Last Updated: 17 September 2026
Most founders still believe one thing: build something good enough, and people will find it. AI and PR are proving that wrong in real time. Matias Rodsevich, founder of PRLab, spent 45 minutes on the Just AI News podcast picking that belief apart, and honestly, it's a harder listen than you'd expect. He's watched companies with genuinely excellent products stay invisible while weaker competitors, some only six months old, pull all the attention. Not because their product was better. Because they worked their PR proactively, and AI tools have made that gap wider instead of closing it.
Here's the part that should actually worry founders. LLMs don't evaluate your product. They evaluate what other people have already written about it, which is a very different question. 84% of what AI tools cite comes from earned media, not from a brand's own website, according to 2026 research from Muck Rack. Read that again. When an AI recommends your competitor over you, it isn't weighing quality at all. It's weighing coverage. No mentions in outlets it already trusts, no shot at the recommendation, and it doesn't matter how good the product is behind the scenes.
That's the uncomfortable mechanic sitting under almost every conversation about AI and PR right now. Search used to reward whoever had the best answer to a query. LLMs reward whoever already got talked about somewhere else first. Quietly, without anyone really announcing it, that turns PR from a reputation exercise into the thing that decides whether AI knows your company exists at all.
PRLab is a specialized B2B technology PR agency that helps startups, scale ups, and global companies grow through media relations and thought leadership. Recognized by ProvokeMedia as one of the best PR agencies in Europe, the agency operates across Europe, the United States, and beyond. It focuses on technology sectors including SaaS, Life Sciences, Cybersecurity, and Robotics.
Founded by Matias Rodsevich in 2018, PRLab has spent eight years building a track record in tech PR. The agency has worked with more than 200 B2B tech clients, guiding companies from seed stage to IPO, whether venture funded or bootstrapped. Its business first model sets it apart: instead of chasing press coverage for its own sake, PRLab ties every campaign to measurable business outcomes, from pipeline growth to investor visibility.
Matias Rodsevich is a public relations expert, media trainer, and the CEO and Founder of PRLab, a global B2B tech PR agency with offices in Amsterdam, Austin, and several European countries. With more than 12 years of experience across corporate, startup, and agency environments, he specializes in strategic communications for B2B and B2C technology companies. He began his career managing PR campaigns at IBM and Google Argentina, then went on to lead over 200 PR projects for more than 150 tech companies worldwide. He holds a Bachelor's in Public Relations from the Argentine University of Enterprise and wrote The PR Paradox in 2020.
Q1: Who are you, and what does PRLab do?
I'm Matias, founder of PRLab. We're a global tech PR firm, heavily focused on B2B tech but we also work in B2C. Our approach is simple: we help companies grow through the power of PR. Most of our clients are startups and scale-ups. AI is one of our biggest sectors, but we also work with companies in robotics, biotech, med tech, and fintech.
Q2: What was the idea behind PRLab when you started it?
I founded PRLab after working in-house for several startups and scale-ups, where I kept running into the same problem. Traditional PR agencies were built to protect the reputations of large corporations, not to help young companies generate news in the first place. Every agency I worked with would ask, "Do you have any news to announce?" But we didn't. We were busy building the product and raising money. What I needed was a partner who would proactively create stories for us, not just distribute press releases and hope something stuck. I couldn't find one, so I built it myself. That was eight years ago.
Q3: What did good PR mean to you back then?
Before AI, good PR was mostly about finding the right journalist for your story, writing a strong pitch, and building relationships. Newsrooms were bigger, there was more investment in media, and outlets weren't struggling the way they are now. It came down to having a genuinely good story and knowing who to send it to.
Q4: How has the definition of good PR evolved since then?
The core of PR hasn't changed. It is still about earning third-party endorsement and managing a brand's image, whether that means protecting it through crisis communication, building it through brand awareness, or elevating it through thought leadership. What has changed are the channels and formats. We've seen an explosion of micro media through Substacks and newsletters, while traditional outlets have shrunk and now rely heavily on freelance writers. Many trade publications have also shifted from earned media to pay-to-play, meaning you don't get coverage unless you pay for it.
Our tools have changed too. We used to rely on media databases and monitoring software. Now PR teams use AI for drafting content and scraping data. Clients increasingly want podcast features rather than backlinks, which used to be the holy grail. But the underlying work is still the same: influencing the people who influence others, so your brand earns positive mentions.
Q5: With everything shifting constantly, how do you keep up?
Honestly, it's hard to keep pace with every new tool. But for us, it always comes back to helping clients hit their business goals, whether that's raising funding, generating leads, entering a new market, or getting recommended by LLMs. Most PR agencies consider the job done once they land coverage. We go a step further and treat coverage as a means to an end, not the end itself. That makes it easier to judge whether we're actually adding value. The "why" and the "what" stay constant. It's the "how" that keeps evolving, and that requires constant testing and research.
Q6: How do you separate good methodology from noise when everyone on LinkedIn claims to have the answer?
Through experimentation. PR can be a surprisingly old-fashioned industry compared to growth marketing. A lot of professionals still pitch with generic templates and believe success comes down to who you know. I hear this constantly from prospective clients: "Which editors do you know? Which journalists?" But that mindset doesn't hold up anymore, because newsrooms change so fast. Journalists hop between publications or start their own all the time, so it's nearly impossible to maintain a stable contact list the way you could ten years ago. It's not about who you know. It's about how relevant you can make your story to people you don't know yet. That's still the core equation of PR, even though a lot of people haven't caught up to it.
Q7: I've heard people say PR is more important now than it's ever been. Do you agree?
It depends on what you're optimizing for, but yes. People have largely stopped Googling things and now go straight to their favorite AI tool to research what to buy. PR is one of the most effective ways to get into those LLM results, which is exactly why people are saying it matters more than ever. That said, PR is a long game. It compounds over time. A lot of companies have watched their search traffic drop and are now scrambling to get into AI results overnight, but it just doesn't work that way. The earlier you start, the better your results.
Q8: Does every company need a PR function?
In my opinion, yes, and that's actually the subject of my book, The PR Paradox. The paradox is that the companies that need PR the most, startups and scale-ups, are usually the ones doing the least of it. Corporations tend to invest heavily in PR, while younger companies treat it as a nice-to-have rather than a growth tool. PR gets you in front of investors and big clients. It positions you as a serious player in your field rather than just another name on the list. It builds authority. But it gets dismissed constantly because founders assume it's expensive, slow, and hard to attribute directly to leads. And if something is hard to measure, people wrongly assume it isn't worth doing.
That's tied to a bigger misconception: that if your product is good, people will simply find you. That hasn't been true for a long time. Plenty of great brands go unnoticed, while plenty of mediocre ones get found because they worked proactively on their PR. I see this constantly. Companies doing genuinely excellent work with no visibility, frustrated as a six-month-old startup steals the spotlight, simply because that startup took PR seriously.
Q9: Has AI hurt PR, or made it stronger?
It's a bit of both, and we're still watching it unfold in real time. On the business side, there's more money flowing into PR because companies now understand its value better than before. That's a genuine positive. On the other hand, journalists are being buried in AI-generated pitches. Spray-and-pray tactics, blasting a press release to hundreds of contacts, have become effortless with AI tools that auto-draft personalized-looking pitches. That's lazy work dressed up as efficiency, and it means journalists can barely open their inboxes anymore. It's also easier than ever for anyone to try their hand at PR, which means more competition for the same stories. Combine that with shrinking newsrooms and more pay-to-play outlets, and earned media has become a genuinely tough game that takes real effort to win.
Q10: What's the single biggest change AI has brought to PR?
Mentions now carry as much weight as backlinks. A few years ago, companies dismissed simple brand mentions because they didn't help search rankings. Today, a mention can get you into LLM results, and that single shift has changed everything. Getting picked up by a small trade outlet can now matter as much as, or more than, landing a national newspaper, because AI tools are remarkably good at identifying brand endorsements wherever they appear. Traffic used to be the metric that defined a successful campaign. A story that didn't run in a major, high-traffic outlet was considered a failure. That's no longer true, and it has completely rewritten how we judge success.
Q11: How has AI changed the daily work of a PR team?
We used to spend enormous amounts of time researching journalists, outlets, and events, then drafting individual pitches for each one. AI now handles a lot of that research and drafting, which frees up hours. But it's also made it much easier to spot which PR professionals are cutting corners. If you're just copying and pasting, people notice. There's a lot of AI slop out there, and journalists can usually tell. So the day-to-day has shifted: less time researching and writing, more time on strategy.
Q12: Does that mean AI makes already-weak PR teams even weaker?
Definitely. Bad habits get amplified. Spray-and-pray pitching, generic "Hi, first name" templates, targeting journalists with stories they don't care about: all of that existed before, but AI makes it effortless to do at scale. So yes, it has made a lot of bad practices worse, simply by removing the friction that used to force people to be more careful.
Q13: Can AI at least help teams work faster, drafting with tools like Claude or ChatGPT?
It can, but only if you prompt it well, feed it the right context, and revise carefully. Otherwise, you end up with something generic that can actually hurt your brand by flattening your tone of voice. We see this a lot with AI-translated content that reads unnatural and strips out the brand's personality. The same happens with graphic design: AI-generated templates for event promotions all start looking identical. If you want to stand out, you still need to invest time shaping whatever AI produces. It's a useful starting point for research or early drafts, but there are no shortcuts. I tell my team constantly: if something looks too easy, it probably is. Never copy and paste an AI output directly. It's usually full of small mistakes and missing the essence that makes a brand distinct.
Q14: How does PRLab itself use AI internally? What's allowed, and what isn't?
I trust my team to use it wisely rather than lean on it lazily. We mainly use AI for research: identifying the right publications, tracking news opportunities, and media monitoring. We also use it for proofreading. What we don't use it for is strategy, because our value comes from making our clients stand out from their competitors. If we relied on AI-generated ideas, we'd end up recommending the same things every other agency using the same tools is recommending, which defeats the purpose.
Q15: With people asking AI tools questions instead of Googling them, how does that affect PR teams specifically?
PR usually reports into marketing, and marketing is about generating demand. If someone asks an AI tool the exact question they'd have typed into Google, that AI conversation becomes a new purchase channel, and influencing it falls squarely under PR's job. The principle is the same: earning third-party endorsement. What's different is how we measure it. We now need to constantly test different prompts to see whether AI tools reference our clients. Research shows AI favors media outlets when choosing which brands to surface, so we're paying much closer attention to earning coverage in specialized, trade-focused media.
Q16: Do media mentions actually help AI tools understand a brand more accurately, the way it might affect a Google Overview description?
Absolutely. When people research brands, they typically search for "the best" or "the top five" options in a category. AI tools rely heavily on that kind of listicle content to decide which brands deserve a mention. If TechCrunch publishes a "top five HR software" article, AI treats that as a trustworthy source and is far more likely to include those brands in its results. With categories as crowded as HR software or fintech, media coverage becomes one of the clearest signals AI tools use to shortlist which brands to feature.
Q17: So what can companies do today to become more visible and trusted in AI answers?
First, optimize your own site and content so AI tools can easily understand who you are, what you do, and what makes you different. That's the SEO and AI-optimization side. On the PR side, companies need to actively contribute to the conversations happening in their field rather than only talking about their own products. Outlets don't want to feature companies that are purely selling; they want companies that are relevant and influential in the broader conversation. Start by identifying what makes you different, what insights you can offer, and which ongoing stories you can weigh in on, whether that's new regulation, emerging technology, or a relevant case study. Building traction in trade outlets is what eventually feeds into AI visibility.
Q18: How realistic is it that AI could replace PR teams? Which parts of the job are most at risk?
AI will inevitably take over a lot of the day-to-day execution for anyone working digitally. But most of what we actually do comes down to judgment, perception, and relationship-building, and we're still far from AI replacing that. I recently saw a journalist describe being pitched by sources that turned out to be AI agents. When the journalist tried to verify those people and brands, they couldn't find them, and they turned down the story entirely. We still trust people to make decisions, and as consumers we're good at telling an ad apart from a genuine recommendation. We tend to trust recommendations that come from other humans, not from bots. When we think of a publication, we picture the journalists behind it doing the research and choosing the sources, not an algorithm. So no, I don't think AI will replace PR. If anything, it will make it easier for strong PR teams to stand out from weak ones.
Q19: What's the biggest risk AI poses to PR right now?
That it makes people lazy. The real danger with AI, in PR or anywhere else, is outsourcing your thinking to the tool. What makes a brand unique is how it differentiates itself. If everyone is saying the same things using the same AI-repurposed content, every brand starts sounding identical. It feels like a shortcut in the short term, but over time it does real damage.
Q20: With journalists' inboxes flooded with AI-generated pitches, how do you actually get noticed?
The ten elements of newsworthiness haven't changed: proximity, timeliness, relevance, and so on. If your story isn't relevant to a journalist's market, they won't cover it, no matter how well written it is. Personalizing your pitch, making the story genuinely unique, and offering it under embargo all increase your odds. A lot of it still comes down to trial and error. It's a sales pitch. You'll hear plenty of no's before you get a yes, and that's always been true. What has changed is the volume of competing noise, not the underlying formula. Companies that keep their stories unique, relevant, and easy to understand still get featured.
Q21: Picture PRLab a decade from now. What does a normal day look like with more advanced AI in the mix?
Honestly, I think it looks a lot like today. The channels, formats, and reporting will keep evolving, and we'll likely move even further away from one-size-fits-all templates and generic reporting. But the day-to-day work, generating brand awareness and thought leadership, putting the right story in front of the right people, will stay fundamentally the same.
Q22: Last question. Do you think AI will make PR more or less important?
More important, even more than it is right now.
