On the second Monday of every month, PRSA offers “AI Pulse,” a briefing hosted by Ray Day, APR, PRSA’s 2026 immediate past chair, that provides timely insights into the latest AI trends, tools, and developments. Learn how to stay ahead of an ever-evolving digital landscape here.
“Some of the best innovations in the communications and PR industry have historically come from the campaign trail,” said Ray Day, APR. “When you’re operating at the speed of politics, you fail fast and succeed faster.”
Day, vice chair of Stagwell, executive chair of Allison Worldwide, and PRSA’s 2026 immediate past chair, hosts “AI Pulse,” PRSA’s monthly livestream that helps members stay informed about how artificial intelligence is changing the PR profession.
For the Sept. 14 episode, Day was joined by two communications veterans with extensive experience on political campaigns, Amy Brundage and Matt Gorman.
The American Association of Political Consultants found that AI use is soaring in the field even as governance of the technology tries to keep pace, said Gorman, chief communications officer at Targeted Victory, a Washington, D.C.-based public affairs and marketing firm.
This year, 57% of political consultants report using AI daily, while 83% say they use AI tools weekly.
“AI is very ordinary, but frequency is not necessarily sophistication” with the technology, said Gorman, who was previously communications director for the National Republican Congressional Committee, rapid-response director and national spokesman for Jeb Bush’s 2016 presidential campaign, and an aide to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign.
Much of the political-consulting industry is “using AI like they would a really good intern,” Gorman said. “Summarize this, organize these notes, sift through this large stack of data and give me 10 headlines.”
But just as a political campaign wouldn’t take something that an intern creates and put it straight into a television ad without verifying the content first, creative materials that AI generates must also be carefully vetted, he said.
While AI provides efficiency, political campaigns might mistakenly think its widespread use is “strategically transforming” and can replace political consultants, Gorman said.
AI for research
Brundage is managing director and economic policy practice co-lead at SKDK, a Washington, D.C.-based public affairs firm.
“In my conversations and my research with Democratic campaigns,” she said, “it’s very clear that AI is used most broadly in the aggregation of data,” so communicators can quickly consume large amounts of information and create campaign messages or manage issues.
Many political consultants are undecided about whether to use artificial intelligence to conduct surveys, said Brundage, who was President Barack Obama’s deputy assistant and his deputy communications director at the White House after working on his presidential campaign.
Gorman agreed that research is the most common way AI is being used on the political campaign trail. People are “deputizing AI to go and find that needle in a haystack,” he said. “But a human determines if it’s a needle, or an aluminum can.”
Artificial intelligence chatbots such as ChatGPT and Claude give campaigns with small staffs “a way to get through a large amount of data very quickly,” he said.
AI becomes a campaign issue
In political campaigns and communications, artificial intelligence is being used to create television and digital advertisements “in controlled circumstances,” said Gorman.
“If a candidate has very damaging or politically vulnerable quotes, but there’s no audio or video of them saying it,” their opponent’s campaign might use AI to make it appear that the candidate is saying those things in an ad, “from their own mouth or in their own voice,” he said.
Such deceptive use of AI in political campaign ads “will only get more likely as we go on,” Gorman said.
As Brundage noted, “We talk about AI as a tactic or a campaign tool, but the use of AI and whether it’s right or wrong has turned into a campaign issue this time around.”
Image courtesy of Google Gemini 3.1 using the prompt “a campaign field office with a communicator reviewing AI-generated research.”
The post AI on the Political Campaign Trail: Lessons for Communicators first appeared on PRsay.