The Machine Can Write the Draft. It Cannot Earn the Trust.

In early February 2025, an animated campaign video for the Free Nutritious Meals program began circulating online. It was made with artificial intelligence by the Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs and shared by senior officials, including the minister, Meutya Hafid, on Instagram. Viewers quickly spotted the odd finger movements, the inconsistent faces and other glitches. Soon, the conversation had moved away from the program and onto the animation.

On February 17, the Deputy Minister of Communication and Digital Affairs, Nezar Patria, defended the video: “It’s part of creativity. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using artificial intelligence for creative work.” The criticism did not die down. Netizens asked why a ministry would not hire local illustrators and animators, and said the government was not supporting the country’s creative industry.

I come back to this episode often because it captures the central lesson of AI in communications. The technology did not fail. The judgment did. A tool meant to amplify a message ended up drowning it, because nobody asked the question every PR practitioner is paid to ask: how will people feel when they see this?

AI is already in the room

AI is no longer a trend in Indonesia’s communications industry. It is part of the infrastructure. Newsrooms moved first. Press Council Regulation No. 1 of 2025, launched on January 24, 2025, allows media to use AI as long as humans stay in control of the process, check accuracy and remain fully responsible for what is published. A mapping by the Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI), published in late 2024, documented AI use at Kompas Gramedia, IDN Times, tvOne, Suara.com, Narasi and Zona Utara, from research and summaries to content production. tvOne has gone furthest, with AI-generated virtual news presenters and tvOne AI, a generative-AI news service.

PR has followed quickly. At Inke Maris & Associates, my team uses AI every day for brainstorming, research, media monitoring and first drafts of press releases, articles and campaign materials. I no longer think of it as just a writing aid. Used well, it is a thinking partner. It speeds up the process, deepens the analysis and sharpens our recommendations. It does not decide where the communication should go or what values it should build. People still do that.

What the machine does well

The biggest change AI has brought to PR is not that it can write a paragraph. It is that it can process information at a scale and speed no team could match before.

Consider the work that used to eat a consultant’s week: going through thousands of news items, researching issues and stakeholders, and compiling monitoring reports. Much of it follows patterns. AI can now cluster trending topics, summarize sentiment, transcribe a press conference and produce a first draft of a routine report in a fraction of the time.

So my advice to teams is simple. Start with the repetitive work. Monitoring, summaries, early research, first drafts and transcription are all good candidates for automation. Every hour saved is an hour for analysis and strategy, which is what clients actually pay for.

What it still cannot do

PR is, at its core, a human-centered profession. We build and protect relationships with the media, clients, stakeholders and the public, and those relationships depend on empathy, intuition and cultural sensitivity. AI is good at reading patterns. It cannot draw on experience, and it does not feel the weight of a decision.

That is why some work stays firmly with people: setting communication strategy, advising a client through a crisis, and building trust with journalists, officials and communities. When a chief executive calls at midnight because a story is about to break, they want someone who understands their business and knows the people involved, not a probability distribution.

AI can produce a grammatically perfect paragraph that sounds wrong: flat, generic, or tone-deaf in ways only a person who knows the brand and the culture would notice. Clients spot it quickly. In my experience, they rarely ask whether AI was used. They assume it was, and they expect faster turnaround as a result. What they care about is whether the final work reads as if it was made by someone who understands them. Once content feels robotic or repetitive, the efficiency stops counting for anything.

Clients in finance, government and healthcare expect more, and some ask which parts of the work were AI-assisted. They are right to. In these fields, transparency and oversight matter as much as speed.

Indonesian audiences notice

If clients are watchful, audiences are unforgiving. Indonesians do not reject AI. Many welcome it in practical settings such as faster CT-scan analysis, better medical records or smoother public services. The resistance starts when AI enters creative and cultural territory.

In 2023, Indomie used AI-generated visuals in ads on its official YouTube channel. The criticism was so strong that the channel turned off comments on one of them. For people in art, design, animation, music and writing, though, the issue was never only that the AI “looked weird.” It was about being replaced, about copyrighted work used to train models, and about years of skill being undercut by a prompt.

Younger, heavily online audiences are the sharpest critics. They recognize generic AI aesthetics immediately: over-polished lighting, strange anatomy, copy that “sounds like ChatGPT.” They respond with sarcasm and memes, and brands that lean too heavily on AI without refinement risk being labeled lazy or careless. On X, TikTok and Instagram, a single flawed image can set off thousands of accusations of cutting corners.

Yet audiences keep rewarding human craft, and local illustrators, animators and writers get strong support because they stand for authenticity. For Indonesian audiences, intention matters as much as execution.

Rules before tools

Given all this, I do not think the right question for an agency is whether to use AI. It is how to govern it.

At Inke Maris & Associates, management fully supports AI adoption, and we back that support with a formal Standard Operating Procedure for AI use. It rests on data security, client confidentiality, accuracy, transparency and professional ethics. AI may be used as a working tool, but never as the only source of information or the basis for a decision. Every output is verified, reviewed and assessed by a consultant before it reaches a client. Each person is accountable for their AI-assisted work, which means it must be accurate, free of plagiarism, free of copyright and legal risk, and professionally written.

Confidentiality is where we are strictest. As consultants, we handle sensitive material every day, especially in corporate and crisis work: communication strategies, action plans and draft statements that have not yet been made public. None of that goes into a public AI platform. In our profession, a single leak can cost more than a thousand saved hours.

Governance also means skills. We have trained our team since AI entered PR work and are moving toward continuous learning through internal discussion and shared practice. The focus is not only on tools, but on prompting well, checking outputs and understanding the limits of AI.

Working with the machine

A few habits make a real difference. Treat AI as a sparring partner, not an oracle: test your own ideas against what it produces. Write prompts the way you would brief a junior consultant, with the client’s industry, objective, target media and key messages, rather than simply asking it to “write a press release.” And never assume the output is right. In PR, credibility is our main asset, and one invented statistic can destroy it.

Why clients will still need us

Will AI replace the PR profession? No, and that belief comes from what the work actually is. What AI will do is add to the list of skills the profession needs. Routine, administrative and data-heavy tasks are most at risk. Strategy, relationships, creativity and ethical judgment will become more valuable, not less.

As content becomes cheap and endless, perspective becomes scarce. Clients will need consultants who can connect communication to business goals, read the dynamics among stakeholders, and advise on decisions that affect reputation, often in situations with no clear right answer. That is the role of the trusted advisor, and it depends on experience, empathy and intuition.

So the task for practitioners is not to compete with AI, but to keep up with it and learn to work alongside it. That means sharpening strategic thinking, becoming fluent with AI as a working tool, and building data literacy, because AI produces plenty of information but clients pay for interpretation. It also means strengthening the skills technology cannot easily copy: empathy, negotiation, crisis management and ethical judgment.

The uproar over the Free Nutritious Meals video has passed. The lesson has not. Indonesia is not rejecting AI. It is working out where AI helps, where it harms and where the human touch still matters most. Our job as communicators is to know those boundaries before the public has to point them out.

AI will change how we work. It will not change why organizations need public relations. As long as they need trust, credibility and strong relationships with the public, they will need people who know how to earn them.

Armand Maris

Managing Director 

Inke Maris & Associates