Muck Rack Names First Ever AI Lead

Matt Dzugan to play a key role in expanding the PR tech platform’s AI capabilities

Muck Rack, the public relations management platform (PRM) that enables organizations to build relationships with the media, manage crisis risk and demonstrate the value of earned media’s impact on business outcomes, today announced the hiring of Matt Dzugan as its first ever engineering director, data. In this role, Dzugan will work to enhance the Muck Rack platform by uniting its comprehensive trove of data with the best of AI technology.

Dzugan will oversee a team of engineers furthering data and delivery architectures across Muck Rack’s various data platforms that inform its AI-powered Media Database and Global Media Monitoring, which integrate hundreds of millions of data points with the most up-to-date information on journalists, articles and media outlets across digital, broadcast, print, podcasts, newsletters and social media. Dzugan’s team will also manage customer activity and workflow data, which, in time, will play a key role in how PR teams leverage data to drive maximum outputs using AI.

Marketing Technology News: IPG Launches Creative Commerce Labs

“Matt is an analytical master with superb cross functional leadership experience building innovative engineering teams,” said Gregory Galant, cofounder and CEO of Muck Rack. “He will play a central role in leading our talented team working to build models that enrich our platform with the most powerful data available to help drive measurable impact and inform the AI models of the future.”

Dzugan joins Muck Rack from supply chain tech company project44 where he spent two years building and expanding the organization’s Data Science department as director of data science. Prior to that he was a data science manager at Uptake technologies and served as a system engineer at The Boeing Company from 2012-2017.

His appointment comes on the heels of the launch of PressPal.ai, Muck Rack’s AI-powered tool that surfaces relevant journalists based on press release keywords generated by its integrated press release creator. PressPal.ai is one of many enhancements Muck Rack is working on that leverage the best of AI to help PR and communications professionals boost and demonstrate the value of earned media.

Dzugan, who will report to Matt Dennewitz, vice president of engineering, holds Master’s and Bachelor’s Degrees in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science from Northwestern University. He is a frequent speaker at data conferences such as the Open Data Science Conference and contributor to the open source data community.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Rich Donahue, Chief Marketing Officer at Ibotta