PR & Communications News South Africa

Propel launches AI powered assistant for PR professionals

Propel, a PR management (PRM) technology company has announced the launch of its Artificial Media Intelligence Generator and Assistant (Amiga), what is believed to be the world's first AI-powered assistant for public relations.

Amiga offers advanced research and writing capabilities including generating pitches and press releases in seconds; and will soon include the ability to automatically create media lists with only the most relevant journalists for a pitch topic along with incorporating pitch optimisation data for hundreds of thousands of journalists.

Focusing on the human element

Researching media targets, building media lists, and writing pitches and press releases are some of the largest pain points and most time-consuming processes in communications. These pain points can be exacerbated by writer’s block, something even the best of PR professionals sometimes endure in pursuit of the perfect turn of phrase, and which compounds the pressures put on them as the PR industry sees a continuous decline in journalist responses.

Therefore, Propel developed Amiga to augment communications professionals’ innate creative abilities and make the research and writing process easier, saving time so they can focus on the creative and human elements of PR such as building relationships, developing creative strategies, and fine-tuning messaging.

Millions of data

Built by Propel’s team of in-house AI engineers, Amiga is believed to be the first AMI model in the world, and was trained using the company’s vast and proprietary PR data set. The data set comprises more than five million real pitches and press releases sent via Propel’s Gmail and Outlook plugins, information on over a million journalists, as well as hundreds of millions of articles.

Using this data, the AMI model that powers Amiga’s pitch drafter has learned how to generate eloquent and personalised pitch drafts which are tailored to each journalist on a one-to-one basis, as well as how to generate full press release drafts. Amiga will also soon be able to assist PR professionals with generating media lists by auto-suggesting which journalists, bloggers and outlets are most relevant for a particular pitch. Finally, Amiga is able to utilise Propel’s data set to learn journalist preferences to send pitches on the days of the week and times a particular journalist is most likely to open a pitch.

“Propel has always been at the cutting edge of technology for the PR industry.,” said Zach Cutler, CEO and co-founder of Propel PRM. “We created the category of PRM in 2019, which today is considered standard for any PR team. Therefore, I couldn’t be more proud to announce that we have pushed the boundaries yet again to create another breakthrough category for comms: Artificial Media Intelligence. AMI will never seek to replace PR professionals, rather it will significantly improve the lives of people in our industry by performing the more repetitive and automatable parts of the job, freeing them up to focus on the parts of the job they love. As a former PR professional and agency owner, I could have only dreamed of having the power of Amiga by my side. Our top priority is making sure that Amiga, and AMI in general, are safe and helpful, and we look forward to working with the industry to ensure this.”

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