Hollywood erupted in debate and discourse when a company unveiled a completely AI actress, Tilly Norwood. The public relations industry may be having its own Tilly Norwood moment with the introduction of Olivia Brown, a 100% AI PR agent that will handle all the steps of producing, distributing, and following up on a press release. Is this PR’s future, or just part of it? Neville and Shel engage in their own debate in this short midweek FIR episode.

Links from this episode:

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, October 27.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email [email protected].

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. You can catch up with both co-hosts on [Neville’s blog](https://www.nevillehobson.io/) and [Shel’s blog](https://holtz.com/blog/).

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript

Shel Holtz: Hi everybody, and welcome to episode number 484 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.

Neville Hobson: And I’m Neville Hobson. A new name is stirring debate in UK public relations. Not a person, but an AI agent called Olivia Brown. Launched by Search Intelligence, an SEO and digital PR agency, Olivia Brown promises to automate the entire PR process from brainstorming ideas to writing press releases, identifying journalists, and even following up with them automatically. For £250 a month, it’s marketed as a digital PR assistant that can cut campaign time from 16 hours to one, according to its founder, Ferry Casone. Is this the future of PR? We’ll explore that question right after this.

Journalists and PR professionals are sounding alarms about Olivia Brown. Press Gazette reports that Olivia Brown has already been flooding inboxes with AI-generated press releases, complete with invented expert quotes and relentless follow-ups, all camouflaged to evade AI content detectors. Alastair McCapra, the CEO of the CIPR, calls this a threat to the very foundations of the profession, arguing that instant automation erodes judgment, relevance, and trust—the cornerstones of ethical communication.

Dominic Pollard at City Road Communications goes further, saying this kind of technology flips PR upside down. Instead of starting with a genuine story, it fabricates one designed to match a publication’s existing output—what he calls coverage for coverage’s sake. Supporters, meanwhile, frame Olivia Brown as an amplifier of authenticity, not a diluter of it. On LinkedIn, Cassone describes it as a tool that frees up time for creative thinking while improving productivity.

Beneath the surface, Olivia Brown isn’t just about automation. It forces us to confront a deeper issue: when AI can generate stories, quotes, and even relationships on an industrial scale, where does that leave trust, the single most valuable currency in our profession? Let’s unpack what this means for communicators, for journalists, and for the fragile relationship between authenticity and efficiency in the age of AI-driven PR. I’ll start with this question: Is this the future of public relations or the beginning of its undoing?

Shel Holtz: Are you asking me? Yeah, it’s somewhere in between, I think. This does not trouble me very much. This is a situation where you have a tool that primarily cranks out press releases. It does some work preceding that, but ultimately it’s about cranking out press releases. We have discussions happening—you and I have discussed these conversations in previous episodes—about whether the press release is dead or not. I happen to believe it is not. But there is far more to public relations than press releases.

This is touted as a tool for the agency, not for the client. It’s my understanding based on the little I have read of this that you pay £250 a month to the agency for them to use this on your behalf. It’s not an interface that’s available to the client. Is that right?

Neville Hobson: No—the whole website area, the whole dashboard thing—it’s way beyond just press releases, really it is, according to what they say themselves.

Shel Holtz: OK, because all I’ve read is this LinkedIn post, and it makes it sound like it’s an augmentation of what the agency does. Either way, I’m largely untroubled by this. Some people will use it. Some people will recognize the value that you get out of having a human PR agency doing your public relations work for you.

I don’t know how adept generative AI is at this point at building relationships over the long term. It seems to me that outside the memory that some of the large language models have that recall previous conversations, you don’t get the benefit of having worked with someone over time and getting to know them and getting to know the issues and the challenges and the triggers and these types of things. But some people who maybe have less of a budget will use it. It could be a gateway, in fact, from using an AI public relations agency, if you will, to working with a broader mixed group of humans who are using AI in their work.

But the fact is that we have some data that can support this. First of all, research has found that most journalists are untroubled by PR people using AI. There was one from Cision this year that showed that a majority of journalists are not strongly opposed to AI-generated pitches—about 27% are strongly opposed. Concerns that arise are around factual errors, but that’s on the humans in the agency to address.

There is other research that says a quarter of press releases that are being distributed right now are already written by AI. So we’re going to see press releases written by AI. We’re going to see PR professionals using AI to help them in their work. And then you have Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, joining a chorus of voices who anticipate that there will be billion-dollar companies run by AI with no humans in them at all. I don’t know how soon that’s coming, but I believe that it’s likely at some point.

I don’t see this as an authenticity challenge as long as there’s a human reviewing what’s going out before it goes out—whether it’s a PR person or the client. This is going to happen. But is it going to replace traditional public relations? I don’t see that. This is that old Mitch Joel line of “along with,” not “instead of.”

Neville Hobson: Okay, so you don’t feel uncomfortable about the fact it makes up people, makes up quotes, fabricates stories and all that.

Shel Holtz: This is a problem. No, I don’t feel comfortable with that. That’s something that has to be addressed. I can’t believe that they actually released it.

Neville Hobson: That’s at the heart of their service. That’s what they do. I’m reading Ferri Cassoni’s post on LinkedIn where he gives the steps of a typical “what happens.” Client joins the agency—meaning him. The PR exec starts a new campaign with Olivia. It’s all about how much time all this takes, but Olivia comes up with 100 ideas in five minutes. A PR executive selects five of those ideas.

The PR exec goes to the client and asks for expert tips for the five campaigns. The PR exec copy-pastes the expert tips into Olivia. It writes up five press releases with the client’s tips in five minutes. PR exec double-checks the content, tweaks it, and adds their own sprinkle to it if they want to. Once the release is written, Olivia scans 30,000 news articles on news outlets likely to pick up the story and identifies hundreds of journalists for each story separately with high accuracy, creating a personalized, on-the-fly media list—hours saved up to 20, it says.

Olivia sends the expert tips via email to all those hundreds of contacts for all five stories. Olivia follows up in two days to see if journalists need any extra info regarding the stories—hours saved, one. And it doesn’t say this, but others have commented, then relentlessly keeps emailing all those journalists: “Have you read it yet? What do you think? Are you going to run it?” Without Olivia, all this would take 16 hours, and with Olivia, it takes one hour.

I mean, come on. This is crazy, in my view. If this is the future of PR, I do not want to be part of this, I tell you. You’re right—we’ve seen automated press release stories before. I’m not sure we reported it on FIR, but I wrote a blog post about this podcasting tool that’s industrial scale—creating podcasts completely run with AI presenters and so forth. I think I read it’s 3,000 shows a week. It blasts them all out, and it’s already all over Spotify.

So that is part of our future, I suppose. Is it the future we think it should be? I’m not sure. It troubles me hugely, Shel. I have to tell you that this is out there because many people—you know this as well as I do—are just going to take what it does and blast it out. That’s most of the criticism I’m seeing. So I’d love to hear from a client or someone who is reputable using this, saying what experience they got and how they feel about it. But right now, it seems to me this surely cannot be the future of public relations.

Shel Holtz: And like I say, it’s not the future of public relations—it’s part of the future of public relations. Right now, as I have said probably 500 times on this podcast, anybody can hang up a shingle that says “public relations” and do work that they claim is sound, professional public relations work with absolutely no background in it. We see press releases written by humans—and we know they were written by humans because we saw them before AI was around—that are just awful.

This is just another way to produce awful press releases, but it’s also a way to speed up a process with people in it. So yeah, you’re going to get slop. You’re going to get really bad stuff. You’re getting that anyway from the industry. If professionals can use this to speed up the process and give better outputs on a quicker schedule to clients—with that human intervention of checking the facts—and I’m not necessarily saying it’s this one, this Olivia Brown, but something like it that does a better job of research and fact-checking…

I mean, Ethan Mollick just posted over the weekend that people claim, “I use ChatGPT-5 and it makes stuff up.” And he says, not if you use ChatGPT Thinking—it makes up far less. But they don’t know to go in and do that. So we need a tool like Olivia Brown that knows how to basically fact-check and think about what it’s doing rather than just spew the first thing that comes into its digital mind.

But this is not the be-all and end-all of PR. Even looking at this entire process outlined in this LinkedIn post, it’s still ultimately about sending out press releases and checking with the reporters. You know that there is public relations work that goes far beyond press releases. There’s PR work that never involves sending out a press release. There’s crisis communication. There’s reputation planning and the kind of work that we do around building or shifting reputation.

I always like to remember the case—I think it was Burson-Marsteller working with, I believe, StarKist Tuna—that was caught up in the boycott of canned tuna as a result of the dolphins that were being caught in the nets. The activists who were looking for a change in the rules on how they caught tuna initiated this boycott. StarKist already had policies around dolphin catches. They were already on the side of the activists, but their product was caught up in this.

Working with Burson-Marsteller, they were able to get the word to the activists in a negotiation with both parties at the table in the same room—could be done over Zoom now, I suppose. They came to the conclusion that, “You’re the good guys,” so the boycott was amended to say “except StarKist.” There wasn’t a single press release involved there. And Olivia Brown is not configured to do any of that.

So I don’t think traditional public relations is going anywhere. This is just a further enhancement of the automated press release concept. We interviewed Aaron Kwittken—he’s doing that with Profit. All this does is add the ideation at the front end and the journalist contact at the back end. Other than that, it’s the same product. I just don’t see it as that big a deal.

Neville Hobson: But it makes up people; it makes up facts. That’s at the heart of it. This is what’s here now, and that’s what it’s doing.

Shel Holtz: Olivia Brown—this particular product—is not good. The concept is fine. That’s what I’m saying.

Neville Hobson: I’m not talking about the concept. The concept is this—this is what’s on the market now. The point is to talk about this in the context of what’s happening right now. It’s attracting a lot of comments here in the UK—maybe it hasn’t hit the US radars yet—but most comments I’m seeing are very critical.

Shel Holtz: If it makes up people, it’s problematic. It’s the first shot out of the gate.

Neville Hobson: This is not a good thing at all. The notion of this—industrializing PR for coverage’s sake—automates the entirety of it, including the follow-up to journalists, the relentless pursuit of answers. What about your reputation when people start thinking, “I don’t like these people; they keep hitting me up with all this stuff”? Is this the answer to your dreams to get that coverage you’re after? And never mind how you do it—the means justify the end, right?

Shel Holtz: Well, this is version 1.0 of Olivia Brown, right? They’re going to get feedback and presumably come out with 1.5 that addresses some of these things. I’m not defending Olivia Brown.

Neville Hobson: I wouldn’t hold your breath on that, Shel. I wouldn’t.

Shel Holtz: You’re going to have press releases with fabrications get called out, and people are going to point to Olivia Brown as the source of the releases that led to that coverage. You’re going to have clients who are going to be upset when they’re called on the carpet for inaccurate or completely fabricated content. Either this thing is going to be a dramatic failure as clients publicly turn on it, or they’re going to make tweaks and improvements—the way most software is improved.

Either way, you’re going to see other people look at this and go, “I can do this better.” And we’ll see more of these. We’ll see some that start to take on other elements of public relations. PR is going to be AI–human hybrid—there’s no question about it. And the workflow that’s outlined in the LinkedIn post seems ripe for AI augmentation. But they’ve got to fix the problems with this. No question. It’s unacceptable to be fabricating in public relations. Accuracy matters.

Neville Hobson: I don’t see any signs whatsoever that that’s on the radar to do. This is the product. Your point about AI and automation—I don’t disagree with that at all; that’s what we’re going to see. But this, though, is a whole different thing, it seems to me.

Shel Holtz: We should ask them. Let’s interview their CEO.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, maybe. I’d like to find out what others say about them—if they’re using them—to see if there’s anything worth talking about. Is this so revolutionary that we would want to do that? So anyone listening who uses Olivia Brown and would like to share their experience, do get in touch. We’d love to hear it.

Shel Holtz: [email protected]. And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #484: Is Olivia Brown the Tilly Norwood of PR? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.