TL;DR
Every PR tool or platform now promises AI-powered everything. Before you buy anything new, figure out which questions your team can’t answer, audit what you’re already paying for, and make vendors prove their value on real work. Your tech stack should be built around questions, not demos.
This is the second in a three-part series based on Double Forte’s latest POV, What to Measure, Evaluate, and Invest in for 2027. Read the first one here.
All last year, I got asked some version of the same question: “What’s your AI strategy?”
Meanwhile, my inbox filled up with demo invitations. Every platform was “AI-powered.” Every one promised to transform how we work.
Here’s what I’ve learned: a good answer to the AI strategy question never starts with a tool. It starts with a question.
A team can have six research tools and still have no reliable way to understand where a priority audience gets its information. That’s a planning problem, and no new subscription will fix it.
I’ve written before about the power of not-knowing: asking before you answer. The same rule applies to your tech stack. Ask before you buy.
Start With What You Don’t Know
Before you look at a single new platform, get your team in a room and answer three questions:
- Where do we lack insight today?
- What do we need to understand about our audiences, competitors, reputation or performance to make better decisions?
- Which questions take too long to answer, depend on manual digging, or go unanswered altogether?
It helps to sort what you know into two buckets. The first is what you should know: your domain expertise, your clients’ businesses, your team’s capabilities and your metrics. The second is what you cannot know yet, like AI’s full impact or which tools will matter next year. Your stack should make you sharper on the first bucket. Be skeptical of anyone selling certainty about the second.
And if your budget is tight? Good. Resource constraint is a feature, not a bug and limits force you to decide what actually matters.
Questions first. Tools second. Every time.
Audit What You Already Pay For
Once you know your questions, take inventory. For every platform in your stack, document what it does, who uses it, how often, what it costs and which workflows it supports.
Then evaluate by capability, not by vendor. Depending on your organization, that might include media monitoring, social analytics, audience intelligence, creator intelligence, competitive intelligence, narrative intelligence, AI visibility and reporting.
A good audit will surface three things:
- Gaps: meaningful questions you can’t answer.
- Overlap: multiple platforms doing the same job without adding enough value.
- Underuse: a tool that isn’t the right fit, or one nobody was ever trained to own.
The “Would Anyone Notice?” Test
Run every platform through these six questions:
- Is the tool actively used?
- Does it provide unique value?
- Is it connected to real workflows?
- Would the team notice if it disappeared?
- Are enough people using it to justify the cost?
- Is there a better or less expensive way to meet the same need?
If the honest answer to number four is “no,” you already know what to do.
Make Vendors Prove It
Nearly every communications platform now claims some form of AI analysis. The problem is that similar-sounding claims can hide enormous differences in what a tool actually does and how well it does it.
So skip the feature list and run three gut checks:
- Is the data any good? Ask where it comes from, what it covers and where the gaps are. Muck Rack itself warns that irrelevant mentions, inaccurate sentiment or missing context make it harder to see which narratives are taking hold.
- Will it change a decision? If the output won’t shift a recommendation or strategy, it’s a nice-to-have.
- Will people actually use it? Usability, workflow fit and exportability matter more than the demo.
Be especially careful with AI visibility scores, the hottest thing in our industry right now. New industry guidance from the IAB urges caution about using AI visibility scores to make budget or strategy decisions. More than 20 companies now sell AI visibility measurement, and these scores are modeled estimates built from controlled testing, not measured from actual user behavior.
The ground keeps shifting, too: Muck Rack’s research found ChatGPT showed abrupt shifts away from news sources like Reuters, AP and the Wall Street Journal over just 10 months. Chasing the score can even backfire. Adweek reports that brands rewriting their websites to be “LLM-friendly” can hurt the on-site experience for humans, reducing engagement and conversions.
The best way to cut through the noise is a bake-off. During trial periods, give competing platforms the same real assignment, with the same parameters and the same strategic questions. Then compare what you learned, what was missing and how much work it took to turn the output into something useful.
If you can only afford one or two capabilities, start with the one that answers the question costing you the most right now. Skip the one with the flashiest demo.
A Tool Without an Owner Is Just a Subscription
Buying the right tool is only half the job. Every important platform needs a clear owner, someone who understands it well enough to train others, evaluate new features and decide where it fits. Your team also needs defined use cases, so everyone knows which resource to reach for when they need to research a reporter, evaluate a trend or measure a campaign.
Right now, a lot of organizations skip this step. In Muck Rack’s 2026 State of PR research, 29% reported that no one owns GEO within their organization, and another 13% are unsure who does. Training is improving but still lagging: only 43% of PR professionals report receiving AI training at work (read my blog on how we can use AI as a pencil, not a pen).
New tools get attention right after purchase, then fade as teams slip back into familiar habits. Build them into onboarding, playbooks and templates. Set clear rules for AI use, confidential information and human review. And put your stack on a regular review cycle, especially before contract renewals. Consistency isn’t glamorous, but it’s what keeps a stack honest.
So here’s your assignment: pull your tool list this week and run the six questions. Anything that fails gets a hard conversation before renewal.
Next up in this series: why AI makes information cheap, and why judgment just got a lot more valuable.
Listen to more on communication that drives results at Everything Speaks.