universe out here, Steve, don't forget. I
Steve Barrett 1:48
know I miss my times out there. I don't visit enough, so I need to, need to get over there again. But let's talk about these reports. We and USC worked on a study called energized by AI, and that reveals that AI is making communicators feel more valued, while USC is relevance report produced with Microsoft showcases how AI is reshaping the way we work, create and connect. So lots of synergies between the reports, lots of big discussion topics for the industry. Frank, I wanted to start with you. One of the things that always comes up with AI and is, I guess, people sometimes a little frightened about it. And one of the main highlights of the relevance report talks about finding our voice, the role of humanity in storytelling in the age of AI, because maybe people are afraid that machines are taking over. Communicators often roll wonder about that role humans will play as AI becomes more ingrained in the day to day and storytelling is still one of, if not the most important aspects of a communicators role. So how are you at Microsoft ensuring that humanity remains central to the storytelling process in this age of AI, because they're both super important, aren't
Frank X. Shaw 3:06
they? Yeah, I think there are two sort of questions embedded in that. One is like, how do we take advantage of these new tools to enhance our storytelling capabilities? And we have to do that. We have new ways of working. We can create things more easily than we have in the past. So how do we take the thing that we're really good at with just storytelling and get better at it by using some of these new tools? So that's thing number one. Thing number two is equally important is that it's not just around storytelling. The value we provide is so deeply embedded in relationships and understanding of relationships, both internally and externally. So I think about the jobs that many of us do, we're not just sitting in front of computers, typing away or anything like that. We're in meetings. We're out there finding stories. We're creating stories. We're creating clarity about what we're going to do. We're mediating disputes, often, because, you know, some somebody might think this is the story, and somebody else might think that is the story. And you know, we're the we're not necessarily the decision makers, but we're there at that at that point of discussion. And so our ability to be great at our jobs is completely dependent upon our ability to forge relationships and then make sure that we are using those relationships in ways that drive the company or the institution forward.
Steve Barrett 4:27
Yeah, you often hear the phrase that people are worried about AI taking their jobs, but actually it's people who know how to use AI smartly who are going to be taking the job. So I guess that speaks to your point about upping the quality of storytelling, doesn't it? It's actually going to be a useful tool, literally, to improve storytelling even more. That
Frank X. Shaw 4:52
is exactly right. And there's new ways of finding audiences. There's new ways of reaching those audiences, and so we have to. To be looking at that. But the core, the core piece of it still gets to that human piece. Like, what's the story? Where do we find it? Who do we tell it to? And then life gets, you know, both easier and more complicated through AI,
Steve Barrett 5:13
yeah, absolutely correct, and relationships will still remain true. Yes. Fred Al
Fred Cook 5:18
Gore and you Sam is saying, it says, Don't let high tech replace high touch. And that was something that he believed in. And I think our business has always, always been about relationships, and I think that's going to continue to be at the forefront, regardless of the technology that we use. Yeah,
Steve Barrett 5:36
Al was one of the forerunners of the industry, and full of wise words, and that would that that one certainly stands up. Melissa, you know, whether you're leading an agency or an in house team, one of your major responsibilities now as a leader is to foster that AI ready culture and to help everyone on the team thrive as such a leader. How are you doing that? At we communications, because it's, it's quite a revolution, isn't it, if you're looking back over the last decades, it is a fundamental change. Yeah, it's
Melissa Waggener Zorkin 6:10
a fundamental shift. And I think it's the sort of the rebuilding of our culture at its core. I think the most important thing is to make sure that our people feel empowered, truly empowered to dive into these tools, and that means experimentation, if not perfection. That means innovation, and that means new kinds of ways of thinking and even making mistakes and celebrating some of those and learning from those. And so for us, you know, our research tells us that the strongest predictors of AI success within an agency or anywhere, really are this encouragement from an employer and allowing the freedom and the trust to say you can use this as you see fit. And so as CEO, I'm making sure that we instill that in our people, and we send a strong message that I trust you. You've got this give it a go. I'm sure you'll do it right? And if not, let's get together and talk about what's working and what's not. Because I think it's interesting. People ask for training, but is there really training today? I think the training comes from the people who have adopted it first, and they're passing what they know or what they've learned on to others. And so it is all about that culture and people modeling AI use themselves, and then supporting the culture and saying, this is, this is where we're going.
Steve Barrett 7:24
Yeah, Frank, you're an interesting position, because you're a communications leader, but you're a leader at a company that is at the cutting edge of AI. So that's a an interesting dynamic. How are you, how would you advise teams to stay ahead of that? And to Melissa's point about training and getting, you know, getting getting up to speed with the technology. What sort of hints could you offer?
Frank X. Shaw 7:47
Well, I mean, I'll just start by saying I've been around technology for a while, and I have never seen kind of rapid improvement and additional capacity that that we've seen around all these new AI models, things that, you know, a year ago or two years ago, you know, we thought were five years out, are here with us today, and the pace continues to increase. So the capabilities just keep going up. And so the idea that there's going to be this place where you just pause and wait for somebody to show up with like the tablets that say, Here, go do this. It's just not going to happen, because by the time those tablets show up, the world will have moved on six months in six days. So the key is to really encourage people to use the tools that are there now. Experiment like crazy. Find the tool that works best for what it is that they are trying to do. And then if it doesn't work, don't give up on it. Try it again in two days, because it might work in two days. And so it's this culture of experimentation. It's this culture of use. It's a finding the tool, thinking about it as a tool, not as something that's happening to you, but something that you are using to be better,
Melissa Waggener Zorkin 9:01
yeah. And I think it's also that everyone is writing the playbook. It's not just one playbook. And I think we look at the numbers in our company about, you know, what we have done, it's been a game changer for productivity at our agency, really. And there's been, you know, like, 1000s and 1000s of actions taken a since assistance log the documents we've rewritten and all the things that we've done differently. So it's just the combined collective power of the agency that's coming together versus sort of a here's a training session, yeah,
Fred Cook 9:30
because one of the things we found is that people are overwhelmed by the number of new tools, and just keeping up with them all is almost impossible. So you have to it has, as Melissa said, it's got to be like a collective effort, where one person sharing something that they have used, another person sharing something they have used, because otherwise you you get overwhelmed. Yeah,
Steve Barrett 9:51
that was something that came through in the USC we communications report, wasn't it? Fred, yeah, and that, you know. Current with evolving AI is the number one challenge at the moment for communicators. So what other council would you offer communicators? You're in the education space. Of course, you're producing the comms folks of tomorrow. But what council would you offer communicators of all types, so that they can manage this what they might see as a daunting challenge,
Fred Cook 10:20
but it's interesting, because I you know, when social media hit in the early 2000s all the agencies hired young people because they understood social media. They were they were more native to it, but AI is different. They don't have a head start the way they did on social media, and so we're all sort of learning it at the same time, and I think that makes it a different dynamic. And I think sometimes the older veterans are are using it more often than students. So we're trying at USC, where we've been teaching AI courses for the last couple of years. We're incorporating it into all of our classes in some way or another, and we're inviting people who have new products to come to campus and show them to us, so that we're trying to immerse the students in this AI experience, so they when they get out, they'll be bringing something new to an agency instead of just learning on the job. Yeah,
Steve Barrett 11:15
it's an interesting dynamic. Frank, I was one more question on this, I've heard people say that when the piece personal computer came in back in the day, that it was kind of incumbent upon business to provide the training for people to learn how to use PCs. And you know, and largely they did, and they kind of funded it, and they gave the time for it. Now we're in such a different time where there's so much technology and everyone's so tech savvy. There the smartphone rules everything. So Fred mentioned social. Are we getting enough time? You know, I sometimes feel like I need to take three months off and get myself, you know, almost like reset my brain and get up to speed with AI, but you've got to do it on the right while you're doing the day job, haven't you? What's your advice there? Well, I
Frank X. Shaw 12:06
do think that the difference, I think the difference is that some of the early tech, some of the early technology from the PC and some of the productivity software, it was more complex, and it forced people, it forced people to adapt to the device, as opposed to the other way around. You know you had to, if you wanted to be something, to be in bold, you needed to learn an obscure set of keys that you hit. Yeah, and then over time, that got simplified so people couldn't use it more naturally. But, but it was still us adapting to the needs of the device that we're using. A lot of the technology today that's coming out flips that a little bit. It's adapting to us. And so the modality of being able to talk to your device and get answers in whatever language you want is different than the learning to speak, search or anything like that, and it's just a question of figuring out which works best for you under what circumstances. You know, if I'm trying to solve a problem at home, I will talk to my phone and I will ask questions. I was like, Okay, now I'm trying to do this. I was, I was doing something the other day that involved me having to get out of a locked trunk. I'm not going to get into it. I was not being kidnapped,
Steve Barrett 13:31
but I was just, like, a film script. I was just talking
Frank X. Shaw 13:34
to my phone, you know, like, where is this thing? And it's like, I can't find it. So look, look over there, right? And it can't see it. I mean, I could have turned my video on, but it's just me talking to it, just like I would a smart friend. And I'm like, I can't open it. It says you got to use your key and pop this thing off, and then you push this button, and then you'll, you'll, you'll be good. And that's a great example of just how rapidly things are moving. Six months ago, I couldn't have done that, and how natural it is. And so I think, you know, one of the things that we have going for us is that we are all uncovering these new superpowers based on our ability to engage more naturally with a set of technology. You know, we can all code now. We can write applications like all of us can write applications that do things that we want that we used to not be able to do. I mean, that unlocks a tremendous set of new capabilities that we didn't ask before. So it's like, it's like being bitten by a radioactive spider, except no spider or no radioactivity.
Steve Barrett 14:39
Yeah, I like the line about, rather than us adapting to technology, the technology adapts to us. That's a great line. Sticking with you, Frank, because I think people worry about data security and safety, don't they? And they they've emerged, I think, in the research, as two of the biggest obstacles to people fully embracing. Um, AI, so how can PR pros approach and overcome those sort of obstacles in terms of pushing forward to the future we I
Frank X. Shaw 15:08
think the first is that we just have to acknowledge these are real concerns and not try to hand wave them away and say, like, oh yeah, these are not things you have to worry about any any business or institution like really needs to think hard about their data, the privacy of their data, the security of their data, and they should work with vendors that put that as a high order problem. In some ways, it's similar to what happened when people started bringing things like mobile devices to work that opened up a whole new set of security challenges. Businesses then adapted to that by figuring out how to manage those devices. So the industry has gotten better, and so now most companies provide resources so that that that data and the way it's used is secure. And so pick one of those companies that has security and privacy as a first world problem that they're solving.
Fred Cook 16:03
I'm sure you know one, Frank, you know it's interesting. Frank, when your team was at USC recently, we had a speaker from a cybersecurity firm present to them, and they said there's 4 million job openings in cybersecurity right now. So if anybody's looking for a job. That's the place to go. I
Steve Barrett 16:22
think there are a few people looking for jobs at the moment, but that's probably a whole other podcast. Yeah. Melissa, another one of the enlightening findings of the USC we communications report is that the least common use cases of AI among communicators. So it found that PR pros don't broadly use AI for media relations, for example, only 24% or coverage reporting only 20% and measuring PR impact only 16% so those are quite surprising numbers, actually, and they clearly indicate areas for advancement. So what would you say to communicators who are looking to embrace AI in a manner that will will improve those percentages,
Melissa Waggener Zorkin 17:07
I would first say we kind of missed a point back where we were talking about the adoption, is that the key for us is to celebrate the people who are the evangelists, the people who are on the leading edge, and make sure that we're bringing in a lot of that learning into just the core of our company. Because if you start with the good news that I think we all agree that the most common use is the content creation for AI, followed by probably data analysis and background research. Well, so people have been really diving in and experimenting with pieces of that prompt, writing, idea generation, developing outlines, first drafts, whatever. So there's a great there's a great foundation, but now we need to say that untapped potential, those things that are the not common use cases. How do you migrate those to people so that they become more common? And I think that's where you make sure that you are trading information about AI habits. That's where you make sure, like we do, every Friday we've got people meeting talking about, I tried this, I tried that, and you just have to push people to go much, much further in terms of All right, so how could I identify which journalists will cover a topic and get into kind of that relationship piece that Frank at the front was talking about, as far as Taking storytelling into that relationship piece, so that more people do for media relations, actually start to see a value, a connection. And then I think it's about systems for learning and systems where you celebrate and because people love to share when they've discovered things, and that's not a natural thing to pause and say, hey, look what we've learned. And so we've created a way to trade this information where it's celebratory and it's actually making sure that the people who are the evangelists are really raised up. And I'd finally say that leaders don't often celebrate experiments and failures. They tend to celebrate the things that are successful. I think we switch our mentality as leaders, and say we're also going to celebrate the fact that that didn't work, you know, so don't try that and and we make sure that there's a benefit of recognition for the great work going on in experimentation.
Steve Barrett 19:12
Yeah, one of the numbers that really stood out there Frank, was the measurement point, with only 16% using it at the moment. How do you see that evolving and developing? Because you would, you would imagine that there's a lot of potential there that maybe isn't yet being taken up. Yeah,
Frank X. Shaw 19:30
I think it's super interesting. The you were experimenting and trying a bunch of new things that have been really helpful, especially in a real time situation, because one of the things that you really want is you want real time information, and real time access the ability to ask a question, what's the top story for Microsoft in Japan today and and get a response back, set up a search that'll let you know how news is landing, and then you get the reports. Like, as rapidly as they can. They're not perfect, right? Because, you know, like, what you really are looking for is you're going to look for deeper analysis, and that's going to come a little bit later, but you can get a lot out of that. And then the other thing that I think is kind of interesting is that it gives us the ability then to look back as well, and then use some of these new deep research, deep models that are out there to ask questions about how we did and get it from a completely unbiased source. You know, one of the things that makes me crazy is that, like sometimes, you see, all the, you know, we did something, it was perfect. Everybody loved it. Look how great it was. I mean, you know, we want to celebrate our wins, as Melissa said, and of course, that's not always true, but it's very hard to ask an account team, either here or at one of our agencies, to be completely unbiased about how something did. It's just it's just tough, but you can't go back and you can say, hey, here is all the coverage. What does it say? What does it say about our communication strategy? What did we do? And then, you know, the language model that we're working with, it does not care how we feel about
Steve Barrett 21:10
Yeah, robots. Robots don't have emotions yet or biases, yeah? Well, they maybe they may be some, some biases.
Melissa Waggener Zorkin 21:19
Biases piece too. But I like what Frank said about the global reach and the ability to not just say that it's, you know, the United States view. I like that very quick ability to say this is how it played in the world, which I think for communicators, is incredibly important with all the geopolitical dynamics and just making sure we're giving the right counsel. That's more from a global perspective,
Steve Barrett 21:41
absolutely, especially for global brands.
Fred Cook 21:43
David talked about media. I just wanted to say one of the articles in the relevance report was written by Frank's colleagues, and it talks about a joint venture between co pilot and meltwater. They're working together to create a tool that will add AI to the media mix, and we beta tested our students, beta tested at USC, and it's really going to be, I think, revolutionary in terms of how it's going to allow you to use not search the internet, but search meltwater in a way that will help you a lot with media. So I think the numbers in the survey that Melissa was quoting are going to go up.
Steve Barrett 22:22
Yeah, that's a good segue, actually, Fred into the question for you about because the report really wants to address what the next generation of PR pros need to know about AI, and maybe they're shaping it as well. But yeah, I'm sure you'll tell us. But industry leaders also need to help prepare those young pros to contribute immediately, but be tomorrow's leaders as well. So you're dealing with youth, the use of the next generation of PR pros. What are you focused on to help them in the near and short, in and long term, in that, you know, in relation to those facts?
Fred Cook 22:59
But as I said before they're they're not any more trained than anybody else on this. So it's sort of a baseline of zero. I think that, you know, in my class last week we had, what we do every year is they create a business as an as an entrepreneur, startup. And this year I said, I want you to write the business plan with AI and and then I want you to correct it and improve it and show me the changes you know, like track changes on it. So they they created the document using AI, and then they analyzed it and incorrect it and added their own point of view to it and improved it. And then we talked about the prompts that they used in class, and the people that wrote the best prompts had the best result, and often the prompts were longer than the actual document that came out. So just shows you, they're just learning how to use the tool, as Frank said, in a way that is effective. The people that did prompts that weren't very good sort of got the same generic stuff back from Ai. So it's a learning process that you you get better and better at over time. And I think that's they just have to get their hands on it and use it. And a couple of people didn't like it. They said I could write this faster by myself than than I came with AI. It's too much trouble to put the prompt in, but the majority found it much easier. Yeah,
Steve Barrett 24:30
interesting. Melissa, just to finish off, what would you say to the next generation of PR pros in terms of AI and what they need to bring to the table?
Melissa Waggener Zorkin 24:39
Well, I love the discussion, because I agree we're all beginners when it comes to AI, and that's a really good thing. And I've often thought that the best, you know, leadership team would be a 25 year old and a 50 year old who'd come together. And, you know, it would be magic. I would say that the lack of hierarchy around AI is a really great thing for PR. Pros coming into this industry and say, you know, this gives you a chance to learn and grow and think and contribute in a way that maybe before hierarchy would have changed for you. So you have a chance, you have a seat at the table. And I think that that's that whole idea of, you know, senior leadership roles are just equal to a lot of people who are also just entering the business, and let them learn from one another. And I bring it right back, though, to what Frank said up front about the human part of it. You have to encourage every one of them to understand this is no replacement for you and your thinking and your critical analysis. And so you have to always bring them back and say, it is just a tool. We develop the tool. We're maintaining the tool. And so at the end of the day, you have to really embrace it and use it as if it's just a piece of you. It's not you.
Frank X. Shaw 25:47
We tend to think about this as a tool we're using at the tactical level, or even maybe at the reporting level. What's interesting to think about is how we use some of these new capabilities before we start right? So it's like most, most senior people, when you're starting on a project, you don't start from a blank sheet. You've been thinking about something for a while, you've been reading things about it for a while, you've been listening to podcasts, and then you start now, we have the capability of starting to capture all that stuff, and as you go along, you know, so like, I'm engaging on a regular basis in a dialog with an experimental co pilot we're using where I'm telling it what I'm thinking about and what I'm reading, and I have an idea of what the output might be, but you don't want to start there. You want to say, Gosh, because this was a really interesting piece of reporting from this publication on the state of the media. This was another really interesting podcast around who is going to own the Washington Post, and why is it going to be? Kara Swisher, right? You know, like about this a little bit, and then, and then, over time, you amass the set of information, as well as a dialog with the agent, and it starts being able to suggest other things. And so then when you when you actually move into action, you've already got a rich data set that you're working with, and it's just super interesting.
Steve Barrett 27:17
Yeah, and young PR pros are not going to be they're going to be doing more interesting things than pasting up media hits, aren't they into copy books? So I think that's it's so much even more exciting industry to come into. So thanks to all three of you for sharing your expertise and your views. Check out these reports, energized by AI and the relevance report. And Thanks so much, Frank, Melissa and Fred for joining us for this special podcast. Hey,
Speaker 1 27:45
Steve, thank you. You.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai