THE BIGGEST STRUCTURAL SHIFT IN PR RIGHT NOW HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH AI
It has to do with who owns what - and why the answer is changing fast
WPP has enlisted Goldman Sachs to explore a potential sale of Burson, its flagship PR agency formed just two years ago from the merger of BCW and Hill & Knowlton. The move would mark WPP’s near-complete exit from the public relations business, following its earlier divestment of a majority stake in FGS Global to KKR.
Burson employs around 6,000 people across 43 markets. Its revenue fell 6% in 2025 as client discretionary spending tightened, particularly in Europe. The sale would be the first major divestment under CEO Cindy Rose, whose Elevate28 strategy is focused on simplifying WPP’s structure around media, creative, production, and technology — areas where AI integration is tightest.
The analysis from The Drum put it plainly: “PR starts to look slightly out of step” with the AI-enabled, systematized marketing engine WPP is trying to build. The most likely outcome is a financial buyer, potentially alongside management, looking to reshape the business over time.
What this signals for the broader market: PR is valuable enough to sell for over a billion dollars, but holding companies are no longer sure it belongs inside their walls. For independent agencies and boutique firms, this is an opening.
THE PITCH PROBLEM IS GETTING WORSE. HERE’S WHAT ACTUALLY WORKS.
Journalists are receiving more pitches than ever - and responding to fewer of them.
Muck Rack’s 2026 State of Journalism report found that while 86% of journalists say at least some published stories started with a PR pitch, 54% say they seldom or never respond to pitches. Volume is the core problem. Reporters have less patience for irrelevance than at any point in the past decade.
The specific numbers are clarifying: 88% of journalists immediately delete pitches that don’t match their coverage area. 71% delete pitches that feel generic. The use of AI to blast high volumes of personalized-sounding pitches has made the problem worse, not better.
What journalists actually want alongside a pitch: clear beat relevance (70%), interview access to credible sources (58%), and original data or research (40%). Pre-written quotes landed at 14%. Social copy at 3%.
The fix isn’t better AI pitching. It’s relationship work done before you have anything to pitch - background meetings, no-agenda check-ins, and understanding what a journalist is actually working on. The brands consistently earning coverage are the ones that have done that groundwork.
AI RECOMMENDS YOUR BRAND. ONLY 2% OF CONSUMERS ACT ON IT IMMEDIATELY
The rush to appear in AI-generated answers is real. But a new finding from Idea Grove puts the strategy in sharper perspective: only 2% of consumers buy from an AI-recommended brand without checking elsewhere first.
That doesn’t undercut the case for AI visibility - it reframes it. Getting cited by AI is the beginning of the buyer journey, not the end. The question is what happens when someone searches for your brand after seeing it in a ChatGPT answer. Are there credible, third-party media placements to reinforce the recommendation? Is there a body of earned coverage that confirms the AI wasn’t hallucinating?
This is where press release distribution and consistent media placement directly drive business outcomes. Earned coverage in authoritative outlets creates the validation layer that converts AI citations into actual trust - and trust into conversions.
PR teams that treat earned media as training data for AI engines, and trust-building for humans, are the ones positioned to win both games at once.
IN THE INDUSTRY
- Marketing leaders are underusing PR in revenue forecasting, according to Axia Public Relations — when PR is treated as a fuzzy add-on, teams miss clear, predictable impact on demand, conversion, and long-term revenue health.
- Employee engagement continues to slide. Gallup reports engagement peaked at 23% in 2022–23 and has since dropped to 20% in 2025 — a reminder that internal comms is now a business-critical function, not a nice-to-have.
- DoorDash’s head of public affairs made headlines this week for the wrong reasons — a reminder that the oldest rule in crisis comms still holds: don’t make yourself the story.
- Lego topped RepTrak’s 2026 reputation rankings, reinforcing that brand trust built over decades remains one of the most durable assets in any communications strategy.
