This is the year of content, media relations and of course, AI.
Is anyone sad to see 2025 go?
It was a year of tumult politically, economically and within the PR industry. 2026 isn’t shaping up to be a smooth ride, either, but there are a number of bright spots that give hope to PR professionals as they work to settle into a world where AI is default and their skills in media relations and content strategy are more valuable than ever.
Here’s what 2026 (probably) holds in store.
- AI becomes the expectation.
It’s been more than three years since generative AI became widely available. In that time, it’s changed how we worked, bringing a plethora of new tools to the PR space that make drafting, list management, pitching, social listening and other aspects of the craft faster than ever.
AI is no longer some looming boogey man – it’s an expected part of a PR professional’s toolkit. Just as it’s assumed PR professionals can use email and word processors, a basic understanding of PR is part of the fundamental toolkit of any PR pro.
Yes, we’re still debating the finer details of how these tools should be used, when disclosure is necessary and other factors. But if you’re still digging in your heels and insisting AI has no place in the workplace, get ready to be left behind.
- …And so human details matter far more.
At the same time, practitioners will need to work harder to ensure their work doesn’t seem like it was created by a robot.
People are being inundated with more and more undifferentiated AI slop in their social media feeds, in their inboxes, even on their TVs and adorning products. The voices and content most likely to break through are the ones that say something interesting in a unique way that doesn’t sound robotic.
This goes way beyond avoiding the em dash or making sure the people in your videos have the right number of fingers. This means discovering your content’s unique value proposition and driving that home with everything you do. There’s even a trend of inserting intentional typos into written work to give it a veneer of humanity and avoid the too-perfect sheen on AI.
We’re not recommending that approach, but you do need to find ways to indicate there’s a person behind your work. That might be a sense of humor, a unique voice, in-depth stories. Whatever makes you, you should shine through to stand out.
- Bots become more scrutinized as part of misinformation ecosystem.
Bot accounts – that is, fake social media accounts that stir up controversy – aren’t new. But the scope and scale at which they can operate has expanded exponentially with the rise of AI. They’re now playing a key role in elevating once-niche stories to the attention of major influencers.
We saw this happen most notably in 2025 with Cracker Barrel, where research shows that about half of all posts about the controversy in the early days were driven by inauthentic bot activity. By elevating a quirky design story to a culture war issue, the story was seized upon by conservative commentators, politicians and eventually the president of the United States. The bots themselves can come from a variety of sources, ranging from foreign nation-states to domestic political interests to rival organizations.
Expect to see bots used more and more effectively as a method of getting interest started in minor issues. Once a major influencer or politician gets ahold of it, it doesn’t matter how the rumor got started. Early detection and mitigation is key.
- The traditional industry will contract.
2025 was a rough year for the industry. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like this is likely to abate in 2026. From the fallout of industry consolidation to a rocky economy and, yes, the impact of AI, many professionals found themselves out of a job. While it’s difficult to put exact numbers on the losses, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics has not yet released data for 2025, an anecdotal look at LinkedIn will show just how much talent is available.
But even as traditional forms of employment shrink, more and more PR professionals will forge their own paths forward. Whether through founding new agencies to freelance consultancies to fractional work options, more and more practitioners will go it alone, creating their own rules for their professional lives. This comes with risks and difficulties, but also could lead to a new creative renaissance.
- Content and media are king once again.
Even as LLMs reduce some jobs in the industry, they will also create a boom as companies demand both content and media hits designed to influence the content served up by these powerful models. Research from March of 2025 found that two-thirds of those who use LLMs have used it like a search engine.
Data from Muck Rack found that 27% of all sources cited by LLMs came from journalism, in a boon for PR professionals. Owned content, like blogs, accounts for another 9% of data cited by AI bots, in another boon for the industry.
That means we can expect to see an uptick in the value of not only media relations strategy as well as content creation strategies, which could help the industry through a rocky stretch.
- Media is dead, long live personalities.
Traditional media continues its long, slow decline even as companies become ravenous for inclusion in stories. News media saw 2,254 layoffs in 2025, making it trickier than ever to land a traditional media hit.
But even as audiences turn their back on traditional media, they’re putting more and more trust in people.
This can come in a variety of forms: Influencers, traditional journalists gone independent, YouTubers turned journalists and on and on. The important common denominator is that audiences want to feel as though they’re building trusting relationships with another person rather than through an institution.
It used to be that a media outlet built trust in the organization because of its strong roster of reporters, editors and fact checkers. Now, the opposite is often true. Audiences are more likely to trust people because they believe they are beholden to no one, able to speak truth without corporate interests getting in the way. This presents new challenges and dangers for PR professionals as those backstops like editors and attorneys are removed from the equation. But it also offers new, more personal ways to tell stories through personalities eager to tell stories in bold ways.
Allison Carter is editorial director of PR Daily and Ragan.com. Follow her on LinkedIn.
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