The digital native myth: why young PR professionals aren't the AI experts you think

Assuming younger practitioners are naturally AI-fluent risks excluding them from the conversations that will shape their careers – and leaving the industry with a growing skills gap.

By Leticia Callista

There is a comfortable assumption in our industry that younger practitioners have AI handled. We grew up online, so surely we'll pick it up as naturally as we picked up social media.

I don't think that's true.

Knowing your way around TikTok or Instagram is very different from understanding how to use AI responsibly or judge whether an AI-generated answer can be trusted. One came naturally growing up. The other I've had to learn on the job.

I'm fortunate that my employer encourages experimentation with AI. But after speaking to other junior practitioners, I've realised that's far from universal. Too often, support is limited because people assume younger employees will simply work it out for themselves.

AI conversations are missing junior voices

I felt that assumption particularly obvious at the recent AI for PR conference. It was one of the best conferences I’ve attended. The quality of thinking was well ahead of where most of the profession currently sits. However, somewhere around the first coffee break I realised something: there were very few people my age in the room.

When the next session began, I noticed something else. There were very few younger voices on stage either. We’re having an industry-wide conversation about how AI will reshape public relations, but many of the people whose careers will be affected first are missing from it.

The path of how PR careers are built is changing

This should concern senior leaders as much as junior practitioners. AI is increasingly handling many of the tasks traditionally carried out by entry-level PR professionals, from drafting pitches and building media lists to monitoring coverage. These jobs formed the apprenticeship through which junior practitioners developed judgement and commercial understanding.

If AI replaces that work without creating new opportunities to learn, we risk removing the pathway from junior to senior altogether. This isn't about fairness. It's about the long-term health of the profession.

The skills are changing

Take media pitching. I am not talking about using AI to produce a first draft. Journalists have reportedly said they can spot an AI-written pitch immediately. At the conference, one journalist demonstrated the AI system he uses to manage his inbox. It scores each pitch, ranks them by relevance, extracts key information and compiles a daily digest. The system has been trained using thousands of his previous stories, giving it a sophisticated understanding of what constitutes a worthwhile pitch.

His advice was not that AI will reject pitches automatically. It was that generic pitches have become even easier to discard. When AI becomes the first reader, well-targeted pitching becomes more valuable, not less.

Search is changing too

Then there is the bigger shift in how people find things at all. More and more, people aren’t typing questions into Google and scrolling through results. They are asking ChatGPT or other AI assistants and acting on the answer without visiting a single website.

That has created a whole new discipline almost overnight: generative engine optimisation (GEO). Unlike traditional SEO, GEO focuses on increasing the likelihood that brands appear in AI-generated answers. The rules are already proving to be different. Research suggests the overlap between Google’s highest-ranking results and the sources cited by AI tools has fallen significantly, meaning strong search rankings alone no longer guarantee visibility in AI-generated responses.

I finished my master's only last year, and GEO barely came up. That is not a criticism of the course. It simply shows how quickly the profession is changing. One speaker had a simple piece of advice: we all build a tier-one media list, but we should now be building a tier-one gen-AI list alongside it.

The sources AI models rely on are not always the publications that perform best in Google search. Understanding where AI systems gather information is becoming an increasingly important communications skill. Given how new all of this is, nobody has a head start measured in years. That is a rare opening for juniors to get up to speed quickly and learn alongside the people ahead of them.

Don’t leave junior practitioners behind

There is a lot to be excited about in all this. Far from automating public relations into the background, AI is pulling it closer to the centre of how brands are understood, and the work is getting more interesting, not less.

That is exactly why it matters who is in the room for it. We keep asking what AI will do to public relations. The better question might be: who will be equipped to lead the profession if the people whose careers are being reshaped aren't given the opportunity to learn alongside everyone else?

I will be at next year's AI for PR conference. I hope that when I look around, the room is fuller — not of more people, but of younger ones. So, to the senior practitioners reading this, bring someone junior with you. Better still, bring them into the work that is reshaping all of this now, while there is still time for them to learn it.

I think I was the youngest person in that room. Next year, I would like not to be.

A portrait of Leticia Callista.

Leticia Callista is a senior account executive at Curzon PR, which is a CIPR Corporate Affiliate member. Her passion is to support dynamic storytelling with a global mindset in approaching strategic media relations and content creation.

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