One of our founder friends tried it. He really did.

About six months into the AI wave, he sat down and did the math. Hiring a PR agency was too costly, factoring his startup stage and business operational expenses, so he figured now with Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, NotebookLM – tools that could theoretically do what took an entire PR team—he could basically cut costs and do his own PR.

One solid prompt gets you strategy. Another gets media monitoring. A third spits out outreach lists and pitch emails. A fourth generates press releases and article drafts. You scale from a full PR team to one person managing the AI outputs. You cut costs, reduce overhead, move faster.

So he experimented. Six months later, he dropped me a WhatsApp saying it just wasn’t working. That was when we sat down and tried to figure out what went wrong. And that’s when we realised the real gaps in AI.

What changed (The pros)

Speed, for starters. Press releases, pitch emails, and article drafts were generated in minutes. His startup’s social media calendar was practically built out for a full year and scheduled to go. Research that took a researcher two days? Done in under an hour. That part actually worked.

Cost-wise, yes, he saved money on the volume side. That’s not nothing for a bootstrapped startup. And on paper, it looked like a win, especially for other founders wondering if they could ditch the PR agency retainers.

Also Read: The classroom: An untapped testbed for human-centric AI

What didn’t change (and this is where it got real)

But when he reached out saying results weren’t materialising, I pulled up my sleeves to help him figure out why. And that’s when we realised something: AI can hand you the tools, but it can’t hand you the judgment. There’s a fundamental difference.

A good PR professional isn’t just a content machine; they’re a translator of nuance. They understand that some information transfers through coffee chats and off-the-record conversations. They know that certain journalistic relationships are built on years of trust and calibration, not just a well-crafted pitch email. They recognise that what works in a pitch to a tech journalist in Singapore might fall flat with a business editor in Indonesia because of cultural context, language, and heck, which platform or channel you’re using to reach out to that particular editor.

AI doesn’t have access to that. And that became very obvious very quickly.

What made us re-evaluate things

First: The media list that looked perfect but wasn’t

His AI-generated outreach list looked pristine. Categorised perfectly. Emails formatted flawlessly. But when he actually started using it, he started hearing back: “This person doesn’t work here anymore.” “Wrong email.” “Not sure who this is.”

One producer was still listed because the online media registry hadn’t updated. But she had left for a new opportunity years ago, before I had even thought of starting SARAHÁ Advisory. Where was she now? Nobody would know unless they followed her LinkedIn or caught wind of it through industry chatter. That’s human knowledge. That’s the stuff you pick up over coffee with other journalists, or by noticing someone’s career move announced on social media.

Also Read: Pandai’s low-cost growth playbook puts the edutech startup on LSE’s 100x Impact radar

The AI agent pulled her old email and title. Our PR human, who stays plugged into the industry? She wouldn’t have even sent that email. That’s not a marginal difference, that’s the difference between a pitch that lands and one that gets lost in space.

Second: The article that was smart but generic

He had a real story to tell. A hard-won lesson in e-commerce store optimisation in a volatile economy.  A perspective that only he could speak to as a multi-entrepreneur. He gave the AI a brief: create a thought leadership piece that positions him as an industry voice.

But it never made it into the opinion editorial calendars where it mattered. Editors who he pitched it to said the same thing: too high-level, generic. It was lacking value. What could readers learn from this piece that they haven’t read on probably a million other pages? It lacked the hard-won insight, the “I’ve been in the trenches and here’s what I learned” energy that actually gets coverage in opinion sections.

Our founder could tell that story. It’s real to him. But he wasn’t a PR professional who was accustomed to knowing exactly what editors were looking for, the extra meat that made the news, so it became a blind spot that he skipped – his own customer use cases. And AI wasn’t smart either to call him out for more personal insights and experiences that couldn’t be found on the internet.

A human who’s been in this space knows what not to do. They know which journalists are burned out and unlikely to respond. They know which outlets have recently changed their editorial focus. They know the unspoken rules of how to approach different editors. That institutional knowledge isn’t in any database. It lives in people who’ve been paying attention.

Also Read: Alan Turing asked if machines could think. We asked if they could lie

The lesson for early stage startups

Your next PR hire might not be a large-scale PR agency. But it’s not AI either.

It’s a human, someone who can fact-check what the AI spits out. Someone who can look at a media list and know immediately if the contacts are real and current. Someone who understands your market, your founder’s voice, and the subtle differences between a pitch that lands and one that doesn’t.

You don’t necessarily need four PR hires as an early stage startup. But you do need the advice of one really good person who can be the quality filter between what AI produces and what actually goes out into the world.

That person isn’t managing AI agents. They’re auditing them. They’re the bridge between algorithmic efficiency and human judgment. They’re the reason your outdated contacts never make it into a pitch, and why your thought leadership actually sounds like it came from a real human who’s been in the trenches.

AI is the accelerant. This person is the steering wheel.

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Image Credit: Matt Botsford on Unsplash

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