Kevin Mwenye

ACROSS boardrooms in Harare, newsrooms in Kigali, and classrooms at universities preparing the next generation of communicators, one question I have been asked by several people is reshaping how we think about our profession, can we use artificial intelligence (AI) in public relations without losing the very thing that makes PR powerful, human authenticity?

The short answer is yes. But it requires intention, discipline, and a clear understanding of where AI helps and where it can quietly harm your credibility, your client’s reputation, and the public’s trust. This article is written for you, whether you are a seasoned PR practitioner managing a portfolio of clients, a communications officer in a government ministry, a young graduate walking into your first agency role, a company that needs to understand the value of their PR with the inception of AI, or a student still learning the fundamentals of media relations and stakeholder engagement. The AI conversation belongs to all of us, and we must navigate it together.

AI did not arrive in public relations as a distant future concept. It is already here, embedded in the tools many of us use daily, whether we recognise it or not. Practitioners are already using it to draft press releases, speeches, and media statements in minutes, monitor media coverage and sentiment across dozens of platforms simultaneously, analyse audience behaviour to inform campaign strategy, and identify emerging reputational risks before they escalate into crises.

For practitioners operating in resource constrained environments, which describes much of our reality across Africa, these capabilities are genuinely transformative. A solo PR consultant in Mutare can now produce the volume and analytical depth that previously required an entire team.

But with this power comes a responsibility that our profession has always carried, the responsibility to tell the TRUTH, to represent with integrity, and to serve the public interest alongside our clients’ interests.

This is where we must be honest with ourselves. AI systems, particularly large language models and generative tools can produce content that is factually incorrect with great confidence, culturally misaligned with local audiences and values, and indistinguishable from human writing to the untrained eye. For PR practitioners, this creates a dangerous grey area. When you use an AI tool to draft a statement and publish it without thorough review, you are not simply being efficient. You are staking your professional reputation on the accuracy of a machine that has no accountability, no professional code of ethics, and no understanding of the nuanced stakeholder relationships you have spent years building.

Consider what is already unfolding across the communications industry. A communications team uses AI to generate a backgrounder on a company’s environmental record. AI produces confident-sounding statistics that are outdated or simply fabricated, a phenomenon the industry now calls hallucination. The document is distributed to journalists. A fact-checker finds the errors. The company’s credibility takes a hit, and so does the practitioner who approved the content.

In another situation, a PR agency uses AI to generate social media responses during a crisis. The responses are generic, tone-deaf to the local cultural context, and feel robotic to an audience that needed empathy and human connection at a critical moment. The brand recovers, but the trust does not. These are not hypothetical warnings. They are the real consequences of treating AI as a replacement for professional judgment rather than a tool that supports it.

What makes this conversation particularly important for Zimbabwean and broader African PR practitioners is the question of context. Our audiences are deeply relational. Trust in this part of the world is built through community, consistency, and cultural fluency. A press release that reads as though it was written without an understanding of the local political climate, the economic pressures facing ordinary citizens, or the communication norms of specific communities will be felt immediately, even if the reader cannot quite explain why it feels off. AI, trained predominantly on Western datasets, does not inherently understand the texture of communication in our context. That understanding lives in you. And it is irreplaceable.

So how do we use AI responsibly without surrendering our authenticity? The answer lies in repositioning the role AI plays in your workflow. Think of AI not as the author, but as the assistant. Not as the strategist, but as the researcher. Not as the voice, but as the first draft that your professional eye then shapes into something that genuinely represents your client, your values, and your audience. When you generate a media statement using AI, read it with the same scrutiny you would apply to a junior team member’s first attempt. Check every fact independently. Interrogate the tone. Ask yourself whether this sounds like the organisation it is meant to represent, or whether it sounds like every other corporate statement generated by an algorithm with no knowledge of your client’s history, personality, or community standing.

Authenticity in PR has never meant doing everything manually. It has always meant that the human professional remains the custodian of truth and relationships. A practitioner who uses AI to analyse media sentiment and then applies their own insight to craft a strategic response is not being inauthentic. They are being smart. A practitioner who generates a speech, reviews it carefully, rewrites the sections that do not reflect the speaker’s voice, verifies the data, and takes full professional responsibility for what is published — that practitioner is using AI exactly as it should be used.

The misinformation dimension of this conversation deserves its own serious attention. We live in an era where deepfake videos, AI-generated quotes attributed to real people, and algorithmically amplified false narratives are becoming weapons in reputational warfare. As PR practitioners, we are on the frontline of this landscape. We are the professionals that organisations turn to when their reputation is under attack, and increasingly, those attacks are being powered by AI. This means that part of your professional development in this era must include media literacy that goes beyond traditional fact checking. You need to understand how AI-generated content is identified, how synthetic media is flagged, and how to advise your clients on policies that protect them from being victims or, unintentionally, perpetrators of AI-driven misinformation. This is not optional expertise. It is fast becoming a core competency of the modern PR practitioner.

For students and early-career practitioners reading this, understand that you are entering the profession at one of its most consequential turning points. The practitioners who will lead this industry in the next decade will not be those who avoided AI out of fear, nor those who embraced it so completely that they forgot to think critically. They will be the ones who developed strong foundational skills in writing, research, ethics, relationship-building, and then learned to use AI as a powerful amplifier of those skills. Learn the craft first. Learn to write a press release that sings. Learn to read a room, navigate a crisis with calm, and build a media relationship based on mutual respect. Once those muscles are developed, AI will make you faster without making you hollow.

For seasoned practitioners, the responsibility is equally significant. You carry institutional knowledge, professional credibility, and mentorship obligations that matter enormously in this transition. Your role is not just to adopt new tools, but to model ethical adoption for those watching how you work. l Mwenye is public relations and communication specialist

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