AI training for the press office, not the IT department
A private, in house day that teaches a communications team where AI earns its place in the workflow and where it quietly costs you time. Media research, first drafts, monitoring, crisis, measurement and the rules you need around all of it. From £1,200 for up to six people, in your offices or online.
How is AI training for PR different from general AI training?
A general AI course teaches your press officer to summarise a long document. It does not tell them whether a summarised board paper can go to a journalist, what happens to an embargo when somebody pastes a release into a chat window, or how to answer a client who asks whether you used AI to write their statement.
Those are communications problems with communications consequences, and they do not appear on an IT trainer’s slide deck. Neither does the one that matters most, which is that a model will invent a statistic and a quote with complete confidence, and a press release is the worst possible place to find that out.
This day is built around the actual comms workflow. What you can hand over, what you must not, and how you tell the difference quickly enough for it to be useful on a deadline.
What does the day cover?
Eight blocks, hands on throughout, using your own releases, your own media list and your own coverage report.
1. What these tools actually are
Enough understanding of how a language model produces text to know why it invents things, which is the single most useful thing a press officer can learn.
2. Prompting for comms output
Role, context, constraints and examples. Building a prompt library the team reuses rather than starting from scratch every time.
3. Media research and journalist lists
Where AI genuinely speeds up finding the right journalist, and where it hands you a list of people who left the title two years ago.
4. Drafting
Releases, statements, briefing notes, award entries and Q and A documents. Briefing properly, then editing like an editor.
5. Monitoring and sentiment
What AI sentiment analysis is good for, where it misreads British understatement and sarcasm, and how much to trust the number in a board report.
6. Crisis
Where AI helps under pressure, drafting holding lines and scenario work, and the places it becomes actively dangerous during a live incident.
7. Measurement
Pulling coverage into an evaluation narrative without the model inventing reach figures that fall apart when somebody checks them.
8. The rules
Disclosure, embargoes, client confidentiality and sign off. You leave with the outline of a policy rather than a vague intention to write one.
Where does AI cost a comms team more time than it saves?
Every other page selling this is relentlessly positive, so here is the honest list.
Media lists built from a model rather than a database need checking name by name, which usually takes longer than building the list properly in the first place. Sentiment analysis on small volumes of British coverage misreads irony often enough that you end up reading everything anyway. Anything requiring a genuinely new angle comes back safe and generic, because safe and generic is what the training data rewards. And the moment a draft contains a statistic or a quote, the verification cost eats most of the time the drafting saved.
Where it does reliably pay back is second drafts, structure, summarising material you already have, and the administrative writing that nobody enjoys. We spend real time on this distinction because getting it wrong is how teams end up slower with AI than without it.
Can AI be trusted in a crisis?
For preparation, yes, and it is underused. Scenario generation, stress testing a holding statement against the questions a hostile journalist would ask, and building out a Q and A document are all genuinely faster with a model, and all of it happens before anything has gone wrong.
During a live incident the calculation reverses. The facts are moving, the model does not know them, and the cost of a fabricated detail in a public statement is not recoverable. Add to that the temptation to paste confidential incident information into a tool nobody has approved, at exactly the moment judgement is worst.
Our position, which we will defend in the room, is that AI belongs in the preparation and the debrief rather than in the live response. The reputational side of this has its own session in AI misinformation and crisis training.
How does the cost compare with a course from the professional bodies?
Both the CIPR and the PRCA run AI courses and both are worth knowing about. The difference is the model, not the quality. They sell seats to individuals on scheduled dates. We sell a day to a team, in your building, on your material.
| Option | Format | Cost for a team of six | Whose examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| PRCA, AI in PR and Communications | 3 hours, online, per person | Around £1,980 excluding VAT at the non member rate | Generic |
| CIPR AI courses | Scheduled, several separate courses, often split across a London venue and an online day | Priced per delegate, member discounts available | Generic |
| This session, half day | 3 hours, your offices or online | £1,200 excluding VAT for the group | Yours |
| This session, full day | 6 hours, your offices or online | £1,800 excluding VAT for the group | Yours |
Prices checked in August 2026 and worth verifying with the bodies directly before you quote them internally. If your team wants CPD points and a recognised certificate then a professional body course is the right answer and we will say so. If they want to leave with your own press releases rewritten and a policy started, book this.
Who is it for?
In house communications teams
Universities, charities, housing associations, NHS trusts, manufacturers and local government. The teams every AI course forgets exist.
Press offices
Press officers and media managers who write to deadline and need to know what is safe to hand over under pressure.
Comms leadership
Heads of communications who have to give a board a defensible position on AI and cannot get one from a vendor.
No previous AI experience is assumed. If half your team uses these tools daily and half have never opened one, that is the normal room and the exercises stretch to both.
Can AI write a press release a journalist will actually open?
It can write the shape. Given a decent brief it produces a headline, a standfirst, a quote slot and a boilerplate in roughly the form a news desk expects, in about ninety seconds.
What it cannot do is know which angle a particular editor cares about this week, and that is the job. Left alone it takes the safest available framing, which is the framing that gets deleted. It will also invent a supporting statistic without hesitation, and an invented figure in a release is the kind of error that follows a comms team around.
So the answer is that it is a useful second pair of hands on the draft and a poor substitute for knowing your patch. We spend the drafting block proving both halves of that with your own material.
What does the full day look like, hour by hour?
| Time | Block | What comes out of it |
|---|---|---|
| 09:30 | How these tools work, and why they invent things | A team that can predict where the model will fail |
| 10:15 | Prompting for comms, with your brand voice loaded | A shared prompt library, saved somewhere everybody can reach |
| 11:15 | Media research and list building | One real list built both ways, with the checking time measured |
| 12:00 | Drafting releases, statements and Q and A | Two of your own releases rewritten and compared |
| 13:30 | Monitoring, sentiment and measurement | An evaluation narrative from your own coverage report |
| 14:30 | Crisis preparation and stress testing | A holding statement tested against hostile questions |
| 15:30 | Disclosure, confidentiality and sign off | The outline of your AI policy, agreed in the room |
| 16:15 | Action plan | Three tasks each person will hand over, and one they will keep |
The half day keeps the first two blocks, the drafting and the rules, which is the combination most press offices need first.
What does your team leave with?
- A prompt library built for your organisation, not a generic list off a blog
- Two of your own press releases rewritten, with the before and after side by side
- A tested holding statement and a set of hostile questions to keep
- An honest list of the tasks worth handing over and the ones that are not
- The outline of an AI policy covering disclosure, confidentiality and sign off
- A verification habit for every claim, statistic and quote a model produces
Who runs the day?
I am Chris Norton and I run most of these sessions myself. I founded Prohibition, the PR, social and content agency behind this site, I have worked in public relations for more than twenty years, and I have been running training since 2009. I co-authored Share This Too, the social media handbook published by the Chartered Institute of Public Relations.
We run live campaigns and a working press office, and we use these tools on that work, which is why the session includes the failures as well as the wins. There is more on the strategic and consultancy side of this at Prohibition PR. This page is the productised training day.
Is this the right AI session for your team?
You are here
AI for PR and comms teams. Media research, drafting, monitoring, crisis and measurement.
Writing an AI policy
A facilitated half day that ends with a written policy. See the AI policy workshop.
Microsoft Copilot
Practical use inside Microsoft 365. See Microsoft Copilot training.
AI and PR questions we get asked
How much does AI training for a PR team cost in the UK?
Professional body courses are priced per delegate, so a three hour online session for a team of six comes to around £1,980 excluding VAT at non member rates. We price by the group instead, from £1,200 for a half day and £1,800 for a full day for up to six people, delivered in your office on your own material.
Should PR teams use AI to build media lists?
Only as a starting point, and only if somebody checks it. Models produce plausible journalist names at plausible titles, including people who moved on years ago. For a small targeted list the checking usually costs more than doing it properly from a database.
Is ChatGPT safe to use with embargoed or client confidential material?
Treat the answer as no until your organisation has decided otherwise in writing, because it depends on the product, the tier and your contractual obligations to the client. Embargoed announcements are the clearest case. They should not go into any tool that has not been approved for it.
Will AI replace junior PR roles?
It replaces tasks rather than people, at least so far. Drafting, formatting and summarising get much faster. Knowing which journalist cares, what the risk is and whether the claim is true does not, and those are the things clients and boards pay for. We are direct about this on the day because pretending otherwise loses the room.
Can AI do media monitoring and sentiment analysis reliably?
At volume it is useful for spotting shape and direction. On smaller sets of British coverage it misreads understatement and sarcasm often enough that you should not put the number in a board paper without reading the coverage yourself.
Do we need CIPR or PRCA accreditation for AI training?
Not unless your team needs the CPD points or the certificate, in which case go to them and we will say so. If you want your own releases rewritten and your own workflow examined, private in house training does that and a scheduled seat does not.
Half a day or a full day?
Half a day works if the team already uses these tools and needs structure and rules. A full day is better where you want the media research, monitoring, crisis and measurement blocks as well as the drafting, and where people are starting from nothing.
Can you train an agency team rather than an in house one?
Yes, and the confidentiality material matters more to you. Tell us when you enquire and we will build the day around client work rather than brand work.
What should be in a comms team’s AI policy?
Approved tools, what must never go into a prompt, who signs off AI assisted content, your disclosure position, verification of every claim, and what you record. We cover the outline here and there is a full facilitated session at the AI policy workshop.
How do we measure whether AI made the team faster?
Pick three recurring tasks, time them honestly before the training and again six weeks after, and count the editing time rather than just the drafting time. Most teams find the saving is real but smaller than the vendor claims, and concentrated in fewer tasks than expected.
Tell us what your comms team is trying to speed up
Half day £1,200, full day £1,800, up to six people, excluding VAT. Delivered UK wide or online.
Part of our AI training for marketing and communications teams, alongside PR training. Last reviewed August 2026.
