Who should lead brand efforts today? PR or Marketing?

AI is reshaping how people discover and interact with brands.

And it doesn’t care who “owns” a brand message.

It just wants consistency, relevance, and authority. But that shift is forcing many companies to rethink not just who tells the brand story, but how it's told, tracked, and trusted.

So if everyone is all in on brand, who should lead brand efforts in an organization? PR or marketing?

To answer this question, I did a Q&A with Leah Dergachev, an AI and comms strategist and the founder of Austley, a communications-first marketing consultancy. 

With 20 years of experience in marketing and comms, Leah brings a clear-eyed perspective on how AI is forcing marketing and PR to merge into a single, strategic voice — and what happens when they don’t.

We got into fears, guardrails, AI visibility scores, and how brands can stay relevant when answer engines become the new front door. 

She also shares how successful brand teams are evolving and why the smartest companies are ditching the old PR-versus-marketing debate entirely.

P.S. We’re capturing all our experts' insights via Leaps, the Expertise to Content platform. At Leaps, we believe in amplifying real human expertise and experience, and that’s what this content series is about. We’re sharing the experience and expertise of experts in PR, brand, and marketing like Leah.

Brand storytelling should no longer be a tug-of-war

Q: With AI changing how people find and consume information, how have you seen the traditional roles of PR and marketing shifting when it comes to brand storytelling? Who should lead, and why?

A: Historically, PR has always focused on reputation and earned media, while marketing has been centered on driving sales and managing paid or owned channels. 

Today, with AI and its ability to analyze vast data sets and predict audience preferences and automate content creation, we're now seeing that AI has transformed both disciplines into data-driven, hyper-personalized storytelling functions, often operating in tandem rather than in silos.

AI isn’t just bridging the gap between PR and marketing, it’s eliminating it. And as AI-powered search and content engines prioritize relevance, credibility, and context, brand storytelling is truly a shared, strategic function. 

We used to have press releases here, ad campaigns there, but now they should be part of a unified narrative ecosystem.

AI rewards brands that integrate their earned, owned, and paid media into a cohesive, discoverable story. 

The companies that are going to excel are the ones who have brand storytelling as a collaborative effort across both marketing and comms that can be powered by AI, but guided by human creativity and strategic alignment.

AI Trust signals require both credibility and performance

Q: When it comes to building trust in AI-driven answer engines, should brands lean more on PR’s credibility or marketing’s data-driven strategy? From your experience, what blind spots does each bring?

A: AI search engines have changed the game drastically. They don't just look at what you're saying; they check if you're saying the same thing everywhere. Your website, social media, press coverage, customer reviews — it all has to match up.

Traditional search engines cared about keywords and who linked to you. Now AI cares about whether you actually know what you're talking about, if you explain things clearly, and if your content is relevant. That's where PR and marketing both excel.

The best approach today combines both fields. You need PR people who know how to build real credibility, plus marketing people who can track what's actually working with your audience. 

AI is basically fact-checking your brand against everything, and it notices when things don't add up.

Now, here's where each side struggles: PR teams don't always measure the data on how their content performs. You might get great media coverage, but if people don't engage with your own content, AI picks up on that mismatch. 

Marketing teams do the opposite. They're so focused on conversions that they miss the deeper credibility signals that come from genuine expertise and storytelling.

The brands that are going to come out on top treat trust-building as an all-around effort. They use PR skills to establish real authority, then use marketing data to make sure that authority shows up in content that both people and AI can find and recommend. 

It's not about picking between credibility or performance — you need both working together.

New KPIs for an AI-first world

Q: What does success look like when AI decides what content gets seen? How should PR and marketing teams rethink performance metrics?

A: Everything we used to measure is basically becoming outdated. We used to measure success at the end of the funnel: impressions, clicks, conversions. Now we need to measure how well AI understands and trusts our content before it even gets to humans.

Traditional KPIs like reach and engagement are still important, but they don't tell you if AI engines are actually selecting your content to show people. Are you showing up when someone asks ChatGPT or Google AI a question in your field? 

Some companies are already tracking this stuff — how often their brand gets mentioned in AI answers, whether those mentions are positive, and if their message stays consistent everywhere.

There are tools now that can track your "AI visibility score" across different platforms. The problem is everyone's making up their own way to measure this because it's all so new. But the companies that start paying attention now are going to crush it later.

The challenge is these metrics aren't standardized yet. The field is evolving fast, and different platforms are developing their own ways to measure AI visibility and content discoverability. But the brands that start tracking this now will have a huge advantage.

Marketing teams have an edge because they're comfortable with data and testing new measurement approaches. 

They're already experimenting with AI visibility dashboards and cross-platform consistency tools. But their weakness is they often measure everything for immediate ROI, which doesn't capture the long-term authority building that AI engines value.

PR teams naturally understand sustained credibility metrics, which align with how AI evaluates trustworthiness over time. But many are still catching up on granular performance tracking and real-time optimization.

If you want to get it right, track both immediate results and long-term credibility. If AI doesn't trust you enough to recommend you, people might never even see your content. 

We now live in a world where people are getting answers directly from AI instead of clicking through to websites, and quite frankly, being chosen by AI is becoming more important than being clicked by humans.

Who should own brand voice in this AI search era?

Q: With AI amplifying brand messages — and inconsistencies — who should be responsible for maintaining a brand’s voice and authenticity?

A: This shouldn't be a PR versus marketing thing — that's how brands end up with a split personality online. You need to remember that AI amplifies everything, including inconsistencies, so if your PR team is feeding AI one version of your brand story and marketing is feeding it another, AI will surface both versions to different people. That's confusing for everyone.

Now someone does need to own the brand voice, and that's typically dependent on how the business is set up. At the end of the day, it can fall under PR, marketing, or the comms team, and whoever is owning it needs to make sure everyone's on the same page. 

Success is when you have clear guidelines that all parties can use when they're creating content or training AI tools.

Here's what goes wrong when this responsibility isn't clear: 

• Customers lose trust because they can't figure out what your brand actually stands for. 
• Potential customers get different impressions depending on where they encounter you first. 
• Your credibility takes a hit because inconsistent messaging makes you look unprofessional or like you don't know your own business. 
• And the worst part is that AI tools start learning from your inconsistent content and generating even more mixed messages, making the problem compound over time.

The next wave of marketing and PR pros: data storytellers and AI trainers

Q: Looking ahead five years, as AI becomes the main way people interact with brands, what new roles or skills should PR and marketing professionals start developing?

A: Looking ahead five years, if answer engines become the primary way people interact with brands, we'll see the rise of folks who are data storytellers — whether we call them that or not will be the mystery. 

These people will be able to take complex brand performance data from AI platforms and turn it into actionable insights that leadership can actually understand and use.

We'll also need people who understand how to craft brand narratives that work in a chat format, not just traditional content. 

For instance, when someone asks ChatGPT about your industry, you want your brand to be part of that answer. That requires a totally different approach than writing press releases or ad copy.

I also think we'll see AI training specialists come about. Their job will be to literally feed AI systems the right information about your brand so they represent you accurately. They'll need to understand both brand storytelling and how AI actually processes information.

In my opinion, PR people have a bit of an advantage when it comes to relationship building and long-term credibility, which is exactly what AI engines are looking for when they decide who to recommend. 

So, they're better positioned to evolve into these roles because they understand how to build authority over time — not just quick wins.

Final thoughts: stop clinging to dated playbooks

Q: Any final thoughts on how brand teams should be thinking about the future?

A: The biggest mistake I see right now is trying to force a traditional PR or marketing playbook onto this new AI-driven way of operating. The old silos don't work anymore. 

AI doesn't care if you're a "PR person" or a "marketing person", it evaluates your brand as one cohesive entity across every touchpoint. 

Companies have got to stop thinking in terms of separate disciplines and start thinking in terms of unified brand presence. You need PR's credibility-building expertise and marketing's performance optimization working together, not competing against each other. 

If you're still operating like it's 2019, with PR handling reputation over here and marketing driving conversions over there, you're going to get left behind. 

AI rewards brands that have their act together across the board. The future belongs to those who can bridge that gap and think strategically about brand presence in an AI-first world.

Related:

— How I Use AI in Marketing (Without Relying On It Too Much)

— Bold, Harsh Marketing: The Right Way To Do It B2B (Expert Advice)