Generative AI is set to disrupt and transform public relations and corporate communications. And technology providers in the industry are lining up to sell PR and communications professionals AI solutions, many of which will soon be available for free, if they aren’t already.

To underscore how easy and inexpensive it is to build and deploy an AI tool for communicators, Gregory FCA today launched Write Release, a free AI press release writing tool informed by the thousands of press releases the company has written over its 33-year history.

“The disruption is upon us,” begins Greg Matusky, CEO of Gregory FCA. “The risk to our industry, however, is that these AI tools will be developed by tech companies and not PR people. If so, it will be more of the same, with tools that become embedded in costly, bulky, expensive, and awkward-to-use media research or monitoring platforms, allowing these players to extract more revenue from those doing the actual hard work of serving clients. AI can break the grip of these providers, reduce our costs, and usher in a new era of productivity for the industry.”

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Write Release demonstrates that transformation and Matusky hopes it will open conversations among communicators. “Our ultimate goal is to learn from this experience by making one of our home-grown AI tools available to anyone for free, so they can tell more compelling stories and gain better client results. The current market for communications tech tools is woefully underwhelming and costly. Generative AI opens a whole new avenue that allows us to create AI solutions and tools that better reflect how we research, collaborate, and engage with clients, the media, and colleagues.”

Gregory FCA’s journey into generative AI began two and half years ago when the company undertook a tech-enablement investigation. The findings convinced management that generative AI was destined to redefine public relations and corporate communications, not just as a content generation tool but also as a workflow enabler that acts as a PR assistant.

“More than anything, we are looking for input from communicators as to how AI tools and solutions can reduce the friction inherent in our industry,” says Matusky. “OpenAI and similar AI engines take the brute force out of content generation. What’s next is a new frontier of industry-created solutions that increase the speed and quality of our work, allowing us to concentrate on more thoughtful and creative execution for our clients.”

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As proof, this news release was written with Write Release, which suggested that we might want to include a novel series of questions to bring it home. So here goes:

1. Why is Write Release better than Bing Chat, ChatGPT, or OpenAI? It’s better because it was designed to emulate how great writers write news releases. It walks a user through the process to inform the machine to deliver better results. It’s where AI meets PR — built on a generative AI platform but made by PR people.
2. Why would a PR firm make its secret sauce available to competitors? There is no secret sauce. AI is evolving quickly. We wanted to show the world that what is novel today will be commoditized tomorrow and that we no longer have to buy expensive technology platforms that don’t fit our workflow.
3. Are there other AI news release writing tools? Yes. Most are very general and were not built to recreate the thought process of how corporate communicators and public relations professionals create.
4. Will allowing more people to create more news releases swamp the world with more bad communications? That’s a real risk of all AI-created content. Communicators need to understand that our value is no longer in syntax and grammar, but rather in the thought we put into the process to assist a machine in creating a better final product.
5. What’s next from the minds of Gregory FCA? We’re building more use cases and applying them to specific industries. A financial services AI platform we are building will transform how sophisticated financial services companies communicate.

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