18 AI Tools for PR Content, Outreach, Monitoring, & Social

ChatGPT opened our eyes to a lot of possibilities with AI.

From helping us correct grammar errors to structuring and formatting messages and more, the tool has been one of the biggest technological advancements in recent times.

But since ChatGPT, there’s been so many other AI tools I (and we all) have seen.

Particularly for PR, there are now AI tools for capturing exec/expert insights, writing media outreach pitches, monitoring PR performance, and many more.

So in this article, we’ll cover some of the best use cases and tools we’ve seen for PR pros.

Let’s get into it.

A quick overview of top AI tools for PR

PR tasks	AI tools	Key benefits
Gathering exec and expert insights	Leaps, Otter.ai, Fireflies.ai	Simplifies the process of gathering, organizing, and utilizing expert and executive insights for PR and content creation.
Outreach & media relations	Pitchbox, Respona, PressPal.ai	Automates outreach, manages media relationships, and enhances personalized communication with journalists and influencers.
Content creation & optimization	Jasper, Grammarly, Wordtune, Persado, Leaps	Assists in generating, optimizing, and refining content to improve SEO, engagement, and relevance.
Media monitoring & analysis	Cision Comms Cloud, Meltwater, Mention, Talkwalker	Tracks brand mentions, sentiment analysis, and media trends, offering actionable insights for PR strategies.
Social media management	Hootsuite, Buffer, Sprout Social	Streamlines social media scheduling, engagement, and performance tracking to maximize audience interaction.

Now let’s look in more detail at each tool.

Gathering exec and expert insights with AI

POVs and stories make the world go round — at least in PR. 

They’re usually what fuels your PR efforts, from owned media to shared media, paid and earned media. 

Here are a few AI tools for PR for capturing exec and subject matter expert insights:

Leaps

Leaps is an AI tool that captures insights from your subject matter experts (SMEs), without calls, and turns them to content outline for thought leadership pieces, reports, newsletters, and so on.

Your SMEs can share their insights, contributions, & perspectives via voice notes (with transcription) or just text.

And no sign-ups required from them. No training needed either. All they have to do is click and talk — or type, if they prefer. You can also set automated reminders for SMEs who aren’t responding on time before deadlines (which happens often).

Once they respond, Leaps then uses their insights to outline content for various types of PR and comms materials. A frequent user — Gini Dietrich, founder of Spin Sucks & the PESO model — explains it like this:

Key features in Leaps

• Customizable expert question templates
• AI-powered content outlines from expert insights
• One-click voice note (speech-to-text) answers for execs/experts
• Automated reminders for experts
• Expert-led content briefs & outlines
• Expert insights storage
• Unlimited team members

Leaps pricing:

• 21-day free trial
• Basic: $49 per month (billed monthly)
• Pro: $99 per month (billed monthly)
• Custom pricing available

Check Leaps out for yourself.

Otter.ai

I’m still looking forward to using Otter.ai, but I’ve heard good things — it’s an AI meeting note taker and real-time transcription tool. 

If you’re able to regularly get your execs or in-house SMEs on calls to get their insights for comms and PR content, you may find this useful.

One feature I particularly liked in Otter is that after a conversation with an SME, I can chat with the tool and ask it to recall certain information from a meeting. For instance, “What did John say about competitive analysis tools being expensive?”

Key features in Otter.ai

• Identify speakers by their names in transcripts
• Automated grouping of keywords & words used in calls
• Automated summary of calls with action points
• Chat with AI to recall important information
• Live transcription of call recordings through the Otter app

Otter.ai pricing:

• Basic: Free
• Pro: Starts at $8.33 per month per user
• Business: Starts at $20 per user per month
• Enterprise pricing available

Fireflies.ai

I’ve used Fireflies.ai for a few years and I can say from experience it’s a great tool and a direct alternative to Otter.ai.

Like with Otter.ai, if you’re able to get your execs & SMEs on calls regularly to pull their insights for content, Fireflies offers live transcription, automated grouping of keywords and common words used in a conversation, and automated summaries of calls with action points. 

One difference I noticed between the two tools though is Fireflies’ lowest plan is a bit more expensive than Otter’s. But it’s a relatively small difference, so it’s probably not a deciding factor.

Key features in Fireflies.ai

• Unlimited transcription for all plans
• Unlimited AI summaries for all plans
• Create meeting clips as soundbites
• Screen recording from video calls
• Mobile app available

Fireflies.ai pricing:

• Basic: Free
• Basic: Free
• Pro: Starts at $10 per month per user
• Business: Starts at $19 per user per month
• Enterprise pricing available

AI media outreach tools

Personally, I’m not a big fan of using AI to write media outreach emails or anything else for that matter. But I’m also well aware other PR pros and marketers may have a use case for it. So I’ve listed a few below.

Pitchbox

Before AI became popular, Pitchbox was already helping PR pros and marketers send tens of millions of outreach emails to bloggers, journalists, influencers, and so on.

But now with the advent of AI, Pitchbox now learns from a dataset of those millions of emails to predict and draft the best outreach emails for any media relations effort. 

And because Pitchbox’s AI has been trained on almost every type of replies you’ll get from your outreach, it knows how to respond to them and move the conversation forward. So when you get responses, you can simply ask the platform to draft a relevant reply.

Key features in Pitchbox

• AI template assistant to help you draft emails
• AI-powered, context-relevant replies
• Bulk AI personalization (reads web pages and suggests pitch)
• AI-powered prospecting (scans keywords across websites and shows which ones to pitch)

Pitchbox pricing:

• Pro: Starts at $165 per month
• Advanced: Starts at $420 per month
• Custom pricing available

Respona

Respona and Pitchbox work almost the same way in how they both use AI to write outreach emails.

Additionally, it makes it easy for you to identify relevant publishers, find verified contact information for journalists, and pitch them immediately with AI-powered personalized messages.

Key features in Respona

• Automated emails and follow-ups
• Pitch analyzer (scans your pitches for spam words, ideal length, etc.)
• Auto-reply tracking (notifies you when you get automated out of office emails, etc.)
• Email templates with custom variables
• Email outreach performance reports

Respona pricing:

• Pro: Starts at $399 per month
• Unlimited: Starts at $799 per month
• Enterprise pricing available

Muck Rack’s PressPal.ai

Muck Rack’s PressPal.ai is one of the most innovative AI tools I’ve seen for media outreach. 

You simply enter the topic of your pitch, with as much detail as possible, and it’ll generate a pitch for you based on your entry. And that’s not all. The tool also scans through your input and recommends a few reporters it could be relevant for.

After trying it out myself, what I liked most about it is just the ease with which it executed the entire process.

Key features in PressPal.ai

• AI-powered pitches
• AI-powered press releases
• Journalist recommendations based on pitch or press release

PressPal.ai pricing:

• Free

AI content creation and optimization tools

There’s a plethora of tools under this category — mostly because most AI tools have features that support content creation or optimization. 

Leaps expert-led AI outline creator

If you typically rely on executive or expert insights for press releases, newsletters, op-eds, etc., you often need to sift through hundreds or thousands of words to extract key points and structure your articles, press releases, etc.

Leaps’ AI outline creator takes all that work and does it for you.

It pulls insights from your execs/experts on any topic and then converts it into a detailed content outline, which you can use to draft content for comms or PR. 

Key features in Leaps’ AI outline creator

• Customizable expert question templates
• AI-powered content outlines from expert insights
• One-click voice note (speech-to-text) answers for execs/experts
• Automated reminders for experts
• Expert-led content briefs & outlines
• Expert insights storage
• Unlimited team members

Leaps pricing:

• Basic: $49 per month (billed annually)
• Pro: $99 per month (billed annually)
• Custom pricing available

Check out Leaps for yourself.

Jasper

Jasper has become a household name in the world of AI, especially in marketing and communications.

It has quite a lot of use cases, but we’ll focus on its content creation and optimization features for this section. 

With Jasper, you can create content (press releases, emails, blogs, social content, etc.) from scratch in a few clicks, choose from multiple templates, and optimize your content with AI-powered suggestions. It also lets you input details about brand voice, employees, customers, etc. — all of which helps the platform to create content that sounds like you.

The platform offers a range of features, but my favorite feature of all is their Chrome extension. Once installed, it helps to complete sentences on Google Docs and other websites. And this is especially useful when I encounter writing blocks.

Key features in Jasper

• Chrome extension to provide AI writing assistance wherever you write online
• 50+ AI templates created from writing best practices
• A prompt library with over 500 prompts
• AI recommendations that help your team focus on what works with content and less on what doesn’t
• AI tools for image creation & editing 

Jasper pricing:

• Creator: Starts at $39 per month per user
• Pro: Starts at $59 per month per user
• Custom pricing available

Grammarly

Grammarly is one of the most popular AI writing assistants out there.

And I’ve been using it for editing content, emails, etc. long before ChatGPT became popular. (So, yes, AI didn’t start with ChatGPT).

But for the longest time, I thought Grammarly only helped to edit grammar and correct writing mistakes, until I checked out their site while writing this article. 

Turns out it does a lot more; check out the features below.

Key features in Grammarly

• Ask Grammarly AI to write drafts from a blank page in your preferred tone
• AI corrections for team members’ writing when they violate your brand guidelines
• General spell checks and grammar corrections
• Reply PR and comms emails with AI
• AI plagiarism detection

Grammarly pricing:

• Free
• Premium: $12 per month per user (billed annually)
• Business: $15 per month per user (billed annually)

Wordtune

In many ways, Wordtune is very similar to Jasper, but it’s a lot cheaper and offers fewer features.

I especially like its rewrite feature. Once I installed the chrome extension, it comes in super handy when I’ve written a text but want to rewrite it to make it sound better.

The AI rewrites the text in a human-like way and you can edit, of course, to your taste.

Key features in Wordtune:

• AI summarizer (summarizes text and video so you spend less time reading & watching)
• Start sentences with your point and complete them with AI
• AI rewriter and grammar checker to improve your writing
• Use available AI templates to kick-start your writing

Wordtune pricing:

• Basic: Free
• Advanced: $6.99 per month
• Unlimited: $9.99 per month
• Business: Custom pricing available

Persado

Persado uses over 1.5 billion customer interactions from 150 million US customers to determine the most effective words and language that motivates people to act.

In other words, it’s not just completing your sentences with AI but looking at a wide variety of data to help you write PR content that converts and drives revenue.

But unlike many of the tools featured here, this Persado is squarely for enterprise-level use cases.

Key features in Persado:

• Generate on-brand, personalized messaging at scale
• Analytics that show which messaging drives the biggest impact
• GenAI and personalized messaging for SMS and emails

Persado pricing:

• Not publicly available; contact Persado for pricing

AI media monitoring and analysis tools

Media monitoring tools have been around almost as long as digital PR became a thing. And they’ve been super useful. But there are now AI tools that make them even more powerful. 

Meltwater

Founded in 2001, Meltwater has become a household name in digital PR and marketing‌.

The platform helps PR professionals use AI to search for mentions of their brand, competitors, or specific keywords across a wide range of online sources. And those sources include news websites, blogs, social media platforms, forums, and even broadcast media.

Plus, you also get a GDPR-friendly database of journalists who regularly write about topics you’re working on.

Key features in Meltwater:

• AI search assistant for easier monitoring and detailed data summaries
• AI-powered recommendations for relevant journalists to pitch
• Track results of both online and offline campaigns
• Social listening tools with no data limits
• Year-on-year trends comparison tools

Meltwater pricing:

• Not publicly available; contact Meltwater for pricing

Cision Comms Cloud

Cision Comms Cloud (CCC) helps PR teams “draw a straight line from PR to sales and ROI.” 

Bold promise? Yes, but I picked it directly from their website. 

The platform backs it up by offering an integrated suite of tools that connect the dots between media coverage and business outcomes. 

With CCC, you can track how your audience is receiving your messaging, use AI to analyze their sentiments in a more detailed way than traditional sentiment analysis, see which influencers or publications drive the biggest vs least impact, and more. 

But my favorite use case is how it helps you identify which particular stories resonate with your audience the most. This way, you’ll know which messaging would resonate across all your channels — whether that’s earned, owned, paid, or shared media.

Key features in Cision Comms Cloud:

• Data points in 40+ different languages
• Track influencers and publications mentioning your brand/keywords
• Build dashboards that help to report and compare campaign performance
• AI-powered alerts to keep you on top of events

Cision Social Listening pricing:

• Not publicly available; contact Cision Comms Cloud for pricing

Talkwalker Blue Silk™ AI

Talkwalker has trained their own AI model (Blue Silk™ AI) with 3 trillion data-points.

This means their platform has the ability to analyze and understand vast amounts of data, and provide you with deep insights and more reliable predictions than ever before.

My favorite bit of their platform, though, is how it can understand the emotions behind audience sentiments. Before AI, PR professionals could only identify three types of emotions — negative, neutral, and positive. That’s it. 

But now with Talkwalker’s AI tech, they can help you detect more details and context behind each sentiment type, joy, anger, sadness, and surprise, giving you a much richer understanding of how your audience feels. 

Key features in Talkwalker:

• Well-structured AI summaries of social listening data
• Data points in 190+ different languages
• Analyze and get specific insights via pre-defined prompts
• Logo and visual branding tracking capabilities
• Analyze data from audio and video posts on social media

Talkwalker pricing:

• Not publicly available; contact Talkwalker for pricing

Mention

Like most other media monitoring and social listening platforms, the first AI feature Mention rolled out was Sentiment Analysis. And that was back in 2013.

But after that, they’ve released more AI capabilities that I think are really useful.

First, they’ve improved their sentiment analysis feature four times (as of January 2024), and now it determines negative, neutral, and positive sentiments with an 82% accuracy.

Next, Mention released AI Highlights in May 2024, a feature that lets you compare trend variations at a glance and helps you understand the reason behind the changes there.

Key features in Mention:

• Free AI tweet and social media caption generation
• Crawl several media sources for mentions (blogs, social, forums, etc)
• Filter mentions by sentiment categories
• Integrate with Slack and Zapier
• Spike alert notifications for your keywords

Mention pricing:

• Solo: Starts at $41 per month
• Pro: Starts at $83 per month
• ProPlus: Starts at $149 per month
• Custom pricing available

AI social media management tools

When social media management tools came on the scene many years ago, I was in content marketing. And I thought it was a huge problem solver. And I know many other PR and marketing pros felt the same way.

But with the emergence of AI came a flurry of newer and more powerful capabilities for these tools. Here are a few of them:

Sprout Social

Sprout Social uses more than ten years of historical social data and integrates with OpenAI to help you engage customers and prospects on social media.

The platform offers tools that help with publishing social content, social listening with proprietary sentiment analysis, and employee advocacy. 

They’ve weaved AI into most of these tools, but I especially liked their Send Time Optimization feature. It uses their ViralPost algorithm to analyze the times your audience is most active to engage and recommends those times for you.

Key features in Sprout Social:

• AI-powered replies and summaries for social messages
• Prioritize messages by sentiment categories
• AI-powered social media captions
• Send time optimization
• AI-powered reporting

Sprout Social pricing:

• Standard: Starts at $199 per month per user
• Professional: Starts at $299 per month per user
• Advanced: Starts at $399 per month per user
• Enterprise pricing available

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is another household name in social media management and they offer interesting AI features too.

They launched OwlyWriter AI — a tool that helps you write social media captions and text posts based on your preferences. 

But as with other tools in the social media posting category, the most interesting thing for me is that it does everything in one platform — from writing to editing to posting content. 

And this means PR professionals don’t have to write a caption in one platform and go to another tool like ChatGPT to edit it, and then to another one to schedule or post it. You can do everything on one platform now.

Key features in Hootsuite:

• AI-powered captions and posts for different platforms (LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.)
• Repurpose best performing captions for later use
• AI-powered content ideas generator
• AI grammar checker
• Analyze and determine the best times to post

Hootsuite pricing:

• Professional: $99 per month for 1 user
• Team: $249 per month for 3 users
• Enterprise pricing available

Buffer

Buffer works almost the same as Hootsuite and Sprout Social, but it has the least starter pricing at $5 for one channel. 

The price increases as you add more channels — up to $120 per month for ten social media platforms or channels. So, essentially, you get what you pay for.

My favorite AI feature in Buffer has got to be their A/B testing feature, which allows you to create multiple versions of a post and determine which one works best.

Key features in Buffer:

• AI assistant for ideation, translation, repurposing, and more
• Supports virtually all social media platforms
• AI-powered content ideas generator
• Content scheduling and posting
• Landing page builder

Buffer pricing:

• Free
• Essentials: Starts at $5 per month for 1 channel
• Team: Starts at $10 per month for 1 channel
• Agency: Starts at $100 per month for 10 channels

FAQs on AI tools for PR

Let’s address some frequently asked questions here…

Artificial Intelligence is here to stay

We’ve had several technological advancements throughout the years. 

Some met with excitement, others with skepticism. AI is no different. It’s a powerful tool that can transform PR, offering insights and efficiencies we couldn’t have imagined a decade ago. 

But like any tool, its impact depends on how we choose to use it. 

Will it be a force for good, helping us connect more authentically with our audiences? 

Or will it become just another way to cut corners and manipulate? 

That’s up to you and me. The future of PR isn’t just about adopting AI; it’s about doing so with integrity, creativity, and a commitment to genuine human connection.