PR Week UK asks comms agencies what they are doing to stay ahead of the AI revolution. Today, we hear from Anna Fishlock, Head of Data and Digital at H/Advisors Maitland. 

What are your agency’s biggest priorities for AI?

A key priority is understanding how AI is changing the way people access information, form opinions and make decisions. AI overviews and agents offer broad visibility, making it difficult for businesses to hide bad news or outdated narratives on page 98 of a 100-page document. In this new environment, AI sees everything.

To shape how AI interprets and presents a brand, we focus on surrounding these tools with content that is accurate, trusted and easy to verify. This means paying more attention to platforms like Reddit, which some businesses may have previously overlooked, and ensuring that all owned channels, such as company websites, are properly maintained and optimised.

Briefly, how is your agency currently using AI?

AI is already part of our daily workflow, supporting obvious tasks such as summarising meetings and analysing media coverage. Human oversight ensures the output stays accurate and strategic.

We also use AI to challenge our ideas, test strategies and prepare for business-critical moments. For instance, for the listed businesses we support, we will use AI to review past earnings calls to help anticipate questions for future investor meetings. We often prompt LLMs to engage with key documents, such as past annual reports, to help us evaluate how future reports can be structured to be easier for AI models to read and understand.

Do agencies/groups need to build their own AI tools, or are the ones on the market good enough?

We have seen some of our most successful projects come from using on-the-market tools, then layering on additional prompt toolkits or dashboards tailored to our needs. Importantly, we apply this approach with a strong focus on data privacy and security, assessing each tool to ensure it meets our standards before deployment.

We are also lucky to be part of Havas and therefore have a wide range of teams globally experimenting with AI and building new tools. Across the business, we now have capabilities to aid brand measurement and develop personas, as well as our Converged OS tool, which is changing how we approach our creative, media and production services.

What’s your view of AI agents?

It’s a fascinating space with the potential to transform areas like healthcare, investing and education.

AI agents present a high-risk frontier for our business. While they could handle tasks like media monitoring or journalist outreach, the reputational risk is too great to rely on them fully. We see more promise in co-pilot roles, where agents assist while our team retains full accountability.

What are the biggest challenges with AI and how are you overcoming/trying to overcome them?

Naturally, we are mindful of the quality of AI outputs, disinformation and the broader ethical implications of AI use. Increasingly, we’re performing regular monitoring to assess how our clients appear within LLMs and AI overviews to combat disinformation.

A growing trend in corporate settings is the use of AI to summarise board packs. These documents are essential for keeping directors informed, but they have become increasingly bloated, sometimes lacking forward-looking insight. Without proper oversight, the risk of inaccurate or biased summaries could lead to poor decisions or even regulatory issues. That’s why human judgment remains central to our approach.

Do you plan to use AI in other ways in the future?

We are actively exploring predictive analytics to anticipate crises and improve message testing.

AI is also reshaping social listening, helping us spot emerging narratives with greater speed and precision. We’re currently using our AI-powered tool for consumer goods companies, monitoring how employees across 10+ markets and multiple languages respond to major business news or highlight trends our communications should address.

AI models are rapidly improving at understanding nuance, context and tone across languages and cultures, which is why I’m especially excited about their potential to further enhance projects like this.

What, if anything, do you see as the limits of AI in PR?

AI lacks the contextual judgment, empathy and cultural intuition essential to effective PR and reputation strategy. It can’t build relationships, influence stakeholders or manage crisis nuance. While it is a powerful tool, AI is not a decision-maker. Wherever trust, credibility and emotional intelligence matter most, human advisers remain essential.

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Contact Anna Fishlock, Parter and Head of Data & Digital at H/Advisors Maitland, for all inquiries related to AI, data and digital.