The AI Glow-Up Guide for Comms Teams

The Shifting Terrain of Modern Communications

The walls have fallen. For decades, communications and marketing teams operated in carefully guarded territories. PR professionals cultivated media relationships and safeguarded the brand reputation, while marketing teams drove pipeline metrics and conversion rates. Each team defended their domain with almost religious fervor.

Then came digital convergence, followed by artificial intelligence, and we’re all now wading in rubble.

What’s been happening exactly? Today’s audiences now move seamlessly across channels, expecting consistent, credible brand experiences regardless of where they encounter your message. AI is accelerating this shift, fundamentally redefining how brand visibility is earned, amplified, and measured in ways we couldn’t have imagined just a few years ago.

This guide offers a roadmap for modern communications and marketing teams ready to embrace integration and step up their work through AI-enhanced workflows, organizational structures, and storytelling approaches.

From Silos to PESO Powerhouses

Traditionally, PR teams excelled at building trusted relationships, orchestrating long-lead storytelling, and managing reputation through earned media channels. Meanwhile, marketing teams focused on paid campaigns, generating real-time leads, and reporting clear performance metrics. This division often led to duplicated efforts, inconsistent messaging, and countless missed opportunities for brand amplification, especially when it came to thought leadership initiatives (more on that in another post!).

That’s all changed. Audiences no longer distinguish between content types. No matter if it’s an X post, a press article, or a search result (Google or AI), all elements shape brand perception equally. The buyer’s journey has become nonlinear, with prospects entering through any channel and requiring consistent reinforcement across what is known as the PESO model: Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned media.

What makes this integration now possible? AI tools have reached a maturity point where cohesive orchestration across channels is appealing, achievable and remarkably efficient.

The days of simply advertising or pitching media are behind us. The strongest brands today engineer cohesive, AI-optimized narratives that flow naturally across all PESO channels. 

How AI Transforms Each Element of the PESO Model

Paid Media Reinvented

AI has taken paid campaigns beyond simple automation. Today’s tools optimize ad copy in real-time, conduct sophisticated multi-variate tests, and identify audience segments with unprecedented precision. Love it or hate it, Meta Ads Manager now uses machine learning to automatically optimize spending across different placements. That eliminates hours of manual adjustment and dramatically improves ROI.

Earned Media Enhanced

The traditional media relations function has evolved into something far more strategic. AI tools like OnePitch and Cision Media Monitoring & Connect now help communications teams identify journalist interests, craft personalized pitch angles, and analyze media sentiment with AI-powered insights. Large language models can even draft media angles, summarize coverage trends, and generate reactive commentary for breaking news. This gives communications professionals the ability to respond at the speed of social media while maintaining the depth of traditional PR.

Shared Media Optimized

Social media management has elevated the arduous practice of scheduling posts into a sophisticated practice where AI tools A/B test copy variations, forecast post performance, and identify ideal influencer partnerships. Platforms like Jasper and Writer help teams co-develop platform-native content variations that sound authentic to each channel while maintaining consistent messaging across the brand ecosystem.

Owned Media Elevated

Content creation for websites, blogs, and knowledge bases has been transformed through content scoring, predictive SEO, and automated publishing workflows. Tools like Clearscope, MarketMuse, and ChatGPT help teams identify which topics are likely to perform well both with search engines and large language models. The most sophisticated organizations now develop content specifically designed to earn both backlinks and LLM citations. They understand that visibility in AI systems represents an entirely new dimension of discoverability.

Building an AI-Optimized Communications Team

Today’s communications professionals need capabilities that weren’t even on the radar five years ago. Teams must now:

• Make stories machine-readable for large language models through structured data and clear narrative chunks
• Monitor LLM quote accuracy and visibility across generative AI platforms
• Seamlessly integrate AI tools across all PESO workflows

Sound technical? These skills are becoming as fundamental as writing press releases or pitching a story.  

Organization Models for the AI Era

For Larger Organizations (8-10 FTEs), consider restructuring around a unified brand narrative with specialized execution:

A Chief Brand & Content Officer owns the strategic narrative and governance across all PESO channels, with directors focused on specific channel groups.

The Director of Communications oversees earned and shared media, with specialized roles like an AI Reputation Analyst monitoring citation accuracy and an AI-Powered Community Analyst tracking social engagement patterns.

The Director of Marketing manages paid and owned channels, with roles evolving to include AEO (AI Engine Optimization) Content Designers alongside traditional SEO specialists.

A Head of AI Strategy & Operations serves as a cross-PESO enabler. They manage AI content analysis, test asset performance, and maintain prompt libraries across the organization.

For these larger teams, I recommend reskilling your current team on prompt engineering, schema implementation, and narrative chunking. Add one full-time “AI Reputation Analyst” to manage visibility and address potential hallucinations in AI systems. Consider adding a fractional contractor (roughly half-time) for schema implementation and regular AEO audits.

For smaller organizations, take a more streamlined approach:

A Director of Communications & Marketing Strategy oversees all PESO activities with AI-enhanced workflows.

A Communications Generalist focuses on earned media, shared channels, and thought leadership, using AI for drafting pitches and tracking media performance.

A Marketing Specialist manages paid campaigns, owned content, and analytics, using AI to generate ad variations and optimize blog content. This role could manage social depending on their workload, and bring in fresh talent from internship programs or onboard junior hires for the d2d tasks. 

Finally, consider a AI Technology Partner to provides on-call support for schema markup, prompt library development, and LLM monitoring. Creative could come from an agency, or be a contract hire.

This creates a small but mighty team that shares tools, KPIs, and narrative responsibilities enabled by strategic AI implementation.

Your 90-Day AI Glow-Up Roadmap: Audit, Experiment, Integrate (AEI)

Phase 1: Audit (Weeks 1–2)

Begin by understanding your current state. Evaluate how your brand appears in large language models. What do they say about you without prompting? Run a structured data audit on your owned web properties using Schema.org tools to identify gaps in machine-readable content. Most importantly, identify where communications and marketing efforts are duplicated or where narrative inconsistencies exist across channels.

Phase 2: Experiment (Weeks 3–6)

Launch a somewhat structured but creative environment to test AI content tools by drafting releases and testing prompt variations. Document what works in a lightweight AI style guide that can evolve with your learnings. Start building reusable prompt libraries for common needs like boilerplate generation, FAQ development, and reactive commentary creation.

Phase 3: Integrate  (Weeks 7–12)

Begin publishing machine-readable FAQ pages optimized for both search engines and AI systems. Use large language models to identify high-performing content that could be repurposed across other PESO channels. Create a shared dashboard that brings together key metrics from all media types, giving leadership a comprehensive view of brand performance across the integrated landscape.

Putting it into Practice By Launching a New Product

Let’s look at how an integrated PESO approach powered by AI can make a product launch something you may actually (gasp!) look forward to. 

Your owned channels feature well-edited AI-drafted launch blogs and SEO-optimized landing pages created specifically to be cited accurately by large language models.

Paid campaigns utilize AI tools to test and refine ad variations in real-time, shifting budget to the highest-performing creative executions.

Your PR team uses AI to predict which journalists are most likely to respond to specific angles, personalizing outreach with unprecedented precision.

As earned mentions appear, AI tools flag the highest-performing pieces for social amplification and influencer partnerships.

Most importantly, an AI feedback loop tracks which messages are being cited and quoted accurately, allowing your team to refine the narrative continuously. Each campaign becomes smarter than the last, creating a virtuous cycle of improvement.

The New KPIs for Communications Excellence

Traditional metrics remain important, but new measurements highlight AI-era success:

Machine Recall Accuracy: The percentage of times your AI-approved content is quoted correctly by large language models.

Citation Volume: The frequency of your brand appearing in AI responses (compared to traditional search visibility).

Schema Integrity Score: The percentage of your web pages with complete structured data implementation.

Prompt Performance Analytics: Tracking which prompt structures deliver the most consistent, accurate results.

PESO Conversion Impact: Unified measurement of traffic and engagement flowing between paid, earned, shared, and owned channels.

Get Started With These Four Practices 

Remember this: Your brand is whatever today’s AIs can instantly quote.

To lead in the AI era, communications and marketing teams need to adopt four practices:

1. Work in synchronized harmony rather than parallel silos
2. Tell stories that are both human-compelling and machine-readable
3. Share tools, dashboards, and success metrics across traditional boundaries
4. Reframe team structures around AI literacy as a core competency.

The long-standing debate between PR and marketing is coming to an end. Tomorrow belongs to teams embracing co-creation amplified by machine intelligence, compelling narratives reinforced by measurable outcomes, and two interdependent teams who share a purpose.

As we reimagine comms teams for the AI era, let’s not forget the extended teams that make this work possible. Our agency partners are the the arms and legs helping us move faster, go farther, and stay nimble in an always-on world.

In this guide, we’ve focused on internal teams, but Part 2 is on the way—and it’s all about them. We’ll explore what the Agency Glow-Up looks like: new deliverables, new value, and new expectations.

Stay tuned. Because if we’re getting a makeover, they are too.