Last month, The Washington Post published an in-depth report grouping jobs by their risk of automation. Shaded in a stability-signaling cerulean on the far left of the chart were circles representing the roles least exposed to AI. Firefighters, surgical technicians, and painters appeared, as did construction equipment operators and electrical power line installers. Public relations specialists landed on the opposite end. Tucked away in a forlorn corner, represented by a glowing orange circle, indicating high vulnerability to automation. While the color was concerning enough, the placement was even more troubling: PR was so far on the vulnerable end of the spectrum that only two careers (writers and interpreters) scored higher.
Before PR pros sign up to moonlight as power line installers, though, it’s worth digging a bit deeper. Fears of the job apocalypse could turn out to be overblown, or it could fail to materialize entirely. One reassuring sign came late last year, when a few of America’s foremost tech companies (including OpenAI) posted surprisingly lucrative job opportunities worth up to $775,000, seeking an intriguing skill set. These positions weren’t anchored by coding ability or financial acumen, but rather the ability to tell stories. More specifically: stories that were authentic, human, and 100% on-brand.
If OpenAI (a lab working to create an AI model capable of generating a technically perfect press release in seconds) is willing to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars on hiring a storyteller, it seems The Washington Post’s chart may be missing something. While AI may be on its way to mastering the technical side of PR, it cannot yet grasp the “meaning-making” required to earn public trust. In the AI age, telling authentic stories on a brand’s behalf remains an exclusively human trait.
Switching Paradigms: From “Terminator” to “Iron Man”
Even if AI may one day upend the entire PR industry, it’s in desperate need of its services in the interim. 2026 has seen a sharp decline in public approval of AI, with a recent NBC News survey finding that only 26% of Americans hold a positive view of the technology.
Even AI leaders have begun to take note of this disconnect, with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang imploring Big Tech to do more to stop the “doomer narrative” currently fueling public skepticism. Other prominent voices more distant from the AI sphere have gone a step further, calling for a federal AI regulatory framework or even putting the brakes on AI development itself. Although compelling at first glance, these regressive solutions fall short. The “AI genie” cannot be put back in the bottle.
Instead, it’s time for tech leaders, regulators, and PR pros alike to pivot to a different working model, one that simultaneously upholds the transformational nature of AI while also preserving human dignity, work ethic, and self-reliance. Instead of building “Terminator”-type models, we should seek to build “Iron Men.”
The Terminator movies tell the story of a cyborg sent back in time to prevent a human-led uprising against AI. Although the Terminator looks and talks like a human, he is 100% machine beneath the surface. The Iron Man movies, which center around an eccentric billionaire’s quest to engineer an armored suit to fight crime, flip the script. The Iron Man suit augments the billionaire’s humanity, rather than replacing it.
Any PR agency that has used Anthropic’s Claude or Google’s Gemini to “kill the blank page” of a press release or research report, and then refined it from there, is already familiar with the “Iron Man” model. AI-driven productivity gains are giving workers an average of 5.4% of their workweek back, and as this number rises, the potential for a four-day workweek and other quality-of-life enhancements for workers does too. Yet, there are still some attributes that AI will never be able to replace. The ability to tell an authentic, human story is foremost among them.
The Decade of the “Brand Storyteller”
Although salaries for early-career communicators are trending downward, effective “brand storytellers” have never been in higher demand. Job postings for these roles have doubled in the past 12 months. A recent Forbes op-ed noted, “AI is automating the work around work, not human value.” It is this capacity for meaning-making that will separate human PR practitioners from their rapidly evolving AI colleagues.
Even as brand storytellers enjoy a renaissance, however, it’s undeniable that the broader PR sector is facing headwinds: Almost 40% of local U.S. newspapers have disappeared, and 130 newsrooms have closed in the last year alone. CBS News Radio shut down after almost a century on the air. For the reporters who remain, an unprecedented deluge of on- and off-topic pitches awaits. To cut the noise, newsrooms are turning to AI for help finding the highest-quality pitches of the bunch. Crucially for Iron Man-aspiring PR pros, while these pitches can utilize AI in the drafting process, only human writing is capable of infusing the special spark needed to break through.
For the lucky few pitches that make it, though, the payoff is potentially greater than at any point in the last 50 years. In direct contrast to the diverse (and frequently competing) realities found on social media and cable news, AI chatbots theoretically offer a return to a more unified, fact-based understanding of the world. Thus, GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is poised to be more impactful on brands’ bottom lines than SEO, and it all starts with stories. Even as PR evolves and the media landscape changes, the ability to craft compelling, relevant narratives has never been more critical.
Last year, former Cloudflare executive John Graham-Cumming launched a website known as lowbackgroundsteel.ai, which treats pre-AI, human-generated content as a precious commodity (just as pre-nuclear steel was scavenged from WWI shipwrecks for its radiation-free properties).
For the PR industry, the ability to tell authentic, human narratives is its pre-nuclear steel. Impossible to replicate or automate, and the secret weapon that makes PR a more resilient industry than previously thought. In the coming years, “Iron Man”-style usage of AI will be a ground-level requirement, but it’s the stories that the best agencies and practitioners tell that will separate them from the slop of the rest.
Michael McKay is a senior publicist at VenturePR, a Beverly Hills-based PR agency for funded startups in AI, SaaS, consumer hardware, and fintech. With over 75 media placements secured in 2026 alone, Michael delights in advising seed through Series B technology companies on communications strategy, earned media, and AI search visibility. He holds a B.A. in Public Relations from Biola University.
Photo courtesy Getty Images for Unsplash+
